Blue sky physics
January 20, 2008
From a physicist of international repute across the dinner table: ‘We need to make the message clear: goal-oriented physics usually doesn’t yield results‘. My jaw drops and my impulse is to make a mocking repartee - surely that must have been a malapropism of some kind… I realise not, he is deathly serious. I lapse into silence and relflect - blue skies and serendipity, how come just physicists can claim this luxury? And then they’re surprised that physics doesn’t get more funding - when the message to be got across is ‘death to goal-oriented physics’!
Entry Filed under: Miscellania, the flying spaghetti monster (what I call physics). .
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1.
Thomas Victor | January 21, 2008 at 7:17 am
Well, if one wants to discover really new stuff, what he is saying that if you have preconceptions, that could obstruct your search for truth
2.
Nancy | January 21, 2008 at 8:11 am
I’m confused.
3.
Thomas | February 3, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Actually, like other things in life, it’s complicated.
Whle doing research or debugging a problem if one is too rigidly following ‘a set goal say’ Watch for X to go down as we increase Y above 200′ then one might not be noticing other things that are happening and which might be the real solution.
That’s life - one has plans but mostly they change. From year to year sometimes from day to day. But that’s fine. As they say ‘Be Here Now’ , ‘Ride The Tiger’, ‘Go With The Flow’ etc. but with a lot of intensity, throwing yourself into it 100%.