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The most difficult thing of allowing for more novel science is accepting that more 'useless' research will be done. If you read stories about the old days, you'

• paulryanrogers 7y ago
  While this is probably true there's also the possibility that in the past there was more to be discovered or invented. Edit: typo
  • naasking 7y ago
    That actually justifies giving researchers more freedom. New knowledge will more likely come from unexpected angles.
    • paulryanrogers 7y ago
      Good point. That said I imagine another facet is the risk of fraud and graft as some would love to be paid for navel gazing 'studies' or generally slap-dash work.
• mjfl 7y ago
  People say you need to let scientists do useless exploration in order to promote innovation. I think that is true to a degree, but definitely should not be the spirit of any policy where innovation is the goal. Many of the scientific innovations that pushed the 20th century forward were in fact purposefully done. The Von Neumann architecture was not invented to have fun, it was invented to aim artillery and design nukes. Similarly, much of the tech infrastructure in Silicon Valley descends directly from radio engineers coming out of WWII theater. Bardeen, Brittain, and Shockley didn't invent the solid state transistor because it would be interesting, they invented it because it would allow miniaturization of vacuum tube computers. The laser was invented for telecommunications purposes. There is now an entire field of "quantum electronics" describing the theory behind them. Even going back further, the invention of the steam engine preceded the development of thermodynamics, which initially sought to describe the limitations of these engines. IF "science leads technology", then one would expect steam engines to be rationally designed from the results of thermodynamics. The opposite is true. I think there are enough examples of scientific fields emerging from technological innovation that "uselessness" should not be considered correlated with innovation.
  • bsder 7y ago
    > I think there are enough examples of scientific fields emerging from technological innovation that "uselessness" should not be considered correlated with innovation. I was going to cite lots of "useless" stuff that suddenly became really important when some "blocking technology" got removed, but "useless" is the wrong problem and phrasing. The problem really is: "How do you compensate someone who tackles a big problem but winds up making no progress or even being wrong?"
    • mjfl 7y ago
      From personal experience, pressure and flexibility. The investigator should be put under pressure to produce results quickly justifying further time investment, in addition there needs to be flexibility in the form of alternative projects they can tackle that have a high probability of working. But I think it's crucial that they be allowed to place themselves under that pressure, if they truly believe they can accomplish whatever big thing it is. And if they have a really good reason that can be written up, that itself is a result that justifies further time investment. I think current science eliminates the possibility of that pressure, and focuses on the high probability projects. I think places like Google X actually don't put enough pressure on, though I don't really know that organization very well.
  • BurningFrog 7y ago
    I think you're mostly talking about engineering, not science. Engineering always has a practical goal, and for that field you're right.
  • nine_k 7y ago
    The von Neumann architecture became possible because Church and Turing wrote their highly theoretical, mathematical works. Lasers became possible because people like Fresnel studied the properties of a highly impractical phenomenon, coherent light, while other people discovered another short-lived curiosity, inverse energy levels population. Many such works had to be done decades before any engineering applications, or a prospect thereof. Science is when you study the literally unknown, including no known practical applications. When you study small pockets of unknown in a generally understood and practically fertile field, it's engineering.
• gumby 7y ago
  This problem exists in schools as well: education is being increasingly restricted and tuned to focus on where the puck is, not where it will be, and increasing numbers of worthless metrics are demanded to ensure this is the case. Not that this is a new problem (consider Dickens’ Hard Times) but I have been shocked how my 1970s/80s education (mostly broad, fun stuff with the only “skills” being mathematics and very concrete things like operating a car or camera or making a nutritious meal) contrasts with that offered to my kid or even worse to my gf’s kids in the Palo Alto schools. This especially astonishes me as I consider one of the best things in the US is its non-specialized approach to undergraduate education.
• rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
  My father is a researcher in electrical engineering. A while ago, he and his colleagues envisioned a method of developing solar panels that could have blown past the efficiency of the day. Only problem is it involved creating and working with very small crystalline structures. Their research into said structures was novel for its time. Turned out once they learned more about the actual physics, the theory behind the panel design broke down and they had to abandon the project. But was the result useless? Hardly. To this day he gets contacted by scientists from time to time trying to do the same thing and he has to tell them why their plan won’t work. Preventing people from going down dead ends is valuable, like knowing how to look for the solution to an obscure software error. Or, to paraphrase Edison, it’s knowing ahead of time how not to make a lightbulb.
  • marmaduke 7y ago
    This is partly why projects like Zenodo exist, to publish results which wouldn't be worth putting to a journal.