Re: dealing fickle success

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

In response to Zach Wolff, John Denker wrote (in part):
> Let's see.  I choose an interesting and useful project.  You choose an
> interesting and useless project.  We both "play well" as you put it.  I
> might or might not get a result that people care about.  It seems like my
> worst case is equal to your best case.

I didn't think I was going to say anything more on this thread, but I
can't let this one go by. Who decides what is a "useful" or "useless"
project? In basic research, almost everything would fall in the
category of "useless," if by useless you mean "without obvious
application". Even if you broaden the definition to mean, "is
directly related to a particular aspect of current theory," a whole
lot of interesting and worthwhile projects will fall outside your
definition of useful, but if you broaden the definition much more,
almost everything becomes useful in some sense. It seems to me that
having other people care about what you do may be nice, and it may
even make it easier to get funding for your project, but from a
personal point of view, what really counts here is what you think. In
the final analysis, if I get a result that interests me to a problem
that I was interested in pursuing, that is entirely enough. What
other people think is largely irrelevant. Most of the time, my
triumphs are tiny and maybe not even unique. But the fact that I
understand something that I perhaps didn't a few minutes before is
enough. I don't care if anyone else knows and many times I don't even
tell anyone. Its my triumph and I want to keep it that way.

Were Bednorz and Muller doing a useless project when they were
examining all those ceramics for their conducting properties?
Apparently their boss thought so, since he told them to stop that
line of research. Were Pons and Fleishmann doing useless research?
Well, it didn't work out so I guess it was useless in that sense, but
look at what we would have had if it had worked out.

It sure isn't clear what's useful and what isn't before the work is
done, and I sure don't want these decisions left up to the Bill
Proxmires of the world. I know that as long as others pay for most
research, these questions will have to be addressed, but it is clear
that the people who fund research are almost always wrong in deciding
what is useful and what is not when we talk about basic research.
That is because they tend to favor propositions that stay well within
the current paradigm, and we know that the advances in science come
when we are able to move outside that boundary. And since outside the
boundary we often have absolutely no idea what will happen, I don't
see how we could call any of those "useful" before the fact.

Hugh


Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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