5 ms·

I feel bad that there is always the request for potential applications for studies like this, and the scientists feel required to come up with something. Can we

by svnt 4y ago

I feel bad that there is always the request for potential applications for studies like this, and the scientists feel required to come up with something. Can we just find out the answer in order to find out the answer? In no world are biosurfactants added to seawater around wind turbines in order to increase the performance of an acoustically insulating bubble sheet for marine life. Can’t we just have the conversation piece and let the scientist continue on? Amortized over the millions of people that drink champagne it’s really a pretty affordable interesting piece of information.

didntknowya 4y ago
to be fair, critical thinking is one of the core prerequisite of research and a part of that is thinking about what you discovered and how it can apply to real world scenarios.
bena 4y ago
I think it's at least partly compelled internally. You see this phenomenon, you wonder why it happens, then you start wondering what you could do if you could cause it intentionally. Part of the excitement of discovering new knowledge is discovering new ways to employ it.
UI_at_80x24 4y ago
This! Pure research for curiosities sake is the key factor in every notable advance that humans have done. Science based on quarterly profits holds us back.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  just nonsense semiconductor research has propelled us forward, and it was for the most part not done for curiosity's sake. (Not that "curiosity" is anything other than evolved hunter-gatherer profit maximization, most of which was carried out on time periods shorter than a quarter.)
  - kergonath 4y ago
    Sigh. One example of A is not a proof that not-A does not exist. Besides, even in semi-conductors there is plenty of research justified only by curiosity. Some of those turn out to be important after the fact; that’s the nature of research.
    - riffraff 4y ago
      the claim was "every notable advance", so giving a single example is proof that "every" is not true.
      - quinndexter 4y ago
        "Every" is immediately followed by "notable", so what's being counted here is entirely subjective.
  - josefx 4y ago
    > semiconductor research has propelled us forward, and it was for the most part not done for curiosity's sake. And yet if learned book binders and doctors had not decided that they where much more interested in studying chemistry and physics the industry would be stuck trying to create new mechanical calculators using ever smaller gears instead.
- dunham 4y ago
  > Pure research for curiosities sake is the key factor in every notable advance that humans have done. Yeah, Feynman got a Nobel Prize doing just that: https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html
- GuB-42 4y ago
  Finding applications is also a form of curiosity. And we can argue that money is also the key factor in almost every notable advance. In order to do research, you need equipment, access to knowledge, and time. The first is the most obvious, equipment is not free. Access to knowledge is much easier than it once was, but still, the best way to access knowledge is to be with knowledgeable people, like in a university, and universities are not cheap, and even if they are, the location where they are usually isn't. The last, time, is the hardest to get by. If you are working your ass off just to survive, then no time for you. You need a job that is low effort so that you don't get exhausted, that pays reasonably well so you can live comfortably, and leaves you enough time for your research. Few can enjoy that. You can also make research your job, but if that's your job, then you need to think of quarterly profits. Another option is to get supported by someone else, but it doesn't change the fact that someone is making money to support your research.
- allemagne 4y ago
  Sounds like researchers just need to issue bonds with a 500 year maturity. Invest in curiosity for curiosity's sake and then be guaranteed a stake in the inevitable profit on every future notable advance of humanity. It's free money!
antonvs 4y ago
On the other hand appending some piece of bullshit to your work so you can continue to get funded to do interesting research doesn't seem like the end of the world. There's a lot worse that research scientists have to put up with.
- sdwr 4y ago
  That is how you get all the smart, lazy, and/or integrity-laden people to leave.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ravi-delia 4y ago
    Honestly, anyone who can't do the three sentence real world applications routine is either ambivalent enough about a life doing research that it wouldn't make sense to reorganize around retaining them or is so bad at politics (not even complicated politics! more than one friend at once politics!) that realistically the many many other social demands will have driven them away regardless. Smart has nothing to do with it.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      > three sentence real world applications routine Sounds easy enough if they believe the applications are vaguely plausible. What if there are no vaguely plausible applications acceptable by reviewers?
      - ravi-delia 3y ago
        That's the key to the whole song and dance- the reviewers also know its bullshit. The actual hurdle is getting grant funding, which takes a more talented bullshitter. But of course you only need one sorry soul to write the application, and its not so difficult that, say, fewer than 1 in 5 can manage it.
  - speedgoose 4y ago
piyh 4y ago
Uniform bubble sheets sounds like it could be of interest to submarines. Go get that DoD money researchers!
- George83728 4y ago
  Submarines use bubble generators for decoys, to reflect sonar and thereby create false returns. But to make the submarine itself quieter, I think it would have the opposite effect. I doubt noise from wind turbines disrupting sea life is a real problem in the first place, but if it really is, they could try applying some ideas from submarines such as covering the base of turbine tower with rubber tiles. Rubber absorbs vibrations and converts that energy into heat.
  - piyh 4y ago
    It's at least used for snorkeling diesel submarines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie-Masker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie-Masker
niemandhier 4y ago
Fish farms create those surfactants anyways, might as well put them near wind farms to harness the insulation effect. At the moment those farms are to close to the shore, since building them further out increases the price.
hospitalJail 4y ago
How are you going to get funding for your pet project then? My buddy's post doc is paid for by the military, but will have further applications in medical because both deal with fluids. Medical doesn't pay unless you are the Physician applying the work, so he needed to get someone who will. Also, he has yet to prove what he is looking for, he is aware he might work on this for 30 years and come up with nothing.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Well funding individual 'projects' as an academic is fairly modern, at least as such a standard practice. It is conceivable simply to have salaried researchers researching whatever takes their interest (or came up at last night's champagne reception). Of course practical experiments and equipment complicates it a bit, but not necessarily much.
  - hospitalJail 4y ago
    >It is conceivable simply to have salaried researchers researching whatever takes their interest Who pays for it?
dspillett 4y ago
> I feel bad that there is always the request for potential applications for studies like this, and the scientists feel required to come up with something. The request of “but what is the application for this” often comes from those outside the field who don't understand. Sometimes it is the selfish human nature question “yeah, but why should I care?” with different wording to try to make it look like the asker cares about a wider community. Sometimes it is a genuine question: they are intrigued by the base idea and want to know more about where it might later develop. Often there is already an application, or a potential application. In fact sometimes this is explicitly written into the paper, but people haven't bothered to read it (or didn't understand it) and are just reacting to a headline report. For instance studies on how cereals settle in transit and how they absorb available liquid, why the bigger parts end up at the top and so forth, are favourites of “silly research” lists but can have importance for the safe transport & storage of many other things that are in particulate or powder form. Some of this sort of work has fed into understanding a very real problem causing ships carrying such cargo to roll over and break and/or sink in choppy seas (endangering lives & the environment and, what commercial sponsors of such research care about, costing money). > Can we just find out the answer in order to find out the answer? We definitely should be able to, and thankfully some do. There are a lot of results in maths over the centuries that were just curiosities at the time but then later became important to a larger problem sometimes quite unrelated to the original thought space. Though even for things that may never find a real world use, the process itself will have helped train and/or the minds of the people looking at it so has value through that.

by svnt 4y ago

didntknowya 4y ago

to be fair, critical thinking is one of the core prerequisite of research and a part of that is thinking about what you discovered and how it can apply to real world scenarios.

bena 4y ago

I think it's at least partly compelled internally. You see this phenomenon, you wonder why it happens, then you start wondering what you could do if you could cause it intentionally. Part of the excitement of discovering new knowledge is discovering new ways to employ it.

UI_at_80x24 4y ago

This! Pure research for curiosities sake is the key factor in every notable advance that humans have done. Science based on quarterly profits holds us back.

fsckboy 4y ago
just nonsense semiconductor research has propelled us forward, and it was for the most part not done for curiosity's sake. (Not that "curiosity" is anything other than evolved hunter-gatherer profit maximization, most of which was carried out on time periods shorter than a quarter.)
- kergonath 4y ago
  Sigh. One example of A is not a proof that not-A does not exist. Besides, even in semi-conductors there is plenty of research justified only by curiosity. Some of those turn out to be important after the fact; that’s the nature of research.
  - riffraff 4y ago
    the claim was "every notable advance", so giving a single example is proof that "every" is not true.
    - quinndexter 4y ago
      "Every" is immediately followed by "notable", so what's being counted here is entirely subjective.
- josefx 4y ago
  > semiconductor research has propelled us forward, and it was for the most part not done for curiosity's sake. And yet if learned book binders and doctors had not decided that they where much more interested in studying chemistry and physics the industry would be stuck trying to create new mechanical calculators using ever smaller gears instead.
dunham 4y ago
> Pure research for curiosities sake is the key factor in every notable advance that humans have done. Yeah, Feynman got a Nobel Prize doing just that: https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html
GuB-42 4y ago
Finding applications is also a form of curiosity. And we can argue that money is also the key factor in almost every notable advance. In order to do research, you need equipment, access to knowledge, and time. The first is the most obvious, equipment is not free. Access to knowledge is much easier than it once was, but still, the best way to access knowledge is to be with knowledgeable people, like in a university, and universities are not cheap, and even if they are, the location where they are usually isn't. The last, time, is the hardest to get by. If you are working your ass off just to survive, then no time for you. You need a job that is low effort so that you don't get exhausted, that pays reasonably well so you can live comfortably, and leaves you enough time for your research. Few can enjoy that. You can also make research your job, but if that's your job, then you need to think of quarterly profits. Another option is to get supported by someone else, but it doesn't change the fact that someone is making money to support your research.
allemagne 4y ago
Sounds like researchers just need to issue bonds with a 500 year maturity. Invest in curiosity for curiosity's sake and then be guaranteed a stake in the inevitable profit on every future notable advance of humanity. It's free money!

antonvs 4y ago

On the other hand appending some piece of bullshit to your work so you can continue to get funded to do interesting research doesn't seem like the end of the world. There's a lot worse that research scientists have to put up with.

sdwr 4y ago
That is how you get all the smart, lazy, and/or integrity-laden people to leave.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  Honestly, anyone who can't do the three sentence real world applications routine is either ambivalent enough about a life doing research that it wouldn't make sense to reorganize around retaining them or is so bad at politics (not even complicated politics! more than one friend at once politics!) that realistically the many many other social demands will have driven them away regardless. Smart has nothing to do with it.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    > three sentence real world applications routine Sounds easy enough if they believe the applications are vaguely plausible. What if there are no vaguely plausible applications acceptable by reviewers?
    - ravi-delia 3y ago
      That's the key to the whole song and dance- the reviewers also know its bullshit. The actual hurdle is getting grant funding, which takes a more talented bullshitter. But of course you only need one sorry soul to write the application, and its not so difficult that, say, fewer than 1 in 5 can manage it.
- speedgoose 4y ago

piyh 4y ago

Uniform bubble sheets sounds like it could be of interest to submarines. Go get that DoD money researchers!

George83728 4y ago
Submarines use bubble generators for decoys, to reflect sonar and thereby create false returns. But to make the submarine itself quieter, I think it would have the opposite effect. I doubt noise from wind turbines disrupting sea life is a real problem in the first place, but if it really is, they could try applying some ideas from submarines such as covering the base of turbine tower with rubber tiles. Rubber absorbs vibrations and converts that energy into heat.
- piyh 4y ago
  It's at least used for snorkeling diesel submarines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie-Masker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie-Masker

niemandhier 4y ago

Fish farms create those surfactants anyways, might as well put them near wind farms to harness the insulation effect. At the moment those farms are to close to the shore, since building them further out increases the price.

hospitalJail 4y ago

How are you going to get funding for your pet project then? My buddy's post doc is paid for by the military, but will have further applications in medical because both deal with fluids. Medical doesn't pay unless you are the Physician applying the work, so he needed to get someone who will. Also, he has yet to prove what he is looking for, he is aware he might work on this for 30 years and come up with nothing.

OJFord 4y ago
Well funding individual 'projects' as an academic is fairly modern, at least as such a standard practice. It is conceivable simply to have salaried researchers researching whatever takes their interest (or came up at last night's champagne reception). Of course practical experiments and equipment complicates it a bit, but not necessarily much.
- hospitalJail 4y ago
  >It is conceivable simply to have salaried researchers researching whatever takes their interest Who pays for it?

dspillett 4y ago

> I feel bad that there is always the request for potential applications for studies like this, and the scientists feel required to come up with something. The request of “but what is the application for this” often comes from those outside the field who don't understand. Sometimes it is the selfish human nature question “yeah, but why should I care?” with different wording to try to make it look like the asker cares about a wider community. Sometimes it is a genuine question: they are intrigued by the base idea and want to know more about where it might later develop. Often there is already an application, or a potential application. In fact sometimes this is explicitly written into the paper, but people haven't bothered to read it (or didn't understand it) and are just reacting to a headline report. For instance studies on how cereals settle in transit and how they absorb available liquid, why the bigger parts end up at the top and so forth, are favourites of “silly research” lists but can have importance for the safe transport & storage of many other things that are in particulate or powder form. Some of this sort of work has fed into understanding a very real problem causing ships carrying such cargo to roll over and break and/or sink in choppy seas (endangering lives & the environment and, what commercial sponsors of such research care about, costing money). > Can we just find out the answer in order to find out the answer? We definitely should be able to, and thankfully some do. There are a lot of results in maths over the centuries that were just curiosities at the time but then later became important to a larger problem sometimes quite unrelated to the original thought space. Though even for things that may never find a real world use, the process itself will have helped train and/or the minds of the people looking at it so has value through that.