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Re: "Directed" vs "Basic" research



John Denker wrote:

At 12:43 PM 2/24/01 -0500, Hugh Haskell wrote:

... the direction [of research projects] is best
chosen by the worker and not by the bosses, or "society" or whatever.

Not bosses? There is an inconsistency here. I thought this thread has
been discussing "big science" like the Apollo project or the SSC.

It turns out that big-science projects have bosses!

Bosses are necessary for such projects because you would rather do a good
job on one project than to do a bad job on N projects that never get finished.

Suppose there are W workers. As the boss, you will start out with at least
N=W (maybe more like N=3W) proposals for what to work on. You will have
to say "no" to almost all of them. It's not fun. The wise boss will, in
collaboration with the workers, try to form a consensus around one of the
proposals, but sometimes you just have to make a decision.

People have used such arrangements for a very long time, presumably even
back when we all slept in trees. People gravitate to such arrangements
because they find that their productivity is higher than it would be in
lone-wolf mode.

Well, for starters, Apollo and the SSC are or were *not* science in
an of themselves. SSC was to be simply a very large scientific
instrument that was capable of carrying out experiments that were
designed by (in this case) large groups of particle physicists, amply
assisted by engineers. Presumably, the nature of the experiments was
determined by the investigators themselves. Of course, by the nature
of such experiments, they are too expensive to be funded by the
investigators, and so, unfortunately, they have to seek support from
various funding agencies, and it is there that the "misdirection" is
most likely to occur. Building the device in the first place is only
creating the capability of doing certain classes of experiments, and
is primarily an engineering effort. Hopefully, the nature of the
instrument grew out of expressed needs for those types of experiments
by those who would do the experiments. I hate to think that its
design was mandated by Congress or NSF, or some other governmental
agency (but that's not beyond the realm of possibility--maybe if the
scientists had let a few key congressmen have a say in its design, it
would have been able to maintain its congressional support long
enough to come on line).

Similarly, Apollo itself was an engineering feat. Its scientific
purpose was only secondary, made more prominent by a perceived need
to justify the program based on something other than national pride
and competition with the USSR. But that aside, it was certainly a
spectacular confirmation of Newton's laws of motion and his law of
gravity ;-) Seriously, there was valid science that came out of
Apollo, but it shouldn't be justified on that basis. As many have
said, almost everything gleaned from Apollo could have been found by
unmanned spacecraft or from ground-based observation. Since Apollo
was an engineering operation, with a definite, politically-inspired
purpose, it is, I suppose, appropriate that it have bosses, who have
decision authority over the myriad engineering decisions that have to
be made. And, for the most part, the astronauts who actually got to
the moon were not themselves scientists, but high-priced "lab
assistants" who were doing the bidding of others who had designed the
experiments they carried out. Since the experiments were not the
ideas of the astronauts, it is not inappropriate that they were not
in the decision-making loop with regard to those experiments.

My point was and continues to be that scientists themselves are the
best judges of what experiments they should do. We don't have to
worry too much about them going too far off the deep end--there are
far too many self-appointed watchdogs looking over their shoulders to
make sure they don't do anything "wrong" (whatever that may mean). Of
course, someone can say "I'm looking for someone to collaborate with
me on such and such an experiment," and someone to whom that idea
seems interesting might sign on, but they are not, usually, being
told to do so, and the collaboration may end if at some point the
collaborators find they want to go in different directions.

I contend that, although the situation is more complicated and
generally murkier when we are talking about "big science," the basic
situation remains the same. The direction of an individual
scientist's research is best chosen by the scientist. It doesn't
always work that way, and I believe that science in general is the
worse 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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