Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter, but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?
不得不讲本书作者真的是对后代非常有责任心的…我真的就是做着好玩,没想过能有什么用,不过看来只要我自己觉得好玩就够了,有没有用是后人的事
Maxwell wasn’t thinking of radio, radar and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnet-ism; Newton wasn’t dreaming of space flight or communications satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon; Roentgen wasn’t contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it ‘X-rays’; Curie wasn’t thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Fleming wasn’t planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mould; Watson and Crick weren’t imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry of DNA; Rowland and Molina weren’t planning to implicate CFCs in ozone depletion when they began studying the role of halogens in stratospheric photochemistry.
Basic research is where scientists are free to pursue their curiosity and interrogate Nature, not with any short-term practical end in view, but to seek knowledge for its own sake. Scientists of course have a vested interest in basic research. It’s what they like to do, in many cases why they became scientists in the first place. But it is in society’s interest to support such research. This is how the major discoveries that benefit humanity are largely made.
书里说到假设女王 1860 想造出电视机,并愿意大量投钱的话,那大概是不可能如愿的,因为前置的技术都还没有发明出来。事实上麦克斯韦方程组发现的时候,谁也不知道它能启发电波塔,通讯卫星,电视和雷达的发明。
所以,不能投钱然后指明必须发现什么技术,科学家们做不到,很可能前置技术还没有发现也根本不知要如何发现。我们应当广泛地探索,等待意想不到的结果的出现。
我就想到我读博的这个 funding 支持的 topic 其实跟我现在做的项目一毛钱关系也没有跟 funding body 做报告的时候必须要解释我为什么在做这些东西,都是教授帮我扯的谎,说我是在 explore,是意外的发现,是 creative works 所必须的,一大通一大通的。那边买账了。我教授真厉害
听说麦克斯韦结婚早但是没有孩子。我觉得如果我能做出些厉害成果,我就不在乎我有没有孩子,我的成果就是我的孩子,为啥要生个孩子然后寄希望于孩子能做出什么成就呢,我自己就行。知识造福千秋万代,孩子一百年后就死了,啥也不是。得真的很喜欢小孩子才生。