THE CUTTING EDGE: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Research Driven by Desire, Not Need
Science usually is seen as the systematic quest for information we need to know in order to make our lives healthier, richer and more convenient. But some of the best science has nothing to do with what we need to know. Instead, it addresses a far more fundamental question: not what we need to know, but what we want to know.
That is more than a subtle distinction, because the desire--not the need--to know and understand the world around us is at the very core of the human soul. We seek answers without knowing any practical application, sometimes at great cost, because we are curious. What other creature does that?
The search for the fundamental building blocks of nature through the use of multibillion-dollar particle accelerators may tell us something that will make it possible to manipulate life on the atomic scale. But that isn’t the reason it’s done. High-energy physicists search for the answers to their arcane questions because they want to know how things work, and the rest of us pay the bills.
They get away with it because practically nobody else knows what they are talking about, so they sprinkle the discussion of their work with questions they know they can’t answer. Where did matter come from? Why is the universe here? What was it like before the Big Bang, if indeed there was one?
But nobody has a tougher job explaining the value of their research than astronomers.
Nowhere else in science will you find so many folks who have to struggle so hard to explain why anyone else should care about their work. And nowhere else will you find so many non-scientists who are eager to support a field of research that has so little application in daily life. Astronomers have not received all the funding they would like, but they have done reasonably well, largely because of strong public support. However, they will find their work a tougher sell as funding continues to grow tighter.
A medical researcher can argue that continued work in a specific field could lead to a cure for cancer, or a major new tool in the battle against AIDS. An astronomer, by contrast, knows you really don’t have to understand the difference between a quasar and a pulsar to conduct your life.
While talking with a scientist on another matter recently, I was surprised to hear him launch into a tirade against science writers for paying so much attention to such things. Why continue to write stories, he asked, about the discovery of objects in the distant sky that can make no difference in our lives?
Perhaps it is because we have learned so much about the universe in recent years. Yet there are questions we cannot answer fully about objects we cannot see. There have been numerous stories in the past few years about the discovery of planets around other stars, and about black holes so dense that even their light cannot escape their gravitational field. The proof is in the inference--events taking place that can best be explained by the existence of a black hole we cannot see, or a planet that is overwhelmed by the brilliance of its star.
That is why those stories usually begin the same way: “Scientists said today they have discovered the best evidence to date of” . . . (fill in the blanks).
There are, of course, some tangible rewards. Particle accelerators gave us nuclear weapons, television picture tubes and new tools for medical research. Astronomy has taught us much about the sun, the only star in the universe on which our lives depend. It has helped us understand solar radiation and the importance of the ozone layer that protects us from potentially lethal ultraviolet rays. It has warned us of the danger of extraterrestrial impacts from large comets and asteroids like that which many believe wiped out the dinosaurs.
But that is not why most astronomers chose their field. They did so because they gazed at the heavens and wanted to know. The fact that we don’t need to know is irrelevant.
Some time ago, Andrew Fraknoi, the articulate former director of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, tried to tell me why he became an astronomer. When I suggested that the problem with astronomy is that it has no “returns” like those in medical research, Fraknoi was almost speechless, a rare condition in his case.
“What do you mean it has no returns,” he said, flustered. “It has all the returns of . . . of . . . of a Mahler symphony.”
He would pick Mahler, that brooding Austrian composer who can send one into the depths of depression with just a few chords. But perhaps it wasn’t a bad choice. The composer of “Songs on the Deaths of Children” pushed his work into the future, foreshadowing the world of music that was to unfold in coming generations.
Mahler looked beyond his immediate world. So do scientists who seek discoveries that have no obvious application. They are addressing that most basic of human instincts: a desire to know, and be a part of, something greater than ourselves.
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Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at 72040.3515@compuserve.com.
