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The difficulty of assessing the value of the work being done is indeed great. One way to look at this difficulty is as a significantly higher order phenomenon.
by sriku 6y ago
The difficulty of assessing the value of the work being done is indeed great. One way to look at this difficulty is as a significantly higher order phenomenon. What I mean is that if science is the discovery of regularities in nature, technology is the application of scientific knowledge to discover replicable tools, and engineering is the application of technology to solve problems at hand, the last is easiest seen, the one before a bit harder to appreciate as it can look a bit frivolous even at the start, and science is even harder to appreciate (what's the economic value of general relativity?).
And if you want to step one level more, there is mathematics.
- qayxc 6y ago> And if you want to step one level more, there is mathematics. The beauty of mathematics, however, is the fact that great discoveries can be made without spending billions on it. There's little public backlash for funding a handful of people who quietly scribble on blackboards or humbly request a few hours of time on the university's supercomputer. Compare that to particle physicists who'd like to have a new super-collider or AI researchers who can easily burn 6-figures worth of compute in a single experiment.
- sriku 6y agoAgreed and that's not the point about mathematics. The point was about ascertaining the impact of a mathematical breakthrough .. which is harder than a scientific one, because the idea of what is a "breakthrough" is usually defined within the domain of mathematics itself. A good example is all the number theoretic work, elliptic curves etc. which underpin much of secure communication today, but started off as "pure" in the sense of "won't find applications". That was easy. Now what's the impact of the breakthrough proof of Fermat's last theorem by Wiles?