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Most scientific breakthroughs in history did not go through peer review. That's a new consensus mechanism that was introduced not that long ago. Einstein was o

• dekhn 4y ago
  I'm not defending peer review; I never enjoyed it when I published. It certainly never made my papers any better. Newton and others all published and then discussed the details in person, a lot of the peer review was "off-paper" and "post-publication". Also, the vast majority of scientific breakthroughs, by count, occurred after peer review- mainly due to the unbelievable pace of breakthroughs due to technological advancement.
• cma 4y ago
  That sounded interesting so I looked into it. It seems to instead support peer review. According to this [1], Einstein's paper that didn't pass peer review turned out to be wrong (it said gravitational waves didn't exist), and was later published elsewhere with different conclusions and fixing problems that the referee's report had already pointed out. > The irony, of course, is that Einstein could have found that escape route months earlier, simply by reading the referee’s report that he had dismissed so hastily. The referee had also observed that casting the Einstein–Rosen metric (as we now call this solution of the Einstein equations) in cylindrical coordinates removes the apparent difficulty. [1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2117822 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2117822