Re: how to judge creative ideas

[Michael Edmiston <edmiston@BLUFFTON.EDU>]

I've got two issues to discuss here.  The first is more philosophical, the
second is more in the line of pointing out what I think are some
inconsistencies or omissions in earlier posts.

* * * Philosophy * * *

I agree with the comments by Chris Horton about the differences between
stockholders and taxpayers.

I assume people agree that tax money should build and maintain roads, but
they won't all agree on how often a road should be repaved, or widened, or
whether a new beltway is really needed.

In my local community we agree the school district needs more money, but we
are having difficulty passing a levy because some want most of the money to
go toward athletic facilities, some want it to go into computers and
textbooks, some want roofs repaired, some want a fancy security system, etc.

The above are examples of fairly obvious needs, yet there is substantial
disagreement on prioritization of the needs and/or allocation of funds.  Now
think of how much harder it is to agree on prioritization and allocation of
funding for things that have less obvious benefit to the ordinary citizen,
especially a citizen having trouble balancing the checkbook at the end of
the month.  I am thinking of art museums, the Hubble Space Telescope,
nuclear accelerators, public radio stations...

If government were totally bottom-line driven we probably wouldn't have
these things.  Are these things important?  Chris said it well...

> Among these societal interests are the intellectual curiosity and
adventure
> of discovering the unknown, and the fascination of learning about who we
are
> and how we got here.  These last [interests are] in fact powerfully
important, and for
> growing numbers of people it increasingly becomes an underpinning of the
> fundamental personal philosophies with which we guide our lives.  But it
is
> very hard to measure its value in dollars.  (Chris Horton)

We can easily measure the cost in dollars, but we can't easily measure the
value in dollars.  Fortunately the government and a few philanthropic
organizations don't demand that we demonstrate a dollar value that exceeds
the dollar cost.  If that should happen I would be very discouraged about
where society is headed.

* * * Inconsistencies * * *

I don't understand how John can say...

> You may be able to find some things that are
> valuable now that were invented
> a long time ago "as a lark".  But there are not nearly as
> many such things as most people suppose.  Selecting the
> data _a posteriori_ is highly unscientific.  And secondly,
> even if there were many such things, it wouldn't support the
> notion that investing at random, without regard to payoff,
> is a good investment strategy.  (John Denker)

after he already said...

> > Somebody has to create one isolated piece, and
> > then another, and then another. More
> > often than not, the pieces are created in no
> > particular order, and we have to collect quite
> > a few of them before we can start linking anything together.
> >
> > The research world would be crippled if researchers
> > were required to build every chain in order, link
> > by link. It is extremely common for pieces to be
> > invented in isolation, and linked up only later.  (John Denker)

It seems to me these are contradictory.

Also, John referenced a nice historical sketch of NMR at the Varian website.
John said "It was obvious in the 1940s that NMR had commercial impact."
Obvious to whom, and when?  The Varian site says, "Both Bloch and Hansen
viewed their work as an advance in physics theory with little or no
immediate commercial value and thus it was the suggestion of Russell Varian
that a U.S. patent application be filed to cover this work."  This says to
me that Bloch and Hansen had no "practical benefit" in mind, and they would
not have stated any such rationale in any funding proposals they might have
made.  Russel Varian could not have seen the commercial value if Bloch and
Hansen hadn't done the work motivated by intellectual curiosity.

Also, at the Varian website, the sputter-ion vacuum pump is described and it
says "At the time of its development." Recalls Helmer, "there were a lot of
people at Varian that were not convinced of the practicality and
marketability of Vaclon pump technology."  Further text at the website makes
it pretty clear that Varian almost abandoned development of this pump, yet
it turned into one of the big success stories for Varian.

Also, at the Varian site, with respect to NMR, it says, "As is often the
case with basic discoveries in science, the original intent of the work
turns out to have been far afield from the ultimate practical application."

Who is more correct?  Are practical uses from "lark experiments" rare, or
are they commonplace.

Michael Edmiston
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton College, Bluffton, Ohio 45817

edmiston@bluffton.edu
419-358-3270