 The bedrock of all science is data. I sometimes say the most beautiful idea in science is generally worth nothing without the data, the observations, the experiments to back it up. Having a journal where you could submit a paper, have it properly reviewed and then there was a record of what you had done. Really clarified how science works. This is one of the most significant steps in the history of all of science. I think one of the most important things the Royal Society ever did and it did it right at its beginning was to invent the scientific journal with this journal Philosophical Transactions, publishing articles describing the work. They could get it out there, they'd published it, they were owners of it and there was a date on it, so they got priority. It's still very important now to have this recognition. Exactly, isn't that interesting? That's basically the same thing as we have now. All the tens of thousands of scientific journals, they publish regularly, they're dated, they're peer reviewed, it's all exactly the same model. When you're competing for a result, you want to be the one that got it first and that means get it in the journal first, so it still holds a lot of importance in terms of motivation to getting out good, robust results fast. And it's exactly the same in my field too. If we do this with WW, with looking at the jets. WW, you would have to say the same diagram as the first. If we're looking for this WW process, then we get a massive background Particle physics in particular were very, very stringent when we analysed our data about whether we say we've discovered something and it means that we really want to be totally sure that what we're saying is reliable. I work on the ATLAS experiment, which already has more than 3,000 people and then there's another experiment called the CMS experiment on the LHC Collider also with many thousands of people and we are essentially doing the same physics programme and that is done on purpose. It's because if one of us is to make a claim of something really extraordinary we need to be confirmed by the other experiment and also it helps a bit with friendly competition. You sort of don't drag your feet so much when you know that there's somebody across the ring who's also doing things as quickly as you are. So Emily, this is the minutes of the Council of the Royal Society recording when philosophical transactions was established so ordered that the philosophical transactions, that's the journal to be composed by Mr Oldenburg The Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, played a key role I suspect that he thought inventing the journal might reduce his workload to some extent so instead of acting as the sort of spider in the middle of the web connecting everybody, it could be dealt with by a regular publication of a journal where the observations and data were set out. Printed the first Monday of every month, so a very regular publication if there's sufficient matter for it so if he didn't have it then he wouldn't publish it and that the track be licensed by the Council of the Society in other words it's acceptable for publication what's in there would be peer review that was the origin review, peer review. What peer review can do is just eliminate the rubbish but if you're going for a high profile journal then a peer reviewer will be making judgments as to how interesting it is and sometimes they don't see that it's interesting even if the science is quite good so the fact we've got a range of journals does mean that research does get out there eventually as long as it's sound. In particle physics we have this rule that we go by that if we want to make a discovery there's what we call a five sigma significance on it so five sigma is making it really safe before we go ahead and we publish it just coming back a little bit to how it's done in your field for example your Nobel Prize winning work you must have really wanted to be sure that it was correct before you announced it so how many different ways did you do the measurement before you were convinced? The first observations were extremely exciting but they were insufficient for us to be sure it was right so for the succeeding months after that we were doing all sorts of further experiments that ended up with a very solid result so when we published it we were pretty certain that we were right it was your personal five sigma it's my personal five sigma so this is the first philosophical transactions volume one very exciting so this is the very first pages of the very first journal it was the beginning of peer review because council had to look at it but it took a while for the whole process to get in place philosophical transactions undertaking studies and labors of the ingenious in many considerable parts of the world that's great language anyway an account of the improvement of optic glasses at Rome a real distinction I think between the sort of thing you're doing and what certainly my lab's doing is that once we've published it people are less likely to say well that's the end of the story than they are with you when those Higgs boson papers came out that was essentially established in our case we'll do everything we can within the lab people will take that idea and test it and poke it and do other sorts of experiments in their system approach it in a different way so the peer reviewing occurs continuously after publication perhaps in a more extended way than maybe in your field we're going through a revolution now in how we publish and we will see different ways of publishing and open access and electronic publishing and all of these things are interesting and will change the way that we do things but fundamentally it's based on the principles that we use to establish philosophical transactions the journal invented by the Royal Society in 1665