The Will to Science

A debate that has prickled my mind for the past four years, and I believe will continue to do so as long as I can think straight, has been about "doing" science. It is natural that a debate on this topic should come to dominate my mind. I am after all currently doing "scientific research", and no, the quotation marks aren't to undermine what I'm doing or to make it satirical. It is just an expression of a doubt about what I am doing, what the majority of my peers are doing and what humanity has been doing and saying for quite some time.

There are two primary types of reactions from people who hear that I'm working in Physics. The first is fascination, awe. "OMG, so lucky. How amazing! That's so cool!". These are often people who have been fascinated by science and somehow never got round to doing it, for various reasons. They will then speak in awe about gravitational waves, black holes and the possibility of time travel. These reactions usually bemuse me, because that was once the image of science that I had. And it isn't always too far from what a lot of scientists do. The universe, the cosmos obviously holds a lot of fascination for everyone and the idea of studying the cosmos captures the imagination of every kid at one point or the other. However, it is very few of us who indeed work at the forefront of things like these. Even those scientists who are working on cosmology and gravitational waves are usually disheveled and sitting in a corner breaking their heads over a missing comma in their code or a plus sign gone astray in some calculation related to another calculation related to another calculation which can possibly have some consequence is some case for a probable realisation of the early universe, all complete speculation of course. You have to be consistent with the known laws of physics and the observational data, but there are infinite ways to be so.

Even for a person working very closely with the kind of question that has direct pertinence to something very close to a field of such fascination, the everyday work is rather dull, requiring immense studiousness, attention to detail, patience and gumption - the qualities required for any field. No one is sitting and meditating upon the cosmos, waiting for the Eureka moment. When you peer closely enough, all scientists are seemingly doing the same things - doing some calculations, running some codes, fiddling with some instruments. It is like whether you walk in to the Department of Finance or the Department of Defence, you will see the same thing at the micro-level - people pushing files, having 45 minute chai breaks and seeming important. But the job descriptions read "running the ministry" and "governing the state". "Understanding the cosmos".

It is being done, but you can never see anyone actually sitting and doing it. Understanding nature is an overall motivation, a backdrop. My most recent project for example began with the objective of studying clouds and cloud droplets - and while I've read up a lot of literature on this, the work I do is only very tenuously related to clouds. Maybe, it is mildly possible, that it could have relevance to a real cloud. But the drive to run those codes and do those calculations daily comes from clouds. Maybe, 30 years from now, after decades of hard work from self and collaborators, I might play a not insignificant part in one detail out of the 3025 aspects of understanding the behaviour of clouds. Inshallah. Or 30 years from now I might be working 9 to 5 at a Software company using the tools I picked up while trying to computationally study clouds. Is it worth the other 25400 aspects of clouds that were studied, published in papers and presented at conferences but eventually turned out to not be very important? Very smart calculations, brilliant ideas, honest work. All leading to nothing. Well, the 3025 would not be possible without the 25400, but maybe if people weren't given all the freedom and the whip was cracked on scientists more, the 25400 would be just 6000. I think I'm rambling now.

Let me come to the second reaction of people to learning that I "do science". "Your work will be useful to somebody". "Maybe you can solve some of our country's problems with your knowledge." And this reaction always leads me to give a sheepish smile. How many things that scientists do can directly go into making something that helps a fellow human being? Let us assume that my current work goes well and I end up doing that which is the benchmark for a good scientist - publish a paper in a decent journal on this topic. Where will the paper go in the annals of history? If I'm lucky, another confused Masters student will read it and perhaps he will use something from it to write another paper after bringing it to the notice of his professor. And then seeing this, another scientist will write yet another. Then seeing her paper, another person will write a paper. Maybe some one in this chain will think that my piece of work, with my professor and lab-mates, is interesting. And that the person who was the brains behind it was a smart chap.

That's about it. The trouble starts, I believe, with the public perception of doing research as something cosmic and something that can help people. Perhaps relative to a person working at an office to help some multinational company get richer, doing science, any science might be (strong emphasis on might - not undermining any profession here, underlining my ignorance) more useful for the world or humanity in general. But hardly more useful than a painter who, by virtue of his/her painting, gives joy to a few people on earth directly. Maybe the astrologer who assuages people's fears with false hope and charlatanism has helped lot more people than my research trajectory will ever allow me to.

And then there is the romanticism associated with the human pursuit of knowledge and the human desire to uncover the secrets of the universe. This is purely an aesthetic, almost spiritual venture, not one of pure rationality and pragmatism - the supposed pillars of science.

This reminds me of something I read in a book recently. The book was talking about the philosophy of American science funding after the second world war.  On one side were the pragmatists, who believed that science must be conducted solely to attain clearly defined end results which would help fellow human beings rather than be an open-ended pursuit of "truth".

"Basic research—diffuse and open-ended inquiry on fundamental questions—was a luxury of peacetime. The war demanded something more urgent and goal-directed. New weapons needed to be manufactured, and new technologies invented to aid soldiers in the battlefield. This was a battle progressively suffused with military technology—a “wizard’s war,” as newspapers called it—and a cadre of scientific wizards was needed to help America win it. The “wizards” had wrought astonishing technological magic. Physicists had created sonar, radar, radio-sensing bombs, and amphibious tanks. Chemists had produced intensely efficient and lethal chemical weapons, including the infamous war gases. Biologists had studied the effects of high-altitude survival and seawater ingestion. Even mathematicians, the archbishops of the arcane, had been packed off to crack secret codes for the military. The undisputed crown jewel of this targeted effort, of course, was the atomic bomb, the product of the OSRD-led Manhattan Project. On August 7, 1945, the morning after the Hiroshima bombing, the New York Times gushed about the extraordinary success of the project: “University professors who are opposed to organizing, planning and directing research after the manner of industrial laboratories . . . have something to think about now. A most important piece of research was conducted on behalf of the Army in precisely the means adopted in industrial laboratories. End result: an invention was given to the world in three years, which it would have taken perhaps half-a-century to develop if we had to rely on prima-donna research scientists who work alone. . . . A problem was stated, it was solved by teamwork, by planning, by competent direction, and not by the mere desire to satisfy curiosity.” The congratulatory tone of that editorial captured a general sentiment about science that had swept through the nation. The Manhattan Project had overturned the prevailing model of scientific discovery. The bomb had been designed, as the Times scoffingly put it, not by tweedy “prima-donna” university professors wandering about in search of obscure truths (driven by the “mere desire to satisfy curiosity”), but by a focused SWAT team of researchers sent off to accomplish a concrete mission."

On the other side were those believed that since we do not know which discovery can lead to what applications, the open-endedness and freedom of scientific research is crucial to the advancement of humanity.

"“Basic research,” Bush wrote, “is performed without thought of practical ends. It results in general knowledge and an understanding of nature and its laws. This general knowledge provides the means of answering a large number of important practical problems, though it may not give a complete specific answer to any one of them. . . . “Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. . . . Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress. In the nineteenth century, Yankee mechanical ingenuity, building largely upon the basic discoveries of European scientists, could greatly advance the technical arts. Now the situation is different. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill.” Directed, targeted research—“programmatic” science—the cause célèbre during the war years, Bush argued, was not a sustainable model for the future of American science. As Bush perceived it, even the widely lauded Manhattan Project epitomized the virtues of basic inquiry. True, the bomb was the product of Yankee “mechanical ingenuity.” But that mechanical ingenuity stood on the shoulders of scientific discoveries about the fundamental nature of the atom and the energy locked inside it—research performed, notably, with no driving mandate to produce anything resembling the atomic bomb. While the bomb might have come to life physically in Los Alamos, intellectually speaking it was the product of prewar physics and chemistry rooted deeply in Europe. The iconic homegrown product of wartime American science was, at least philosophically speaking, an import."

And so the debate has rumbled on in my mind as well. When one thinks about the poverty, the destitution and the disease present in the world today, and if we believe that well-thought out, inventive scientific research can bring us unique solutions to the problems of society, it certainly behooves one to consider the current time as not "peace-time", even though there isn't large-scale war. We do need an urgent, complete war, a war against poverty. A war against poor farmers not being able to manage their crops because of a lack of scientific knowledge about their crops, a knowledge gap that can perhaps be plugged by a few months or a few years of dedicated study by smart people (perhaps one of the prima-donnas referred to earlier) who are instead occupied working to "satisfy mere curiosity". If satisfying curiosity about the inner mechanism of rain and clouds cannot bring rain to parched regions of the earth, is it a worthwhile endeavour? Is a painting a worthwhile endeavour? Are these the same things? 

And there is the clarity of the arguments made on behalf of such "open-ended" research and a search for knowledge. The scientists tinkering with the absorption and emission of radiation had no idea that they would create the laser, which has revolutionised so many fields. How far are we prepared to allow this open-endedness? Shouldn't the approach be different in poor countries and developed countries? Can't Sweden go about funding armies of scientists looking at "basic science" while India and Brazil build "SWAT teams of researchers" to look into agriculture, medicine, tropical forests and a whole host of other topics with pressing concern? 

Perhaps 19th century and 20th century science had enough undiscovered and untouched knowledge that the tactic of buying as many lottery tickets as possible and hoping to win the lottery would work. Now it seems the number of lottery numbers is much much larger, as we go into more and more speculative knowledge. How many journals have sprouted up in the most recent decades that exclusively spew nonsense and are essentially scams? How many research papers are simply thrown on places like Arxiv? The entire scientific ecosystem seems to have become one huge organism itself. If you're a single bacteria cell, you need to worry almost exclusively about the outside. Survive when it is too hot, survive when it's too cold and somehow engulf some nutrition. But now you have to worry about not overheating from your own body heat, not tripping one leg on the other. Increasingly obscure journals servicing specific fields which are sub-fields of already obscure fields which haven't seen any advances in knowledge after a hundred years. Must we really still try to solve the Navier-Stokes equation exactly (or rather, prove that there is a unique, real solution for given initial conditions) when, for all practical purposes, all its characteristics are revealed to us by inexact computational methods? The existence of the solution will not help us predict the weather any better. 

And then there is maths. What to do with maths? I have stopped thinking about this - it is so exasperating. Why must anyone do it? Alright, once in a generation a deep inquiry into some abstract maths translates into some crucial insight into something in physics - but increasingly this is in the abstract physics of more than three dimensions or far-outer space. Is it worth the cost of all that funded mathematical enquiry? Is it worth the cost of such bright minds whose labours could have been spent elsewhere?

I'm not going to try to answer any of the questions here, because I think there are no answers. The absence of utility in doing something is hard to prove to anyone. What's the point of holding the umbrella and watering the plants in the pouring rain? Ooh, it builds character. Instills discipline. Teaches you valuable lessons in life. You never know when you might the chance to enjoy a quiet session of plant-watering in your garden. Maybe that's true. Maybe that's speculative baloney.

"The large-scale emphasis on science education and research builds a generation of critical thinkers and problem solvers who can covert our economy into a knowledge based economy from a service based economy built on mere imitation of foreign technology to leverage our scientific capital in the world in exchange for technical know-how which will help boost indigenous manufacturing and provide for large-scale employment, both skilled and unskilled for our young population." Sure dude, I believe. If you say so. Sounds like it makes sense.

I'm just pondering.