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Re: "Directed" vs "Basic" research



John Denker wrote, in response to both Mark Shapiro and me:

At 03:21 PM 2/23/01 -0800, Shapiro, Mark wrote:
I have to disagree with Bernard's implicit conclusion that "directed"
research is necessarily a more efficient use of the taxpayers' money.

Hmmmm. Actually there is abundant evidence that it _is_ "more efficient",
by any reasonable definition of efficiency. Of course, less-efficient
activities can produce nonzero results.

It is estimated that about 25% of the world's economy depends on the quantum
mechanics of silicon. Product oriented research has given us a number of
interesting inventions, but none of these have had the positive impact on
our standard of living that the development of quantum mechanics has.

That's highly misleading or worse. The first transistor was invented in
the early 1920s.

US Patent 1,745,175
Title Method and Apparatus for Controlling Electric Currents
Filed 8 Oct 1926
Issued 28 Jan 1930
By Julius Edgar Lilienfeld
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/afs/ece/usr/dwg/public_html/course/patents.html
http://www.inventors.about.com/science/inventors/library/inventors/bllili
http://www.inventors.about.com/science/inventors/library/inventors/bllilienf
eld.htm

... and the PN diode was invented long before that, whereas the band theory
of semiconductors was not developed until the 1930s
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~iachemed/FIPSE/RESOURCES/ELECTROCHEM/histo
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~iachemed/FIPSE/RESOURCES/ELECTROCHEM/history.
html

IMHO if quantum mechanics is going to take credit for the whole field of
semiconductors, it might as well take credit for chemistry and metallurgy
as well. After all, without quantum effects, atoms could not exist.

A great deal of semiconductor technology is more akin to empirical "heat it
and beat it" metallurgy than it is to quantum mechanics. Consider the
everyday PN diode. You need quantum mechanics to explain the highly
non-Ohmic operation of the PN junction, but that's not the whole story. To
make a practical device, you need to attach lead-wires. You need to make
an Ohmic contact to the N region and another to the P region. Would
somebody care to explain why the lead wire does not form a Schottky diode
where it touches the P region? I'll bet your quantum mechanics book
doesn't discuss this.

No one set out to develop QM because it might have practical applications.
Instead, the driving force was the one behind all basic science; namely, the
desire to UNDERSTAND the world around us.

It would have been a pretty good bet that QM would be good for _something_.

When researchers or ballplayers are trying to hit a home run, they are not
required to "call the shot" i.e. to specify exactly which seat in the
bleachers the ball is going to land on. On the other hand, it is "more
efficient" if they at least aim in the general direction of the bleachers,
and swing hard enough.

In this vein at 07:40 PM 2/23/01 -0500, Hugh Haskell wrote:

The example most frequently cited of this is the case of
x-rays. Can you imagine that an organized research project in, say,
1890, would have come up with x-rays, as the better way to locate
bullets and other shrapnel in wounds?

1) It is a distortion to suggest that just because Becquerel wasn't aiming
at a particular very specific application, he wasn't aiming at anything at
all.
-- At the time of his serendipitous discovery, he was aware
of Röntgen's work on penetrating rays. An English translation
of his original reports can be found at:
http://maple.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/becquerel.html
-- Photography and luminescence were obviously relevant areas
for inquiry at the time.
2) Examples of pure serendipity are very rare.
-- Geometry, before it was abstract and axiomatic, was developed to
solve practical problems.
-- Probability theory grew from practical roots.
-- Thermodynamics grew from practical roots.
-- The earliest roots of optics are obscure, but thereafter
its development was guided by practical considerations.

The laser is a more recent example of research for which "calling the shot"
would have been particularly difficult. The laser remained mostly a
laboratory curiosity for the first 20 years after it was invented.

Still, my point remains: most people believed that the laser would be good
for _something_ and were surprised it took so long to find practical
applications.

The drive to explore the unknown is deep in the human psyche.

This drive can be satisfied by exploring potentially-useful areas just as
well, or indeed better, than by focusing on obviously-useless areas.

Most of the money spent on science is used to buy or build things
that provide employment and income to countless non-scientists,

That's called the "busywork" argument.

Please, please do not make arguments like this. Justifying something by
such weak arguments is tantamount to conceding that it is
unjustifiable. To see why this is such a terrible argument, suppose
scientists spent the science budget "to buy or build things that provide
employment and income to countless non-scientists" ... and then simply
threw those things into the landfill. The busywork argument would still
apply.

But we could do better in our funding of both science and the arts.
Not nearly enough of it goes to finance work at the truly outer edges
of either field. Scientists have learned that to get a grant they
have to write their proposal almost as if they already knew the
answer they were asking the money to find (but of course, if you
already know the answer, it is no longer science), and artists have
learned that the best way to get funding for their projects is to
keep them firmly within the bounds of the acceptable norms. The
avant-garde stuff just pisses too many people off. So as a result,
much of the money we spend on science and the arts ends up being
wasted, but not in the sense most people think of waste. The waste
comes in when we keep on doing what has been done before. The true
value of public financing of science and the arts comes when the
grants are given to those who are willing to strike off into the
unknown, even if they fail.

I agree with that! But please, let's not equate working at the "outer
edges" to being indifferent (or hostile) to working in useful directions.

I don't think I said that. What I said was that the direction is best
chosen by the worker and not by the bosses, or "society" or whatever.
And if the only thing that drove researchers was practical
applications, then I don't think we would get nearly as far as we
have. Of course some are driven by that goal, but many more, IMO, are
driven by the thirst for knowledge. Maybe, instead of quantum
mechanics driving solid state physics, it was the other way around
(this is an area about which I am totally ignorant of the history, so
this is pure speculation on my part) and at least part of the impetus
for developing the quantum theory of the solid sate was a drive to
understand why solid state electronic devices worked.

And I didn't mean to use the "busywork" argument as a justification
for *doing* big science, only to point out that the money wasn't just
thrown away, or dropped on other people in the form of bombs, or
whatever. My justification for public funding of science is and
remains that it is worthwhile in the same way as public funding of
the arts is worthwhile--it is what makes us human. If, as a society,
we elect not to fund such activities, then so be it, but we will
surely be poorer for it.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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