I have a friend, who, although quite close to me, differs significantly from my view of science. His name is Debanjan; I'll call him Deb here to save myself the trouble of having to type out the full name every time I make a reference to him. Deb is a brilliant student, and I believe he has quite a future ahead of him in physics. He is an ardent student of quantum physics. But that is beyond the point here. Deb has very strong opinions, and he holds to them and defends them to great depths with much logic. This I find particularly delectable, because when I enter into a technical argument with most people they back down before my own expressiveness. As a result, time and again we have very interesting conversations.
One particular topic about which we differ greatly is the aim of science. I hold a belief that science is meant for the benefit of the common people and to improve the life and living of the masses. Deb on the other hand believes that science is a natural outflow of the joy of discovery, "the pleasure of finding things out", quoting Feynman. As a result of this, we come to rather contradictory conclusions and tiffs regarding the nature of modern research. For one, I acknowledge that for an innovator, the kick of finding things out is like a drug. It gives you an addictive pleasure from which it is indeed very difficult to draw yourself out. Due to this, researchers go deeper and deeper into more and more esoteric topics, to hunt out the intimate details of the truth behind things.
The negative of what I find in this is that researchers, especially modern researchers, overlook the fact that they have some, even if very little, responsibility to the society from which they come and to which they belong. By saying this, I mean that modern research goes so deep into so difficult things, that what they do seldom benefit the common man at all. Much of the research that goes on today, if you see reports in good technical journals, will have a title that in unnerving enough. As soon as you read the title you know that you are as far away from it as one could possibly be. Worse still, I have discovered topics which are somewhat related to my own field of interest, and yet it has gone to such a depth of specialization that indeed I can understand very little about it. I am not against such research, mind you. I appreciate the intelligence and knowledge it requires, and respect the fact that the people involved in it get some great enjoyment in doing it.
The problem I placed before Deb in our debate was thus: imagine such a man, maybe yourself, who knows "very much about very little" and is doing great things in that. Now suppose a simple man, who works 10-to-5 and goes to the market everyday morning, meets you on the street one fine morning and asks you what you are doing. You explain to him, as best as you can (there is a difference in opinion between us here too, but lets leave that aside for the time being), that you are trying to figure out the probabilistic path taken by the electron cloud between two contacts in a quantum transistor, and how the same maybe modified by the use of magnetic fields (actually it is perhaps far more complicated, but lets suppose we bring it down to this). Mr. Simple Guy frowns his brow, tried hard to understand, breaks into a sweat, gives up and finally asks, "I am sure it is very great, but how is it going to help me, or those like me?" What answer do you give?
Deb is of the opinion that the pursuit of knowledge in science in a natural process. If scientists had to worry day in and day out about fulfilling the expectation of the farmer, the laborer and the quintessential family-man right here right now, life would become very difficult for them. They would be forced to think about things and find solutions to problems that really do not interest them, and would perhaps make a mess out of it because they did not put their hearts to it well enough. Deb believes that researches are best left to themselves, doing whatever they please and however they please, without worrying about the fact that whether they are benefiting people or not in the present scenario.
But what about the people, I ask him. What about the thousands of people who live around you. We studied in a college whose fees were greatly subsidized, and if I am not wrong, the subsidy came from the taxes paid by those people about whom you are not willing to spare a thought. Is that morally correct, and do they not have a right to ask you to what effect they invested their money in educating you? Was it not in the hope that you, being brighter and smarter, would show them a new, perhaps better way of living? How can you so casually evade your responsibility to the people behind your success and move on to "whatever you please"?
Deb feels that it is out of context to ask for benefits right now. He believes that what science achieves today benefits people in very tangible ways a few generations down the line. For example, when John Bardeen and Walter Brattain worked hard to develop the first semiconductor transistor, I am sure nobody felt how useful this could be (perhaps not even they themselves). But look now - the transistor, a few generations down the line and with more innovations, has made possible today the computer and the mobile phone and a host of other things that every other person is using. The esoteric has become the pedestrian, and people are reaping the benefits of what once might have been considered to be pursued in "pure academic interest". It may be humorous at this point to note that when the first telephone was invented, the then-president of the USA said "Its a wonderful gadget, but who would want to use it anyway?" Funny as it may sound, it is the root of this argument - what seems to be mere fanciful inventing today may turn out to be instrumental in a mass technical revolution just a few years later.
True. But I have more to say. What about astrophysicists? Prof Hawking for example? What he has done is marvelous, and has richened our understanding of the universe in ways that cannot be explained in the mere words of a fool like me. But how many generations and how many more innovators down the line will it ever become useful to common people? Besides, how many researchers can boast of having done seminal work which has brought in a revolution a few generations down the line? What about the loads of rubbish people produce every year (which perhaps includes many of the undergraduate dissertations we scripted ourselves - God knows whether anybody even reads them) and pass of their entire lives in the name of "futuristic research? Or the people who work on number theory? As of now, I know no application of the practical world where that field has ever proven to be useful.
Deb tries his defense here too. He counters by saying that in that respect many of the greatest discoveries should be called useless. The Special Theory of Relativity, for example. Probability and combinatorics. Even quantum mechanics!
No its not true, I argue. Special theory of relativity is useful, although we may not be aware of it. This theory tells us how to harness nuclear energy, and bad as that may sound, it may well be our prime source of alternative energy a few hundred years down the line, considering the rate at which fossil fuels are getting depleted. Special theory of relativity has its uses in modern aeronautics and allows pilots to drive people home safely, talking of more immediate impacts. Probability and combinatorics are almost the backbone of the world of finance and speculation, the basis on which billions of dollars of forex trading take place and people make or break their fortunes in stock exchanges. Quantum mechanics has allowed us many things, not the least of which is to understand solid state physics well, abstract it to a simpler lever and happily teach it away to undergraduates in the name of electronics! Even molecular reactions owe their full understanding to quantum mechanics, and although many genetics engineers may not be aware of it, the discovery of the structure and thereafter artificial production of life-savers like insulin are, in the history of development of science, an offshoot of quantum mechanics in the name of crystallographic studies (remember Bragg's law, anyone?)
Deb takes these points in his favor and strongly sticks to the fact that such esoteric practices must go on, because that is the way progress has been ushered in in the past and perhaps will continue to be in the future. But who are the recipients of these benefits? The elite? The people who are directly or indirectly funding your research? USA and Europe, to be more in-the-face? What happened to poor India? What about the people here, who will come back for them and benefit them, even if it is 7 generations away in the future?
Deb says science and scientists serve mankind as a whole, and are not limited by political boundaries. Nobel as it might sound, it is fallacious, because if you disregard the political boundaries then you become only more strongly answerable to every common man in the world. The poor farmer who rides on his wooden plough trying to bring his unruly oxen under the harness beneath the burning sun to till his field perhaps gets only more right to question the outcome of your research and its impact, if that be the way. I am yet to receive a satisfactory response to this question.
It is difficult to come to a conclusion on something like this, but what I feel about the topic is this: it is undeniable that research cannot be put under the yoke of day-to-day concerns, and the creativity of innovators must be allowed to run free if discoveries like the recent artificial development of genetic material to bring to "life" an otherwise inactive cytoplasm are to become reality. Needless to say, this research, no matter how esoteric it may seem to the plain eye, has immense significance which I, being a gob-smacked idiot in the world of biology, can also appreciate. But perhaps it would be good if all these great minds sat up straight and decided, that out of 12 months of the year, I shall put 10 months in what I want to do, and think for 2 months about what the people, my people, mankind at large, need, right NOW. And I shall use my mental faculties to find some practicable and useful solution for them, to make the world a better place.
And above all, no great mind should ever become blind to the impact of his discovery on the practical world, in the name of "the pleasure of finding things out". Feynman himself said that when he started working on the Manhattan project, his chief concern was that if Nazi Germany beat them to the race of successfully making the bomb, then the losses to human life would be incalculable. Thus it was a necessary evil to put their minds to work for the bomb. But when Germany was defeated, he regrets that not once did it strike him as to what point was there in continuing the work he had been doing, so lost he and the team was in the kick of discovery. He admits it was perhaps the greatest mistake a scientist could ever make, to allow his brain to be used by the "worldly wise" for unscrupulous purposes while allowing himself to be fooled under the "pleasure of finding things out" syndrome. People around us are too smart, unlike what we "educated" ones think, and they can manipulate us in ways we cannot imagine. In view of mankind, then, let us indulge in the joy of discovery, but not become blind to what it may mean to, and how it may affect, our people, and lets spare a little time thinking for them too.
PS: I am not sure if my readers will find this interesting. If you do, let me know, there are several other equally, if not more, interesting debates, that we had, which I shall be glad to share with you.
no comments :| and no tempo to read such a long post ... btw debate has Deb in it :)
ReplyDeleteDate 10th June 2010
ReplyDeleteTime 9:00am
A guy who had 8 hours of awesome sleep and was fresh, ready to take on any problems that came in today.Opens FB then clicks the link to this blog and finishes to read the blog by 11:48am
and in rendered completely unfit to work anymore for the day and is dozing off (z_z).
Arko da sry no offence par full tempo ke saath i read the blog completely. :P
Namit tells me that number theory is used i cryptography, which in turn allows secure communications, https and e-mail. thanks Namit, now I know better!
ReplyDeleteOr maybe the farmer who is tending after his oxen is actually the problem. Technologies exist to increase farm output manifold. The job he is doing does not require education. It is the failure of the powers-in-charge that he did not get education and access to technology, not the failure of scientists. He is actually underemployed. And it is his output that is actually far below that can be achieved by using technology, not the scientists
ReplyDeleteFascinating... Although I'd completely agree with the Debanjan's point of view, still I'd like to point out some things in general.
ReplyDeleteFirst, as the previous post says, Number Theory is being used in encryption, enabling us to bring the whole idea of a market online.
Second, the most important point, I think, is that the points you raise here are all issues which are supposed to be the responsibility of the ruling authorities. There are thousands of things which scientists have discovered and had led to an invention which can simplfy lives, but are not implemented simply because they are not economical, or just the corrupt administration doesn't want to. True, if it was 50 years back, a randomly selected downtrodden farmer won't understand shit about the electrons and energy bands in a semiconductor, but at this day, if we invest in that, we can come up with things using that semiconductor which can benefit that farmer in miltiple ways (read PD 2009). But then a physicist working on advanced materials isn't, or rather shouldn't, be expected to design that kind of a device which can be designed by a lot many people with much less qualification.
Third, I think if you start looking around, most of the people in various jobs / occupations are not exactly thinking about the society in doing their duties. The governments are spending millions on maintaining and enhancing the armies, which, in fact are simply to create chaos. At every point someone decides to attack someone else, and put the lives of millions of human in peril, and I won't call that philanthropy.
Fourth, the manipulation part is many a times understood as the guy being fooled or "used" by someone, even if it is not so. In case of Feynman, back in 1942 when Hitler had Werner von Braun and his rockets, markedly V2, and the rumours that they are working on atom bomb, the danger was acute on the part of the world to either defend Hitler or have something to answer him with. The Manhattan project was at least projected to the people working at it as an attempt to answer Hitler. Of course the demonstration of that power was entirely political in 1945 after the fall of Hitler, nevertheless that was never an issue back in early 1940s, and that's nothing exceptional as compared to what thousands of brilliant minds are doing at this day under DRDO / NORAD to save lived of the countrymen. So I do agree that this kind of research is vile and should be stopped, nevertheless, I think it was bound to happen once as we didn't know what's an atom bomb is like. The unfortunate part is Trinity test didn't teach people enough to refrain from using it, but then I don't think anything that happened after Trinity can be blamed on Feynman, simply bacause had the war gone the other way and Hitler controlled Europe, I guess atom bomb in the hands of US would've been necessary to balance the power.
Anyway, that was probably too long a comment for a blog!!!
@Arko da:
Waiting for the next post.
And for Debanjan da to comment.
And to an ordinary farmer down the road maybe the movies that Prosenjit makes are more valid and are more appreciated. But to those actors and directors making shitty movies, or to a poet writing esoteric poetry, what are actually their contributions, today or in the future? I am sorry, but if you seek justification in your work from every single person on the street you are doing a grave injustice to yourself. Most, if not all seminal scientific discoveries have pedestrian applications down the road. And astrophysics is actually important. Because it is astrophysics that is shining the flashlight in our inconsistencies in our theoretical understanding of physics. That gaps if fulfilled may help us in harnessing and developing better technologies. In the last decades of the nineteenth century after Maxwell's laws became known physicists thought we almost knew almost everything that was in theoretical physics. Poincare's works must have felt like idle waste of time to some at that time. But they directly led to relativity and quantum mechanics, and today a 100 years on we know how seminal and important they were. And as far as your 10 months and q months principle science already has a better solution. Not everyone is theoretician. There are experimentalists and technologists too who put the theory to practice. You can't force a theoretician to become a technologist and vice versa. That would be like Cultural Revolution in China when scientists, teachers everyone became farmers, because just like we have in India, they had an unhealthy level of fascination and admiration for farming. You surely do not want that, do you?
ReplyDeleteThanks Arko for the wondeful post and Vatsal, Debangshu for your insightful comments.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I don’t want to point fingers at astrophysicists, number theory champions or even army (Vatsal’s comment) because as one of my favorite seniors says , “ It is easy to praise something, but to criticize you have to be an expert”. I don’t know much on these fields and hence my comments might be wrong.
I would just give my opinion on whatever avenues of research (very few aspects of condensed matter physics) that I have been exposed to so far. Arko in his blog distinguishes between research which directly serves mankind and research which does not. But in my opinion this is not a good categorization.
First of all we have to isolate “good scientific research” from all the trash that is being published. I only call it a research which is aimed towards making a direct application in the industry or which solves some of the unanswered or unachieved problems. If I write the Hamiltonian of a complicated system, solve it numerically and publish it without even bothering whether it can at all be applied or whether it is making a new contribution towards unraveling some mystery then the publication does nothing but adds to my resume. Such kind of practice should not be called research in the first place.
So when I debated with Arko over the fact that science should be pursued for the “pleasure of finding things out” I definitely do not defend such useless research work. Out of the two categories into which I classified purposes of good research, I guess none can speak against the first- direct applications in industry. Often it happens that a lot of money is invested on something which ultimately doesn’t work out but fortunately or unfortunately that is the beauty of science. History remembers only the success stories, so when Arko says “how Bardeen’s invention made way to household appliances…….” He is just highlighting the success stories, there has also been lot of efforts which were not successful and hence passed into oblivion but we have no right to undermine them. Thus I think every good research topic which has prospects of impactful industrial applications should be pursued with complete devotion, ultimate success or failure is left on luck.
Now comes the research which is done solely for academic interest, ie, to answer some of the mysteries in science. We can say “existence of a magnetic monopole” is one such issue. I believe that such research must also be pursued with equal vigor because the history of science has lots of instances where a discovery that changes man’s understanding of the physical phenomena has immense applications in the later technologies which might not have dawned upon the minds of the scientists at the time of discovery. If every research is pursued with the thought that how it will help mankind then no new significant contributions can be possible, new breakthroughs in science will never occur which can change the landscape of technology,we will just have improvements over the existing technologies.
Very nice post !!
ReplyDeleteAlthough I side with Debangshu ( completely ) and Debanjan ( partially ) on the issue .
AAB
I'd like to raise a question on what Debanjan and Arko are marking as trash research, as something which has no connection to a real life situation. Einstein's STR says that no physical object can cross the barrier of light, and hence as a corollary no object can possibly be accelerated to a speed greater than c. Despite that, comes forward some guy who publishes stuff on a particle travelling at a speed greater than that of light (tachyon), and deduces it's dynamics, where such a thing can never be realised if STR is correct. What would you tern this research as? (As I know, they are using this idea in some form in string theory, but can't say anything about that...) And if you term it legitimate, why would it be different if I write any complicated Hamiltonian, solve it using advanced theoretical / computational method and publish the result, without bothering to talk about what system is represented by this Hamiltonian, which may not even be possible?
ReplyDeletefirst up, thanks for all the comments. i sometimes amaze myself with the discussions i spark off.
ReplyDeletemy english writing needs improving. i say this with much confidence, because I find this to be the only polite explanation of a simple observation. the observation being that none of you got the real point behind the debate. doubtless, i am the one to blame.
let me put it in black and white. the issue is not categorization of research of "research with direct implications" and "research for purely academic interests" which someday may bear tangy tangible fruit. thats only part of the game. its not about blaming feynman. its not about farmers and laborers.
the topic in question is "what extent of social responsibility should be expected of the brightest minds of the world, what is the current state of affairs and how can we most amicably bridge the gap, if any".
thanks to my despicable style of writing, almost all of you missed it altogether. i say this with confidence because i did it on purpose to spark off an intellectual discussion. slipshod as my writing may be, i did not slip on this account, as i see.
so in light of this information, i question back a major point i noticed in the feedback - claiming it is not the particle physicist's or powder metallurgist's job to ensure whether their deeds reach the masses in some socially acceptable and bening form, rather it is the duty of the "authorities". a pivotal point of raising this topic (in case you lost it again, social responsibility of research community) is the fact that in reality, these ever-elusive "authorities" are nowhere to be found. if the teachers at your children's school dont turn up for classes, is it sufficient for you to say "Oh the people who i entrusted my son's education with are not doing their job"? maybe you would make an exception there, because its YOUR SON... funny we dont feel this way for "mankind", despite tall claims.
social responsibility does not incorporate role-swapping. so i started with a hypothesis, and in the logical flow of the debate standpoints and opinions changed. Debangshu caught the beginning of the drive but missed the follow through. note that I have condescended to the fact that it is neither proper nor correct to question the activities of research day in and day out in the light of the plight of the mundane masses. the clandestine does become the commonplace - history proves it. and aimless ramblings do hit upon gold - QED shows it.
but while i hear claims that there are theorists for the theory and technologists for the, well, things other than theory, it appears in the real world their is an unnatural skew in the way our interests are invested in the prospects of progress. are there enough experimentalists and technologists? are they doing their part? i speak of India; when i look out of the train on my way to the college, i doubt it, i doubt it real hard. somebody is to blame, though certainly not the metallurgist or the quantum physicist or the algorithms guy. but given the state of affairs, is it time we paused, rethought our efforts, reassessed our SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY and went out of our way a little to make a difference?
i am too base to blame feynman. but fact is, feynman blames himself. he blames his lack of foresight after Trinity. will we blame ourselves on a smaller scale tomorrow for not having looked around for ramifications? or are we already too blaise for that?
PS: overwhelmed by the length of comments, so decided to follow suit. associations with the fairer gender gives me a hazy illusion that there is something mysteriously pleasing about length. so be it.
@Vatsal :
ReplyDeleteI never said that if a problem has no connection with real life it is trash research, I just said that research is trash when it has no application and it doesn’t contribute anything to science/maths . Can’t comment on the Einstein-tachyon issue as I don’t know about it, but regarding the Hamiltonian case, I can say that if analytically solving a system ( realistic or unrealistic)had remained a challenge and you do that you contribute to mathematics, if you find a new numerical computational technique to solve a Hamiltonian which could not be solved using standard ones again I think that’s good. But what I am talking about is taking arbitrary systems, writing the Hamiltonians and solving them numerically – I can show you ample number of such works, I call that trash .
A small proof of that- Take up an arbitrary Hamiltonian, solve it and send it for publication, you won’t ever get a good journal unless it’s physics is significantly new or applicable, or you are significantly contributing to the maths . If it does not serve any of these purposes it will be published in a low IF journal which hardly anyone reads or cites.
But as a senior told me today, even such trash needs to be published because some people will be fired if they don’t submit papers , the lower ranked journals also won’t survive and sometimes they do make small contributions to bigger works. So overall I am not against such trash being published, I would just won’t defend them as “good scientific research “ or “pleasure of finding things out”.
I guess every comment can be a seperate blog :P
ReplyDeletefinally a small post...
ReplyDelete@Debanjan
That clears the idea, and yes, I do agree with what you say. But what would you say to such experimental work? Take a new material, make nanoparticles, take a STM, Mossbaeur, PES, blah blah, plot the data, and publish....
@Belgarion
Could you give some examples / description of what this Social responsibility means, and is it different from those of, say, the CEO of a company.
The point of Feynman, I think, is that true he had guilt that the thing he was involved in turned in something that sinister, but I think there is no point of us blaming Feynman, as most of them couldn't have seen it coming back then. (my previous point)
@Vatsal - same goes for experimental work unless the results show a very significant improvement over what was obtained with previous materials which can be utilized practically or opens a new window about our understanding of the physics of the system.
ReplyDeleteIf it can't do one of the above , you won't normally see it in a good journal. But I think , from the very little experience I have , that such experimental work makes a slightly better publication than an equally trash computational work at least in our fields.But that is a whole different issue - experiment vs theory (impact wise), we won't discuss it here.
Overall both the Hamiltonian and STM-PES cases we discussed are equivalent trash, again in my opinion.Normally you will find these kind of papers in very low Impact Factor journals.
PART 1
ReplyDeleteThe author of this post happens to be a friend of mine; so to start this reply I would like to say that I have the highest respect for you and your abilities. But since this is a debate, let’s fight this one hard to the boil, not to mention my mammoth differences with some of your opinions (trust me I generally keep to myself, but our dear Chaap told me to do this). So here we go.
I'll be talking exclusively in the defense of serious scientists only who do research (for whatever reason important to them), which may or may not lead to any tangible benefits in the short or even in the long run for the human race, other than to simply provide "the pleasure of finding things out". I have utter disrespect for all asses who are engaged in the business of earning a living through false pretences of doing research (these people really do no research, most IIT profs are good candidates for this category), and also people for whom publishing papers in whatever way possible is more important than doing research. Tweaking a few parameters here and there and producing new outputs, or feeding inputs into a software and generating outputs is no research, and that’s what this second category of people mostly do (in some cases it has also been noted that such people suffer from extreme illusion, and for example start to observe quantum mechanical tunneling in fish curry).
Next I give some consequences of some seemingly harmless numbers. I'm talking of the '2 months out of 12' act. The average life expectancy of the world today is roughly 67 years. It means that you need to invest roughly 10 years of your life doing something that you would not normally do. Most serious scientists would have a few things to say about that!
I also wonder why there exists the notion that science has not already invented ways to help the common man. There is a repeated mention of a particular class of common man: "the poor farmer", so I will tell a few ways that science knows to help the poor fella out. Hey bro, try to use fertilizers, genetically modified seeds, tractors etc. It’s time to upgrade buddy. Now of course, not every farmer can afford a tractor, and I know that. Trust me a farmer who cannot afford a tractor is poor enough to not have to pay the tax. So the point is that the farmers who do pay taxes actually contribute to the research aimed at their own good. If a farmer rightfully asks me what the hell are the scientists doing with the part of his tax money that makes a tangible difference to his life, and if I happen to have an answer I'll tell him all about it. But if I happen to be doing string theory, I'll tell him that my clients are different, and that there are other dedicated scientists who are working very hard to create a difference in their lives. There are a lot of dedicated agricultural, genetic and food scientists working for the same. There is one more thing about this whole tax sentiment. Given a choice, not a single person in the world will pay a penny for any god-damn research in any field...so sometimes people need to be forced to pay up for their own good.
PART 2
ReplyDeleteThere is also a point about who science really benefits: common man or the elites? I have the opinion (this is subject to open criticism) that if there exists a technology that can improve the living standards of one man today, it can definitely be improved to be made accessible to everyone in the future with more research. Think of televisions, radios or telephones when they first appeared, and think of their accessibility now. We would have indeed regretted it had we stopped researching these technologies thinking that they could only be afforded by the very rich. Having said that, a corrupt government will impose considerable difficulties in the implementation part. But hey, don't blame science for that.
I was especially amused to note that "Number Theory" has been totally useless in the practical world. Forget about the high end prime number theorems which are routinely employed in cryptology to keep your bank accounts safe; what about plain and simple day to day arithmetic. IT IS NUMBER THEORY WHICH YOU USE TO COUNT! It is number theory which says that 1+1 equals 2. Only because it’s so deeply engraved in our minds do we ever pause to think about where it came from. And by the way, 'common man' also needs to count once in a while. The point in all of this is that all fields of science at some stage have proven to be of some 'practical use' for mankind.
The author has debated and then himself justified some esoteric theories like Quantum Mechanics which have helped shape mankind, and there have been filling comments by other friends also...so I am not going to do it all over. But I want to say something about Astrophysics - the field that is the easy target always. Astrophysics is needed to send spacecrafts into Earth's orbit, to send them to other planets, to know if there's a comet coming to hit you, to predict solar storms and blah blah (I hope that you see its use) ! It was an astrophysical discovery that the Earth revolves round the Sun. Sure we could have existed till now knowing otherwise, but now that we do know the truth, I'll like to ask everyone if it was worth knowing. Remember that this is a knowledge that has never been of any 'practical use' for mankind.
It really is the desire to know more about nature that drives research. It is a sacred journey, a journey with lots of bumps along the way, but people always march forward with persistence. Only through acquiring more knowledge do you actually realize which ones can be used for the betterment of the human race. You cannot gain directional access to a particular set of knowledge that happens to be useful. Had we known what to discover to benefit us, it would not be a discovery any more; we would be doing a clerk's job. Such a circumstance would have indeed been very nice! But sadly we don't have it. So we need researchers to explore unexplored territory. We don't know in advance what we are going to get or if it is going to be useful or not. If we knew what to research, we might as well have clerks doing it (By the way a clerk does a very important job so that society runs smoothly). Outcome is never the purpose driving research - it is curiosity and a desire to know more about nature's mysteries. It is like looking at a beautiful girl. You see her face, and you think that she is pretty... but would you stop there, thinking that you had your dose for the day? Hell no! Would you not be curious about the beauties she's hiding? So let Stephen Hawking do his research on black holes and gamma ray bursts (please leave this man out of all unscientific criticisms); and let astrophysicists detect these bursts and candidates that could act as a source of them in the future. Who knows one could explode nearby in the future and shoot towards Earth, and if astrophysicists could let us know beforehand, it might give us a few valuable moments to spend exclusively with our loved ones!
My answers:
ReplyDeletehttp://ramblingsmusingsnreflections.blogspot.com/2010/06/science-scientists-and-their-debt-to.html
i think the length of the blog has been amply superseded by the length of comments. most of the comments have missed the moral issue which I have highlighted to a clearer detail in the follow-up comment.
ReplyDeleteVats asked for an example. yes you mentioned it - PD2009. no it was nothing great, i know, but that is the spirit I am looking for. we went out of our way to design something practical, real, TODAY and to meet the needs of the people. it was not our "job", "responsibility", and surely I and you had much more interesting things to engross ourselves in. thats what I am saying - to make a conscious effort for the betterment of the society because there seems to be a conspicuous lack of efforts for the same.
but never mind. it was wonderful to know your views on modern research, practical research and academic pursuits, although that was not the main point. and i cannot help but praise rahul's way of putting his views. looking forward to another stormy session on Debangshu's blog!
now i prize my blog more than ever, its becoming a diamond mine each passing day :)
@Belgarion
ReplyDeleteTrue I raised the point of PD 2009, but again that is something any normal engineer can make (Even we, given a few months, can work out that device). But whether that really affects the lives of all those in ways we mentioned in the presentation in a feel-good scenario, again depends upon how well the thing is marketed.
And I think it'll be a shame if a erudite theoretical physicist is expected to work on something even remotely similar to the kind of idea we are talking about...