Truth, Ownership, and the Scientific Tradition 263
number6x writes "The Physics Today website has an article by Robert Laughlin titled "Truth, Ownership, and the Scientific tradition". The article deals with some recent blunders in the scientific community like the falsification of data at lucent covered here on slashdot. The article is mainly about the conflict between the free exchange of ideas that the scientific community needs to survive, and the demand for property ownership that commercial sponsors demand."
life sciences vs. physics (Score:3, Insightful)
This is especially true vis-à-vis the life scientists, who have more money, less oversight, and much more tolerance for imprecision than physicists. Rather than allow ourselves to be defined by the property we generate, I suggest we take the high ground and turn ourselves into the gold standard of truth. This is the way to make physics relevant and important in this "age of biology."
Do I see some bitterness in the physics community? It is seen nowadays as very important for humanity to spend more money on the life sciences and less on physics. And the physics guys do not like it!
Tough.
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:5, Insightful)
Tough."
I think you are breathing too much into the statement you're referring to. What physicists are annoyed at is that their research interests are soley judged by the potential amount of money it can make. Physics has a long tradition of basing itself on the pursuit of knowledge, and more importantly, the truthfulness of that knowledge. Replacing "academic interest" with "potential revenue" has many adverse effects, of which some are appearing now. The issue is not about how much money physics gets, but what is being used to justify research.
The author was of the opinion that the life sciences are not as rigorous in testing the veracity of research results. I do not know if this is true, but it would be not be surprising -- biological systems are much more complex and harder to control.
I fully agree with the author of the Physics Today article that the corporatisation of universities is quite dangerous.
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think so. I know that physics labs have less money now than before and that the public grants have gone to life sciences. And some people at (for instance) the CERN are quite pissed off by that. And I understand them. But then I work in the life sciences, so
The author was of the opinion that the life sciences are not as rigorous in testing the veracity of research results.
Very true. But biology is where physics was at the time of Newton. Each big science domain is doing what it can with what it has. I don't think that applying a physics point of view to just life sciences or any other scientific domain is right.
I fully agree with the author of the Physics Today article that the corporatisation of universities is quite dangerous.
So do I.
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:5, Insightful)
The author was of the opinion that the life sciences are not as rigorous in testing the veracity of research results.
Very true. But biology is where physics was at the time of Newton. Each big science domain is doing what it can with what it has. I don't think that applying a physics point of view to just life sciences or any other scientific domain is right.
I suspect the author of the article would agree with you. I think the argument isn't so much "let's be very rigorous to prove that we are better than the biologists." It's more that physicis is no longer the premiere cutting edge technological science as it was in the 20th century; increasingly, biology is taking up that mantle. Instead of continuing as an also-ran has-been, the author seems to be proposing that physicists change their attitude to try and distinguish themselves as useful and productive in a different philosophical area, an area that much of the biological sciences probably won't really be strongly pushing into for at least a few decades.
Mind you, I personally think that applying a (fill in the blank scientific) point of view is right, almost always. However, you then need to evaluate how useful that exercise was. Not performing the excercise out of some sense of "not right" is just as harmful as refusing to make progress in biology because the field can't currently live up to physics standards of rigor. Keep an open mind in both directions; apply as many reasonable scientific perspectives as you can to see if you learn anything in the process.
-Rob
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:2)
I worked at CERN for 2 years. Let us get something straight here, the lab budget was over a billion dollars a year. LEP had not one but four versions of the same experiment, each costing over a billion to build and far more to operate.
The only reason there were four experiments at LEP rather than two was politics.
The fact that CERN now trumpets itself as the birthplace of the Web rings hollow to those of us who worked on the Web at CERN. The Web reseach at CERN was closed down by the physicists because they were jealous of the press the Web got for a project outside CERN's 'core mission'. So much for the value of interdisciplinary research!
Life sciences have incredible potential, anti-cancer drugs, anti-viral drugs, gene therapy, replacement parts. Why shouldn't that potential be measured against the value of measuring Z0 structure functions to an extra decimal place?
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:2)
That is untrue. The physicists I worked with were extreemly negligent in their verification procedures. As my college tutor, Tony Hoare put is, Physicists used to repeat each other's experiments, now they run each other's code.
If you take a hard look at the quality of the creaky FORTRAN decks used to analyse the results of the billion dollar experiments the physicists get you will see what I mean. All four experiments at LEP used the same GEANT monte-carlo simulation code and PAW analysis code. This at a time the code would not even compile unless the compiler warnings were turned off.
Sorry, until the physicists put their house in order they simply have no right to go attacking any other groups.
What physicists are annoyed at is that their research interests are soley judged by the potential amount of money it can make.
And the LHC is expected to make how much money? The claim is completely ridiculous. Only physicists get billion dollar experiments. I am not aware of any billion dollar experiment that was justified on a commercial basis. In comparison intellectual property claims are often the alpha and omega in the life sciences.
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:3, Insightful)
DNA
genetic engineering
tissue engineering
anyone want to add some more?
Use all these in a sentence and submit to your favourite funding agency.
It is seen nowadays as very important for humanity to spend more money on the life sciences and less on physics.
It has been like this for quite some time - research with medical applications has always been well funded because the medical community is very good at procuring and protecting research funding. A decade or so ago it was AIDS/cancer, now it's anything to do with DNA/genes.
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:2)
genetic engineering
tissue engineering
anyone want to add some more?
Astrobiology
That's good for NASA funding. Perversely, finding extrasolar planets is called "astrobiology", even though no organic molecules are necessarily involved.... Astronomers who work on other things and who can figure out how what they do is related to young solar systems would do well to mention that connection in their proposal, in the title if at all possible.
-Rob
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:2)
Quantum Computation
Polymer Electronics
Spintronics
Quantum Cryptography
Informatics (Which I suppose can include Bioinformatics, and is really a branch of thermodynamics)
Quantum
Biophysics in general seems to be quite a popularised area. There is some very interesting work going on w.r.t. neurons and neural mechanisms, both experimental and theoretical.
However, some governments seem to like the quick appliciability of modern biological research to everyday life. This forgets that most of this has come from fundamental advances in physics, often in very unrelated fields that happened many years before they were applied to biology. E.g. discovery of the structure of DNA was worked out using x-ray diffraction. If x-rays hadn't been discovered out of research into cathode ray tubes 70 years earlier, then genetics wouldn't have got started.
I think it mostly comes down to politicians having to have simple soundbite justifications for any money spent, which is quite hard to do, for say, the LHC, or research into the early universe.
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:5, Interesting)
We haven't had the equivalent of a public relations disaster for biology yet, which would cause public opinion to turn against it. All you need is a biological Chernobyl and you'll be tarred with the same brush that physicists have had applied to them. Not that I'd want anything like that, God forbid.
Also, is the authour of the article a bit bitter? Yes, but he does not speak for all physicists.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like a larger grant for some of my research, but we can't always get what we want, and if I *needed* the money, then I should bloody well write a better grant the next time around. Shame on me, not shame on the biologists. My personal moan aside, I think that money in science is well spent, whatever field it is in. If the research is exciting and interesting, by and large it does get funded.
I think there's the relatively modern issue of corporate interests and how they affect the flow of ideas in a given subject, and it just so happens that biology is the science that is facing this at the moment.
Hurm. Time for coffee!
Dr Fish
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:2)
Well if scientists want public funding for billion dollar experiments they had better have public support...
However one of the interesting aspects of the physics funding situation is the way that there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of funds for large scale particle physics colliders which have no practical application I am aware of while fusion research has to scramble for every dollar while trying to solve the energy problem. This is in large part due to the fission mafia's attempt to sink every competing energy source the way they killed public funding for alternative energy research in the 80s (see Salter's duck).
I think though that Chernobyl has less to do with the problems of physics than the end of the cold war. The gravy train for physics research and in particular particle physics had everything to do with the national prestige attached to 'nuclear' research which had everything to do with the bomb. That is why the US just had to build their own SSC and build it in Texas rather than work on the LHC at CERN or site the project close to Canada who had offered to provide the power if that happened.
Nulcear power was a spent commercial force after three mile island. The incredible stupidity of siting a nuclear plant that close to Manhattan island exposed the industry as negligent and careless. By the time that Chernobyl happened nuclear power was already dead.
The problem with the life sciences is finding out if a Chernobyl has occurred. It took several decades before DDT was identified as the cause of the declining populations of perdatory birds. It took even longer to connect smoking to cancer and heart disease. The problem with genetically modified foods is that nobody knows what adverse effects may be linked to them in 20 years time.
We may even have seen a Chernobyl already. There is an interesting correlation between the sites of the earliest identified cases of AIDS and the testing of polio vaccines cultured on monkey kidneys [uow.edu.au]
This link is of course unproven, but it is not exactly disproven either, nor is the alternative cut hunter theory particularly persuasive given that there have been cut hunters eating monkeys since Homo Spaiens appeared on the planet but AIDS has only appeared in the past 50 years.
The 'scientific' response to this theory would be to examine it as a matter of urgency. Instead the reponse from the biologists has been pretty much the response of the physicists to Chernobyl; no not us, could not possibly happen here, no three mile island was not comparable, it was the fault of those heathen communists, etc.
Instead of examining the polio vaccine theory it was silenced by means of a law suit brought by Koprowski, the leader of the polio trial. I do not consider that to be an adequate standard of scientific proof.
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:4, Insightful)
That is untrue. There are no sub-nuclear effects that are employed in semi-conductors. Rutherford and Chadwick's work on the structure of the atom was all pre-war and that is what the physics of semiconductors is based on. I have degrees in electronics and particle physics, the quantum mechanics used in solid state uses a completely different notation to that used in particle physics.
Only through linear accelerators was the crystal structure and properties of semiconductors properly worked out
You were almost close. Accelerators are used for chrystalography but not lineacs, It is the bremstralung radiation that you get from accelerating a charged particle arround a curve that provides the high powered radiation. The crystaline structure of silicon GaAs etc are all very simple and were deduced long before quantum mechanics, let alone particle physics. I very much doubt that any crystal structure that had such a high degree of complexity it could only be deduced using those techniques would be far too complex to be useful for VLSI.
As for your fusion power comment, I must say that, for one thing, there hasn't been too much funding because there hasn't been too much progress.
How much progress has there been in particle physics? Why would basic research into the fusion process be intrinsically less interesting than finding out the structure function of the z0 etc?
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:2)
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:2)
One can argue that the advance in other areas of technology arose because funding at basic research was so good. It then had a "bubble up" effect.
Having said that though, lets be honest. Physics, even basic theoretical physics, was largely subsidized by the cold war. There were a lot of theoreticians doing what they liked on the side while getting paid for research in more applied areas. Further the biggest area of physics research right now is material science. And it isn't as if there is this huge funding shortage there.
So in a sense the poster is right. There is a bit of jealousy now that physics isn't quite the high rolling area it was up through the end of the cold war. However part of the problem is that in physics, most of the easy to answer problems are solved. What's left is [i]so[/i] complex and difficult and [i]so[/i] expensive that one has to be somewhat cautious in funding. I mean do we really need to spend a few billion dollars on the next collider to find the weight of the latest theoretical particle? Especially when the real work is in what is more fundamental. And there is still a ways to go before the superstring theorists and quantum loop theorists have much to give us that can be reasonably tested.
Having said all that one branch of physics/chemistry is about to make a comeback. Apparently a lot of the cold fusion stuff has been doing quite well the past few years. It has been duplicated in over 1000 different experiments. The remaining problems are in getting the proper impurities into palladium and doing some admittedly difficult material science work. (Which isn't to say one is even remotely close to making it a power source) So while the life sciences are deservedly getting the press today, energy problems along with global warming will push things back into the court of physicists and chemist within a few years.
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:2)
Actually there is a genuine 'cold fussion' effect, just not the bogus Fleicheman and Pons variety.
If you take a muon and put it in orbit arround a tritium atom in place of the electron it is much heavier and thus orbits much closer... Ahh just read the article... [triumf.ca]
The real outrage that Fleiechman and Pons did was to discredit a whole line of research with their actions. There is no reason why cold fusion should be rejected as impossible just because the field has attracted cranks. Before Harrison the search for longitude was the domain of cranks and lunatics.
BTW the big problem with muon catalysed fusion is that creating muons is an energy intensive process and the muons decay rapidly so getting one to decay is hard. However one could imagine using a muon catalysed reaction as the ignition chain for a self-sustaining reaction.
Re:life sciences vs. physics (Score:2)
The big debate was that the experiments were very hard to conduct and the evidence was from caloromic readings while the physicists wanted various nuclear reaction evidence. The problem was that while caloromic readings were very persuasive scientists had no idea what was going on inside the palladium.
Probably the best papers are by Michael McKubre over at Stanford. Here's a good transcript [lenr-canr.org] of his talk at this year's conference on cold fusion. He's written a lot on the topic and gave a fascinating hour long interview to KUER in SLC. I'll not post the link to avoid slashdotting a small NPR station. For peer reviewed papers I was looking at LANL, but the links I had appear to have been moved behind a firewall. HEre are some I found doing a bit of looking:
Anomalous Behavior of the Pd/D System [lenr-canr.org]
Correlation of Excess Power and Helium Production During D2O and H20 Electrolysis Using Palladium Cathods [lenr-canr.org]
The Emergence of a Coherent Explanation for Anomalies Observed in D/Pd and H/Pd System [lenr-canr.org]
Some Thoughts on the Nature of the Nuclear-Active Regions in Palladium [lenr-canr.org]
I'm sure there are more if you do a little searching.
Newton, Darwin, Einstein and ownership... (Score:5, Interesting)
One interesting element about these three chaps is that when they had their great ideas there was no way to make money from it so no-one is interested. What we are talking about here are experimental scientists where there is a direct effect of their work. "Blue sky" scientists were less prone to these problems in the past because companies tended not to fund them. With the rise of "corporate universities" and corporate science the drive has been to be more accountable.
Einstein didn't get funding for his research 100 years ago, what would happen if the next Einstein comes along and demonstrates that cold fusion is possible, clean and safe... but is sponsored by Exxon ?
The corporatisation of science means the ethics of corporations now apply. Science will have an "Enron" scenario within the next few years.
Re:Newton, Darwin, Einstein and ownership... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, Exxon would then shift their focus to Cold Fusion, lock everone out of the industry via way of patents and bs intellectual property, and they would pretty much have a monopoly on energy production in the end.
Dispite what most people think the oil industries AREN'T out to kill all other forms of energy production. They just want to make sure that by the time the oil DOES run out they are the ones that own the new source.
Re:Newton, Darwin, Einstein and ownership... (Score:4, Insightful)
And they want to make sure they make a killing until then. Just like farmers make more money when food is scarce, oil companies will profit immensely if there is an energy crisis. OTOH, a gradual, smoothly managed transition will just bring extra costs for the new infrastructure needed for different energy sources, with no extra profit to be squeezed out.
Re:Newton, Darwin, Einstein and ownership... (Score:2)
Re:Newton, Darwin, Einstein and ownership... (Score:2)
What would happen if we got rid of the patent system and let all these tech companies build products using all available technology? What would happen if we realized that our tech companies are more valuable to us when they produce stuff than when they lay off their employees and close their doors? Or if we shifted our media system to promote education and science and technology and creativity and togetherness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, we'd all go broke and starve cuz we couldn't afford to eat at Taco Bell anymore.
Re: complete and utter hogwash. (Score:2)
Exxon and all oil companies and all capitalist nations would lose control. That's a very very very bad thing in the eyes of any exec in any oil corp as well as the current US administration.
That is the one of the most absurd comments I've read in
Of course the interest of oil companies is hiding such an invention, but the interests of the US (and all technologically advanced nations) are the complete opposite.
why are litereally billions poured into fusion research if the US does not believe oil and coal should be replaced ? why does Japan, the EC and the US invest in plasma research ? you may criticize the internal distribution of money within that field, or the results obtained, but saying the US does not want oil replaced is plain nuts. and contrary to evidence (there is a whole bloody department of the US admin for this issue alone, the DOE, look it up, it's not a secret)
criticize where critic's due (and the US does deserve that, many times), credit where it's due. Don't let hate overcome common sense.
Re:Newton, Darwin, Einstein and ownership... (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporate universities are a byproduct of today's corporate society where the emphasis is on money - earning, spending, getting, justifying spending other people's, etc.
The problem has filtered down to universities - because they spend public money (ie. taxes), that money has to be justified. You simply can't justify academia in monetary terms, and so universities have had to change. But that change has been brought on by the public demand that government be accountable and transparent (and so it should be).
The other big problem is that more and more government funding is being cut. The only other avenue for funding is sponsorship by corporate entities who won't sponsor research that doesnt have a product they can make money from (because the companies are accountable themselves), and the problem will continue to spiral downwards.
The real problem here is the money counters trying to put a monetary value on research [output]. In a similar vein, the reason that publication is so out of control now (ie. the emphasis is on getting as many publications as possible) is that people thought this was a good way to measure academic output.
Re:Newton, Darwin, Einstein and ownership... (Score:4, Interesting)
I work in the Cambridge Astrophysics group, and many people there are doing very fundamental research, but also coming up with immediately applicable side results. The problem is that these are often not obvious from the official description of the research. For example, data analysis techniques developed for CMB observations can be applied to general pattern matching, and image analysis. However when the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council's funding is discussed, this kind of thing is often forgotten. Fortunately, the current government is being reasonably enlightened about this kind of thing.
Re:Newton, Darwin, Einstein and ownership... (Score:2)
Exxon giving 100 mil to Stanford for clean energy (Score:2)
OSS, GPL or BSD (Score:3, Interesting)
The human genome should have been GPL'd not BSD'd
Re:Newton, Darwin, Einstein and ownership... (Score:2)
Darwin's return from his voyage on the Beagle was anticipated by the leading naturalists of his day. He was an instant celebrity and rapidly became one of the leading naturalists of his day. The origin of species had the effect it did largely because it came from someone who was already established as a major scientific author.
While Darwin was financially secure, Larmark whose work he often criticised had made his living from science and a good one too.
Newton was also well off, but his recent predecessors Gallileo and daVinci had made their living from patronage.
Einstein worked at a patent office for a short time but rapidly found a university position.
All three were known internationally within a few years of their first major publications.
This man is right on the money. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with his opinion on scientists under stress, for a paid scientist is just like any other working individual; mindful of their family and bills. He has done an excellent job of humanizing the average Joe scientist.
At that, I literally clapped when I got to the part about physics. He said what I've been saying all along, Physics is the Open Source of the science community.
Keep posting articles from this man, whoever is reading, I would like to see more of his work.
Re:This man is right on the money. (Score:2)
I appreciate this man's writing, he is thorough and insightful.
Keep posting articles from this man, whoever is reading, I would like to see more of his work.
Well, considering that he (and two other guys) got the Nobel prize in physics a few years ago (for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum hall effect), you'd kinda expect him to be able to write insightful stuff..
Re:This man is right on the money. (Score:2)
I probably can't explain it very well, but there's more info here:
http://www.bell-labs.com/news/1998/october
Wish I had the time to study physics. Physics is fun!
a questionable assertion (Score:5, Interesting)
I find this extremely questionable. History is full of scientific discoveries and ideas which were not able to produce equal or greater value for long time. Can anyone enlighten me about the value produced by Einstein's research?
Re:a questionable assertion (Score:3, Informative)
I find this extremely questionable. History is full of scientific discoveries and ideas which were not able to produce equal or greater value for long time. Can anyone enlighten me about the value produced by Einstein's research?
Einstein's most important results had no research investment funding it whatsoever. Hence, it does not serve as a counterexample to an assertion about "research investment".
Re:a questionable assertion (Score:2)
Didn't Einstein receive a Nobel Prize for his demonstration of the particle-like qualities of light? I'd say that qualifies as one of his "most important results", wouldn't you?
And weren't those results based on actual empirical experiments, using actual lab equipment to observe and manipulate light? Where did this equipment come from? Who paid for it?
Re:a questionable assertion (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, Einstein invented and received a patent on(in conjunction with Leo Szilard) an electromagnetic pump for pumping metallised fluids with no moving parts.
As for general relativity, if that wasn't taken into account, then GPS systems would be inaccurate, satelite orbits wouldn't be entirely correct, and so geostationary orbits wouldn't work so well, etc. etc. etc.
Also, possibly no nuclear power, which gives us 1/5 of the world's electricity, and is just about the only hope for continuing growth of power usage at current (no pun, honestly) rates (renewables just can't provide enough power if you assume continuous growth of power demands at current rates for about 60 years) in the form of fusion power.
And then there are all sorts of social gains that can be assigned costs that Einstein as a populariser of science is partially responsile for. I'm no sociologists, so I won't expand on that here.
Re:a questionable assertion (Score:2)
Einstein's work was also instrumental, of course, in giving the US an early lead on the development of atomic weapons. Had history gone differently that advantage may have belonged to Germany, the USSR, or even Japan. Given the balance of power and the regimes in charge at the time that would have been rather unhealthy for the world as a whole.
Re:a questionable assertion (Score:2)
With blatant disregard for Godwin's Law, I'll bite: Why on earth would I want to thank Hitler for that? If he hadn't started his genocidal campaign, Einstein would have been free to exercise his great intellect in Germany, remaining intimately connected to the thriving and lively European physics community. Hitler's bigotry and warmongering shattered this community, drove some of the best minds in Physics to the ends of the earth, disrupted their communication with each other... and that's not the worst of it:
What if we'd all been at peace when the power of the atom was first realized and harnessed? With no urgent need to build a superweapon, might we not have progressed calmly into a world of ubiquitous, safe nuclear power? No hysteria, no Cold War, no Hiroshima or Nagasaki... No, Hitler didn't do us any favors by driving Einstein out of Germany.
On another note, the U.S. today is no healthier than Nazi Germany under Hitler? What tipped you off? Was it the genocidal death camps scattered across our heartland?
Re:a questionable assertion (Score:2)
well lets see Einstien basical invented Quantum Mechanics which lead to tranistors, which lead to Integrated circuits, which lead to computers, and Microsoft is worth what about 11 Billion dollars.
adding in all of the branches between Einstien and Gates and you'd come up with just about everything we think of as having value.
Re:a questionable assertion (Score:2)
I believe that fundamental research in science should be supported by society. Computer science research (e.g. new layout algorithms, not new whiz-bang word-processor programs) should be also. Scientists should only be supported (either by society or by corporations) with no strings attached besides those of general acceptance of results in the scientific community, e.g. peer-reviewd publications.
Re:a questionable assertion (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks. I re-read the article and realised that you are right. Thanks for pointing that out.
BTW. on searching I found that Prof. Robert B. Laughlin received a Noble Prize in Physics in 1998 [http://large.stanford.edu/rbl/index.htm]
[http:
kedi
Science serves at the pleasure of Engineering (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course the two are inderdependent. To a huge majority of people, most of whom have some kind of say in how resources are allocated, the goals of the scientist, however, often seem esoteric and even blasphemous.
However, the goals of the engineer are very clear: envision, design, implement, sell. Cars, computers, bridges, perfume bottles, guns.
Which is more important, Ms. Voter, the Scientist or the Engineer? Now, don't go thinking too much!
(disclaimer: I'm an engineer)
Re:Science serves at the pleasure of Engineering (Score:2)
I'm not sure that you can divide some work into that done by engineers and scientists so easily.
I'm nominally a physicist, but I develop high frequency radio receivers for astronomy. This looks remarkably like engineering, in that I have to design a product for reproducibility, to specifications. Admittedly I don't have to then sell the thing, mainly because we have to see if the current designs can be improved first.
To do this engineering type thing, I have to work with and develop theoretical techniques for calculating EM fields, develop theories for describing the performance of the receivers etc.
Re:Science serves at the pleasure of Engineering (Score:2)
Science and Engineering are clear words, and any task can be clearly labled as "Science" (where the product is knowledge) or "Engineering" (where the product is application of knowledge.)
The proper form is for "Scientists" to do complex "Engineering" tasks so as to fund their "science". And, of course, in doing the "Science" they'll probably have to do some "engineering" to get it to work.
"Scientist" should probably be a subset of "engineer", as it's always easier to apply knowledge than to improve upon it. (Though, of course, an "engineer" with as much schooling as a "scientist" should be just as valueable, if not more...)
Re:Science serves at the pleasure of Engineering (Score:2)
Yikes. What kind of engineering does a theoretical physicist do? I mean the sort that develops models of the universe, not the sort that builds supercolliders.
I think that the distinction between application of existing known principles and the development of new ideas is sufficient to keep scientists and engineers in separate categories. Engineers may be called upon to apply the knowledge they have in extremely creative ways, but that's not the same thing as developing that knowledge from scratch. Similarly, many scientists (the experimentalists, at least) often have to perform various sorts of engineering in the course of their work--but I wouldn't want them trying to build bridges. (Q: You just woke up in a lecture hall. There appears to be a demo in progress and you've forgotten what class you're supposed to be in--how do you tell? A: Demo is slimy: Biology. Demo woke you when it blew up: Chemistry (if it smells bad, Organic Chemistry). Instructor appears puzzled because demo does not work: Physics.)
Re:Science serves at the pleasure of Engineering (Score:2)
What kind of SCIENCE does a theoretical physicist do? If they're discussing things that are never tested, then they're simply engaging in conjecture, not science.
I don't know if I can say this loud enough:
If you aren't testing your hypothesis with real experiments, you're not doing science!
Einstein spent years conjecturing about the nature of relativity in his home. It wasn't until he could make and test a prediction based on his hypothesis that he could be considered to be doing science--and it's not until the hypothesis could be tested that it became at all proper to call it a theory in the scientific sense of the word.
Re:Science serves at the pleasure of Engineering (Score:3, Insightful)
Ultimately, it is science if the hypotheses (or conjectures, if you prefer) they develop can in principle be experimentally disproven, and can be used to make predictions.
If you aren't testing your hypothesis with real experiments, you're not doing science!
I suppose the question becomes, "Is Stephen Hawking a scientist?" The evaporation of black holes is something that we are not currently able to simulate in the lab. Nevertheless, the idea is a natural (brilliant, elegant, and inspired, but natural) extension of concepts of entropy and quantum mechanics. (I grossly oversimplify, but there's lots more about it on the web for those that are interested.) Furthermore, it makes predictions about what should happen to a black hole, which meets my second criterion. These predictions cannot be tested at this time, but will in principle be testable in the next generation of supercolliders. Until such time, Hawking's ideas still can spark lively debate--which is exactly as it should be.
Does this mean that we should not be allowed to consider theoretical physicists and cosmologists real scientists until technology matures to the point where their hypotheses can be tested? I submit that scientists are people who put forth rational hypotheses based on whatever incomplete information is available, and are prepared to test their hypotheses--or allow others to do so--when technology and funding allow. Real scientists should be able to recognize the difference between a hypothesis and an accepted theory and trust the two accordingly.
Re:Science serves at the pleasure of Engineering (Score:2)
No. He's an apparantly brilliant theoreticist. But unless he devises and helps organize experiments for his ideas, he's not a scientist.
And until his ideas ARE tested, they shouldn't be considered as "true" or even an ancilliary part of scientific dogma. At least, not if scientists want to maintian that they're after truth, and not merely members of an atheist church.
Does this mean that we should not be allowed to consider theoretical physicists and cosmologists real scientists until technology matures to the point where their hypotheses can be tested?
No, we shouldn't. They can be honored and even paid for out of "science budgets", but they're not doing science anymore than altar boys are performing marriages.
I submit that scientists are people who put forth rational hypotheses based on whatever incomplete information is available, and are prepared to test their hypotheses--or allow others to do so--when technology and funding allow.
Does that mean that my hypothesis of an extant god who wishes to test our faith makes me a scientist? I'm more than willing to test my belief when the opportunity arises, but science isn't quite at the point where we can speak to departed souls...
Unless the hypothesis is being tested AND being found to not need major revisions, it shouldn't be considered either good science or a real Theory--no matter how smart the person saying it is.
Real scientists should be able to recognize the difference between a hypothesis and an accepted theory and trust the two accordingly.
Bullocks.
A real scientist should trust ONLY that which is proven by objective and replicable emperical data. If they want to believe in more than that, they can on their own personal time.
When they put on their lab coat and "scientist hat," they need to put their religious biases and hero-worship aside and be as unemotional as they can possibly be. Anything less, and we risk sliding back to "knowledge by decree" rather than the basic underpinings of science.
Re:Science serves at the pleasure of Engineering (Score:2)
The scientific method has many steps, the first of which is to formulate hypotheses based on available information. Confirmation of hypotheses through experimentation (leading to refined theories; lather, rinse, repeat) is a critical part of the process, but why can't the work be divided up--in time, in space, and among different people? Should experimentalists who spend their time testing other people's theories be considered mere technicians, unworthy of the title of "scientist"?
Theoreticians are just scientists who have to work with very incomplete information. Hawking obviously isn't working in a vacuum--he knows about general relativity, the likely existence of black holes, quantum theory, thermodynamics. Combining those ideas into more comprehensive theories that are subject to experimental disproof is an important first step.
Does that mean that my hypothesis of an extant god who wishes to test our faith makes me a scientist? I'm more than willing to test my belief when the opportunity arises, but science isn't quite at the point where we can speak to departed souls...
First, you're presupposing the existence of an immortal soul. I don't think it's appropriate to beg that question. In fact, I think it would be an excellent starting point for you as a scientist. Propose to me an experiment that would demonstrate the existence of an immortal soul. Describe your hypothetical soul. One possible outcome of your experiment must serve to disprove your hypothesis.
If your hypothesis cannot be disproved by experiment, then it's not a legitimate hypothesis in the scientific sense. Taking again the example of black hole evaporation, Hawking has described the process. He predicts its outcome. Though not yet available in the lab, small black holes will likely soon be created. The experiment has already been sketched out, and its results may conclusively confirm or refute Hawking's work. An experiment can be conceived, it will support or contradict clearly the hypothesis.
I agree wholeheartedly with your disdain for "knowledge by decree", but I think that your definition of the term "scientist" is too narrow.
Try engineer anything without science. (Score:2)
Re:Try engineer anything without science. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, of course you are correct. You know it, I know it. But to the voters who must choose between $5 billion to build a supercollider or $5 billion in freeways and bridges, will they choose the scientist or the engineer?
I wrote my post poorly, so let me clarify. I was attempting to portray the dilemma of obtaining public funds for scientific research.
The perfect example is NASA. What do most people ask? "How is that going to help us?" Most people aren't satisfied by knowledge for its own sake, especially when their tax money is involved.
This is why, in my opinion, the public understands engineers better than scientists.
Re:Science serves at the pleasure of Engineering (Score:2)
Not only do I agree with the parent's view that "use" is more important to an engineer fundamentally than "sell," but I think it is vital to add "make work" after implement. Every engineer will tell you that things don't always come out as planned all the time. One of the most rewarding things about engineering is taking that difficult problem and massaging it, working with it, and sometimes smashing it with a very large blunt object (*Warning* - Only if the two previously mentioned methods failed.) until you can make it work as planned. There is nothing more rewarding than the feeling of standing back and watching something that is the byproduct of your ingenuity go to work.
Nice Euphemism! (Score:5, Interesting)
There you have it ``innovation'' == ``dishonesty''
Over to you, Microsoft ... :-)
New /. dept? (Score:2)
This has been building for a long time... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the one hand you had people typified by older zoologists, who were gentlemanly academic putterers, studying animals and publishing papers. Their ambitions seemed to be a full professorship, continuously funded grants, support for their graduate students, and a bit more lab space.
On the other hand you had people typified by younger molecular biologists, who were hard-driving, competitive, and occasionally arrogant. Some of them gave me the impression that commercial success was in the back of their minds--maybe not even far in the back.
I don't mean to suggest this was a zoology-versus-molecular-biology thing. It was more a change in the zeitgeist. During the years I was a grad student I was certain that I was seeing science becoming more and more competitive.
You could see the "methods" sections in papers becoming shorter and more perfunctory, for example. I was aware of at least some cases in which scientists guarded some of their techniques because they WANTED to be able to get results that others could not get.
As anyone who's read "The Double Helix" knows, competition in science was not new. It was, of course, hard to be sure, then and now, how much of this perception was accurate and how much was just my growing awareness of what had always been there.
Naturally, this was a frequent topic of spirited conversation.
I remember saying, "Well, IF my perceptions are correct, one of the things we should expect to see over the next decade or so is an increasing number of scandals involving faked data."
And I really think this is what we've seen.
(Of course I don't have numbers to back this up--faked data is not new, either).
Re:This has been building for a long time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Along the same lines:
In my experience, it is extremely rare to find a journal/conference publication that includes enough information in the methods section to allow others to either check or verify the work or use the findings themselves. Vital information is almost always missed out - it's an artifial intellectual property control, and, as the parent post says, makes it easier for data to be faked.
Re:This has been building for a long time... (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably depends on the field of research. Working in physics, I've never had that problem.
-JS
Re:This has been building for a long time... (Score:2)
Probably depends on the field of research. Working in physics, I've never had that problem
So, you knew that Schon was faking data long before anyone else figured that out? He *was* a physicist, you know, and published in the most respected physics journals.
Re:This has been building for a long time... (Score:2, Insightful)
and... Along the same lines:
In my experience, it is extremely rare to find a journal/conference publication that includes enough information in the methods section to allow others to either check or verify the work or use the findings themselves. Vital information is almost always missed out - it's an artificial intellectual property control, and, as the parent post says, makes it easier for data to be faked.
and...
Probably depends on the field of research. Working in physics, I've never had that problem.
It can often appear to be the case that enough details are not included in articles, but it really depends on the field, and upon the research group. Part of the driver for this is the "number of publications per year" metric used to evaluate the value of scientific work. What happens is that a group may be using a technique that is pretty standardized, either within their individual lab or within their field of expertise. A person "skilled in the art" can often get enough detail to duplicate the work. And, since the game is to publish every little new thing, it would be a waste of paper to fully detail the experimental technique in each and every publication. It would also eat up a lot of the space in which researchers would rather publish their hot new results. A common practice of good research groups is to occasionaly write one big paper describing the details of the technique, and to refer to that in subsequent papers.
And this is a good thing. In the end, lots of short papers tends to keep everyone at the same pace in the development of a topic. If everyone published only a magnum opus every five years, the result would be a significant amount of dispersion in research directions, possibly in directions that were not fruitful (in terms of being based on good assumptions and a of the state of the art, the current mind on the topic).
It's "two heads are better than one." With short papers, everyone must keep tabs on one another, and short papers help keep everyone focused.
I'm not saying that important information isn't intentionally withheld from the papers. It is. But, science is a race, and you don't want other groups to get the jump on you by giving away your secret. If a reader follows the publication record of a good group, s/he will find that these details eventually come out, in later publications. It's a sort of short-term trade secret approach. Optimally, one keeps a detail secret long enough to do some strong fundamental work in an area. The secret is later (a year or two) released, so anyone can expand on the ideas. If the work was good and is widely read, in the end it gains the researcher the advantage of being a heavily referenced source on the topic (another metric used to evaluate the value of scientific work).
Disclaimer: I am a materials scientist, and this is the field from which I am drawing on for these observations, although I do believe they probably apply in other fields where several groups are working in a particular area.
New data just in! (Score:2)
Since 1982, the frequency of faked data incidents has grown by 79%.
(Ok, I made that result up myself, so what?)
Re:This has been building for a long time... (Score:3, Insightful)
I will paraphrase Ernest Rutherford, since I can't find a definitive version of his quotation on the Web right now. He said something to the effect of, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting."
More generally, research can be lumped into two broad (and overlapping) camps: phenomenology and investigation. Phenomenology involves making more and more detailed reports of the world, but does not require one to perform experiments or formulate hypotheses. Investigation includes attampts to gain a "deeper" sort of understanding of problems--it is not merely stamp collecting.
Unfortunately, much of biology was trapped in phenomenological models until relatively recently. Until the development of tools to pursue the study of molecular biology and genetics, we were limited to a basic acceptance that heredity existed, and some handwaving about evolution and so forth--and we could label all of our stuffed specimens, because taxonomy just takes a sharp eye and some good guesswork. (Even so, many species are now being reclassified as genetics tools are brought to bear on them. The taxonomic kingdoms I learned in school are not the ones being taught now.)
In physics, you can look at a system and in principle describe all of the interactions at work. If it is a simple system, you can perform calculations that predict how it will evolve over time.
In biology, take a single cell. We still can't describe everything that goes on in that little cubic-micron space, though we're getting closer. We're finally starting to understand the way many of the more important chemical pathways within cells operate. We can fold simple proteins in simulation. Some of the genetic tinkering we can do actually has predicatable effects.
So of course biology is changing as a field--it is graduating from stamp collecting to science. That will attract new attitudes, new people--and new funding.
One of the big problems in science now... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a big side effect of corporate funding for science; if some corporation is giving you money to research, say, some new gene, they want viable results and they want them soon. They don't understand that you can't rush science; if you do that, you get an inferior (and often dangerous) product. Hell, just watch an ad for any new allergy medication; the side effects take up most of the ad time.
The real problem is that there needs to be more funding from different sources (government funding, mehtinks?) so that particular labs won't represent the goals of one lone corporation; if you have to answer to many people, you're bound to take your time.
It's a big nasty mess, and one that really needs to be resolved. We can only go on like this for so long before someone fucks up royally and everyone pays for it.
Re:One of the big problems in science now... (Score:2)
Let them own it (Score:2, Funny)
Let the scientists use this money to fund real reasearch in which they freely share ideas.
Everybody wins. The corporations have never cared if something really works, only if they can market it. They have their IP, and we have the real research.
Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
I found it fascinating that at only one place in the article, buried at the end of a long and complex paragraph did the author use the terms lies. He frequently used euphemisms such as "creative", but only once he did directly refer to dishonesty. Yet in the end, this sort of scientific smoke is simple dishonesty at its core. Only when a man chooses to surrender his personal integrity, do these problems occur. Our attempt to color them with quiet shades of pastel only makes the behavior more likely.
What does this say about our culture in general and the effect on our scientific community?
Re:Lies (Score:2)
What does this say about our culture in general and the effect on our scientific community?
Our culture at this point in time is focussed almost entirely on money and possessions (which are really just a measure of money). But this obsession is driven by the public - during the IT job boom for example, people could switch jobs at the drop of a hat or demand outrageous salary increases or they would up and go to the company that would pay up. Why? They wanted more money, pure and simple.
Re:Lies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lies (Score:2, Insightful)
You've probably never won a proposal, I'll bet.
In proposals, you have to tell a good story. And no one can tell the future. Which of these would you pick?
"An understanding of this mechanism could lead to the prevention of 20 % of all cancers within ten years."
or
"We expect to make an incremental advance in our understanding of the relation between the physico-chemical fliberty flap and the occurrence of randomonucleopyrolysistic neurophononisms."
Re:Lies (Score:2)
But maybe - just maybe, we need to revisit ethics and critical thinking as requirements for grade school kids in America. It seems as if there's a whole generation of people, Lawyers, Doctors (ie. Drug pushers for the pharmaceutical industry), Business execs (Enron), Recording execs, politicians, priests (come here little altar boy, I've got a prayer ritual for you. .
Ten commandments are fine and dandy, but try to put "don't covet thy neighbor's ass" into the context of "don't buy a politician, so you can get rich", and it apparently misses something.
Creating "property" vs advancing the art (Score:2)
Interestingly, the same thing could be said of computer science and programmers. As a programmer, I have two options:
- I can create intellectual "property" for the benefit of Corporate America(tm).
- I can release the source code of my work so that the whole of society benefits.
Unfortunately, I can make a living doing the first, but not the second. Even worse, should the company patent my ideas, I will be denying others the ability to use even rudimentary algorithms without the paying of exorbitant royalties; not only will I exclude my own work from the benefit of others, but I will be actively destroying the ability of other programmers to make a living.The choices aren't easy. Fortunately for my sake, my company isn't in the intellectual property business. But the type of coding that I would like to be doing (engineering modeling, GUI design, etc...) inevitably involves me assigning any intellectual property rights for my work to a corporate entity.
it should really be quite simple (Score:3, Interesting)
(2) If people put their names on a paper, they should define their contributions and be responsible for the results. If they don't want to accept responsibility for parts of a paper because they didn't work on it, they should say so clearly.
Unfortunately, it has become common practice for people to pad their publications through multiple authorships: five people writing five papers each only have one publication each, but five people putting their names on each other's publications have five publications each; so much more marketable for job hunting that works by counting publications.
It doesn't look like much is changing. In response to the Schoen affair, the American Physical Society weasled out of a requirement of academic responsibility by all authors; things are just continuing the way they are. And scientific papers with little more substance than press releases are becoming increasing common, in particular in the biomedical sciences, as companies promise the sky and find them good PR and marketing materials. And editors are afraid to reject that junk.
But since the peer review system and system of academic publications is becoming increasingly corrupt and useless, perhaps on-line publishing of results without peer review will become the norm. Then, it is really word-of-mouth and recommendations by known friends, as opposed to anonymous reviewers, that matter.
uncovering the purpose of patents, copyrights, etc (Score:5, Insightful)
patents, exclusive licenses to new inventions, are granted for the sole purpose of encouraging inventors to publish, in full detail, their inventions. without patent protection, for example, texas instruments and fairchild semiconductor may not have ever told anyone how to make an integrated circuit. they would have made the first chips under a cloak of secrecy, sold them as black box devices, and bury the chips in epoxy to protect the secret.
unfortunately, industry, the lawmakers, and even the courts have forgotten the whole idea of patents is to publish. industry wants to call patents property that should belong to the holder and anything that weakens the patent is the equivalent of a 'taking'. congress and the patent office are all to happy to agree. and the courts have screwed the matter up further by taking the position that engineers and inventors are not legally qualified to decide if they are infringing on a patent, and so are not allowed to even look at one when trying to come up with new inventions.
Re:uncovering the purpose of patents, copyrights, (Score:2)
Re:uncovering the purpose of patents, copyrights, (Score:2)
Ethics Guidelines for Physicists (Score:4, Informative)
So last month, the American Physical Society [aps.org], representing some 40,000 physicists, expanded the ethical guidelines for researchers, in their Statements on Profession Conducts [aps.org] document. The new guidelines call for more ethics training in science and urge all research institutions to adopt the same set of misconduct procedures. The guidelines also clarify co-authors' roles and duties, making it clear that when you put your name on a paper, your reputation is on the line.
Biologists faced similar scandals [ucsd.edu] during the Gallo and Imanishi-Kari [nybooks.com] cases in the 90's. Unlike Robert Gallo [amazon.com] and David Baltimore [mit.edu], who survived the scandal virtually unscathed, the physicists involved in today's scandals are actually being held accountable.
The above info was compiled from an article that originally appeared here [scifitoday.com].
Re:Ethics Guidelines for Physicists (Score:2)
So, these biologists were held accountable (at least for a while), but for something they didn't do.
Edison and other 19th century scroundrals (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of the 19th century "competition" has become the stuff of legends. Edison vs. Telsa to design the national electric grid. Telsa's ideas won out. Edison vs. almost everyone else. The dinosaur pioneers Marshal and Cope. One used the others name for fossilized shit! But in the end the real facts survived and the garbage disappeared.
Patents Are The Solution (Score:5, Informative)
This is not a new idea. Article I section 8 of the United States Constitution provides that Congress may "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. . . " (capitalization in original). This clause is the basis of Congress's power to grant patents and copyrights.
The trade-off is simple: Inventors are given a limited time (currently 20 years from date of the filing of a patent application) during which they may recoup their investment and profit from their work with the reassurance that they may sue to stop anyone who tries to get a free ride off their work by copying an invention and thereby trying to profit from the work of another. In exchange, the patent has to contain "a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains . . . to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention." 35 U.S.C. sec. 112, para. 1.
Section 112 is one of the most litigated provisions in the law. Ever. Each and every word has been exhaustively examined by the federal courts and has been found consistently to carry out the policy of ensuring that once the limited time for recouping an investment has passed, that society as a whole has enough information so that anyone in that technical area ("art") can make and use the invention simply by reading the patent.
What are the alternatives to this regime? There are two that readily come to mind. The first is that if you believe that all scientific knowledge should be immediately available without restriction, then by all means, publish the work and make it freely available to anyone who wants it. No one will stop you from doing that (unless of course you are teaching how to build nuclear weapons, etc., ...). The second alternative is to protect your invention by keeping it as a trade secret.
Trade secrets do little to promote the progress of science. They work more of a hindrance. Those who have chosen this route must ensure that their invention truly remains secret or their protection and ability to recoup their investment is lost or greatly diminished. The principal "progress" occurs when someone decides that the invention is too valuable to not have access to, and decides then to reverse-engineer the invention to discover its secrets. Trade secrets potentially last in perpetuity, so it is theoretically possible that no one will ever learn or benefit from the secret scientific advance.
I am not blind - I know there are substantial problems with patent examinations that allow invalid patents to issue. However, the proper remedy for that is to ensure only good patents issue. How? First, by allowing the PTO to hire enough competent examiners to handle the work flow. The PTO is a self-sufficient agency. It is actually a significant profit center for the government. Much of the money paid into the PTO however is immediately diverted by Congress for other purposes instead of being put back into the PTO to improve the agency. Most recently, Congress drastically increased the size of user fees at the PTO to pay for Homeland Security. I am confident in saying the the diversion of user fees from the PTO is among the Top 3 Gripes of every patent attorney in the US.
The execution may be flawed at times, but the policy is sound. We have advanced much further as a society by granting patents than we would have otherwise.
Re:Patents Are The Solution (Score:2)
Re:Patents Are The Solution (Score:2)
A trade secret on an obvious idea does not impede my use of that obvious idea. A wrongly issued patent does.
The problem with the bulk of the software patents issued by the USPTO in recent years (and by bulk I mean 95%+ of those I have read) is that they are completely obvious to anyone who has an understanding of the field.
The legal standard of obvious is different - except of course when the USPTO attempts to justify its racket when the 'non-obvious' standard is held up as the guarantee of fairness.
I have never once read a patent to get a good idea. The only reason I read patents is to make sure that I do not use the technology described by mistake.
Re:Patents Are The Solution (Score:2)
You cannot get any kind of legal protection for ideas. You can only protect the tangible expression of specific ideas. Hope you have a good lawyer if you have any affiliation whatsoever with a company that vigorously protects its trade secrets and you create something similar to what it is seeking to protect. If you think a civil patent suit is bad, try a federal criminal investigation for industrial or electronic espionage.
The problem with the bulk of the software patents issued by the USPTO in recent years (and by bulk I mean 95%+ of those I have read) is that they are completely obvious to anyone who has an understanding of the field.
This is a problem with patent EXAMINATION, not with patents themselves. I acknowledged as much toward the end of my post.
The legal standard of obvious is different - except of course when the USPTO attempts to justify its racket when the 'non-obvious' standard is held up as the guarantee of fairness.
Different? Different from what? To determine obviousness, the PTO looks to the prior art. If a combination of references describes each and every element of the inventlion, it is obvious so long as a person of ordinary skill in the art would have an incentive to combine the references. I have never heard of the PTO holding up anything as a guarantee of fairness.
I have never once read a patent to get a good idea. The only reason I read patents is to make sure that I do not use the technology described by mistake.
Use the technology described all you like - as long as you don't create something that contains all the elements and limitations of something described in the claims. The claims are the description of the invention. Omit just one element called for by a claim from your creation and you don't infringe. And if something is described but not claimed, it is automatically dedicated to the public. Most people think that the protection granted by a patent is much broader than what is actually granted. Most patent grants have a fairly narrow scope.
Re:Patents Are The Solution (Score:2)
The idea of one click shopping has been patented. As have many ideas. The theory of patent law bears no relationship to the actual corrupt practice.
This is a problem with patent EXAMINATION, not with patents themselves.
No, it is a problem with the USpTO, I have no problem with any of the European or in ternational patent offices. The specific problem is the US examination system which uniquely has no period of public review and opposition.
Dissent (Score:2, Interesting)
I understand the arguments for more or less undirected research, that electricity or quantum physics or [insert science here] would never have been discovered without it. I disagree. Directed research would, I feel, have lead us to all of our modern breakthroughs anyway. It frustrates me, as a student, to see scientists waste time, money and effort on questions that are fundamentally not that important. It is much better to look for an effective HIV protease inhibitor than it is to look for patterns in the mating habits of fruit flies.
Re:Dissent (Score:2)
Speaking as an engineer, I thank God for those individuals who pursue science for its own sake, who publish openly and forthrightly, and who make the world, in the long run, a better place. In industry, the *few* scientists who are actually allowed to do reasearch are usually so overworked trying to find the next profit center that they don't have time to actually find much that's an actual breakthrough. Science, like evolution, happens in bouts of puctuated equilibrium. The spikes in progress come from those few moments when some poor sap has time to make sure his brilliant new ideas are right before publishing them. In undustrial research labs, there isn't the time to do that.
My big fear is actually that - as an economically driven society - we're eating the research faster than we're making it. When the research runs out, there won't be any more engineering breakthroughs based on it and the economic wheels will grind to a halt. This is why I don't begrudge the scientists the pittance that the federal government hands out to them. The bottom line is that it's economic security for all of us.
P.S. Did you ever consider that the biologist working on the mating habits of fruit fies might be doing research that might lead to a breakthrough that could stop insects from breeding so much and save billions of dollars in crop damage? How about if his work led to a way to increase breeding rates in hard-to-grow crops? Or a way to get onco-rats to breed more quickly? If you really are a science major, I'd suggest you get a clue soon. Otherwise, you're likely to be trapped in a career that you are seriously non-suited for. Especially if you don't see the value in pure research.
Re:Dissent (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't know any fruit farmers, do you?
If you know what a retrovirus is, what a protease is, what a protease inhibitor is
And I really suggest you read up on fruit flies.
Re:Dissent (Score:2)
I do not have a problem with *undirected* research. I have a major problem with *unfocussed* research. Let me give you an example. I've done research on the proteins involved in the development of fruit-flies - how do they make a wing where they need a wing, and so forth. This is pretty much "blue sky" research. However, as a by-product, people in that lab found an efficient, easy way to screen potential drugs for colon cancer. That's a great, immediate pay-off. Perhaps more importantly, solving the fruit flies development will provide valuable insight into the development of other more complex organisms.
I've also done some research I'm not so proud of - on the parental effects of recombination in fruit flies. Basically, the more sex a female fruit fly has, the greater the probability of certain kinds of mutations in her offspring. This is presumably due to proteins in the male's semen. All well and good. Except - this system is *unique* to fruit flies. In every other organism we've studied, the system of recombination is drastically different. Although everyone involved in this research project was very nice and very well-meaning, I cannot help but think that it was something of a waste of time and resources.
As you may have gathered, I know a bit about fruit flies and other weird and wonderful creatures. However, thanks for your reply and your spirited defence of pure science.
Re:Dissent (Score:2)
1) Negative knowledge is still knowledge. Okay, now we know that fruit fly reproduction is unique, or at least has certain unique features. That uniqueness is in itself interesting. Why is it unique? Are we sure that it actually is unique -- e.g., perhaps the same mechanism operates in other organisms, but at a much lower level? Given that Drosophila is one of the most widely used lab animals in the world, does this uniqueness have any implications for using it in various kinds of research? Etc. It seems to me that these are all valid questions.
2) If you're a fruit farmer, knowing things about fruit fly reproduction is a very, very good thing. New pesticides and/or new organic methods of pest control could very easily come out of this knowledge.
3) "Of what possible use, sir, is a new-born babe?" You may not ever see anything useful come out of the research, and quite possibly no one who worked on the project ever will -- but five or ten or fifty years hence, it's entirely possible that someone else might.
BTW, is any of this research available on-line? That kind of thing interests me. Reminds me of the guy I know at Woods Hole who is the world's leading expert on sea urchin reproduction. Whenever he has trouble getting a grant, he always threatens to start paying for his research by starting the world's first sea urchin porn site
The very sad thing is (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, not all experiments are a 100% reproducable result. Sometimes there are outside factors that one doesn't think of (hey, the moon was full and the tide was high), that make an experiment very hard to produce. If scientists aren't trusted and can't immediately able to produce results, they won't be able to get the additional funding that may be required for further research (it worked, but doesn't now, but it worked, so why?).
Re:The very sad thing is (Score:2)
It's usually a good rule of thumb. And if someone does have a genuinely remarkable result, he or she will usually be believed eventually. At which point, the project will be turned over to a coworker who is capable of keeping a detailed lab notebook.
Science aphorism #2: If you don't write it down, it never happened.
Obviously, this only works for positive results. Negative results unfortunately still seem to happen even if you don't write them down. Records are an essential part of the scientific method. If you believe the fellow who cures AIDS and develops cold fusion while pulling an all-nighter in the lab--but, shucks, didn't get it down on paper--I've got some magic beans for you. No, I misplaced the certificate of authenticity the giant gave me, but you can take my word for it, right?
Re:The very sad thing is (Score:2)
1:30am, I've been coding like mad, fixing this and that and everything is running smoothly.
2:00am, the jolt is wearing out and I'm getting droopy, so I log off and head to bed for the night
8:00am, suddenly nothing's working anymore... processes dying, etc etc. Of course, in computers it's usually predictable, death starts to occur right about the time a lot of users start logging on.
But the point is, even if it WORKED... and then suddenly didn't, and there were notes, how do you believe it?
I'm not talking "I didn't take notes", I'm saying "I followed exact procedures XX and YY and got results ZZ". Sometimes it could be as simple as "it worked at night because there was no sunlight".... who knows.
Ever has a car or appliance that only worked right when it gets to the mechanic? You'll know what I mean then
Re:The very sad thing is (Score:2)
The point is that if there are accurate and detailed notes, you have a much better starting point to try and repeat the result. You know what reagents the chemist used. You can check for contamination at all the steps. You can run the experiment again late at night and see if the cleaner power helps. For that matter, you can evaluate the work in the cold light of day and look for gross errors of technique that were inadvertantly missed late at night.
Scientists are usually willing to spend a significant amount of time working on a needle-in-a-haystack type of problem. They hate to be sent on a wild goose chase. Good notes make all the difference.
The best way to get colleagues to believe you? Build a reputation for good technique and recordkeeping over years of scientific effort. Show them the steps you followed in your work. Respect their criticisms and listen to their advice. Other scientists will be falling all over themselves for a chance to get a piece of a new discovery.
professor rot, jeez (Score:2, Insightful)
ok dude, i like your opinions about the value of scientific purity, and openness. but i think that your head is buried in a lot of historical sand.
the Military-Industrial complex of the last 50 years has been driven by university research, and there was no "tradition" of giving without expecting a return. there is always a return, at minimum some gov. controls (see stem cells) at maximum, total control (see manhattan project @ U Chicago).
please limit you traditions to historical fact.
this comment is the result of what i call Academic Demetia. typical professor here, thinks that they give him all that money solely for the purpose of his enjoyment of the truly kewl geek toys that normal people can't afford (well, cept for the atom smasher i installed in my Volvo).
wake up fella, the government owns more whores like you than you could find if you put LA, Amsterdam and Tel Aviv together and shook it up, and declared perpetual night. which is apparently, the sum of your historical knowledge, lemme guess, you didn't like "memorizing facts"????
end disgruntled history major rant.
Re:professor rot, jeez (Score:2, Interesting)
Those bombs were central to the government relationship with physics. As long as physicists were needed to design them, the government was happy to fund "basic research" to maintain a healthy field. From the perspective of the government, the main value coming from this research was in the physicists being trained, not the results they published. Now things have changed, and the government research enterprise is being reshaped along the lines of corporate research labs.
Also recognize that he is trying to persuade his intended audience of physicists to change their practices. It helps his case to remind them how the situation around them is changing.
Face it, people will do anything to get ahead (Score:2, Insightful)
Science doesn't have the "corner" on honest people that will sacrifice everything for the truth. Neither does engineering, computer science, whatever. People are going to do bad things no matter what field they're in and the field is supposed to have ways (e.g. peer review) to alleviate and correct those problems.
I could just as easily say that the media causes these problems by publishing stories that have not gone through even minimum peer review - because in the media, accuracy is always second to newsworthiness and speed.
Vice-versa (Score:2)
It could easily be
"The conflict between the free exchange of ideas that the scientific community demands, and the property ownership that commercial sponsors need to survive".
We like to see the business community as demanding and unreasonable, and we like to see the scientific community as altruistic and open, but in the real world, business is based on not losing money and most science can (possibly) proceed without community-wide coordination.
Can't Wait.... (Score:2)
Article unfairly critical to industry (Score:2)
Re:french "artists" (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:french "artists" (Score:2, Interesting)
As performance artists though, I give them the highest regard.
Re:french "artists" (Score:2)
The idea is that the folks on the PhD committee need to understand the work well enough to vet it. Which means that one responsibility of a dissertation is to explain your work in a way that is understandable at a minimum to the committee deciding on your degree. And of course the orals need to answer any lingering questions in the minds of the committee that your work is valuable. So if their works is nonsense, and they have PhDs, it's the responsibility of the committee members who granted them the degree without properly vetting their work.
If.
Re:Please do not mod spam replies up (Score:2)
But what if the post starts at +2?
-Sean