All That Matters

I finally had the chance to read Michael Nielsen‘s book ‘Reinventing discovery‘ – a must read for anyone interested in scientific discovery. Why? Well, because the closed, individual way in which we organize science today in many ways is hampering progress and may eventually become a thing of the past.

If you are in science, why did you chose a scientific career in the first place? For me, the dream was to make scientific discoveries, to find out about the laws of nature. Being part of a scientific community that works together to achieve common goals. I was fascinated by the scientific discourse, and historical debates. The debate whether light is a wave or a particle. The scientific arguments between the pioneers of quantum mechanics. The huge collaborative efforts at the particle physics laboratory CERN. But what I never imagined myself doing was to sit alone in a room thinking in isolation. The philosopher Kant might have been great at this, but these days most scientists wouldn’t get far in isolation. That’s because increasingly science is a collaborative undertaking.

It is therefore surprising that the way science is still being conducted is for the most part neither open nor transparent. Instead, science today is based on small research groups doing experiments more or less in secret, only emerging from their ‘hiding’ once in a while to publish their latest results, but only to go into stealth mode again afterwards. […]

The study of materials is one of the major areas of science, with legions of researchers in physics, chemistry and materials science working on this topic. Condensed matter physics is one of the largest research areas in physics. Yet, it makes me often uneasy how the benefits of materials science are promoted. It is all too often about applications, and not about fundamental physics. How materials such as graphene might revolutionize electronics. And how new physical concepts could be used to develop materials for energy applications: solar cells, batteries and so on. In classical materials science it’s often about tougher materials, such as enhanced steels, and less about the fundamental insights they are based on. Of course, applications are an important aspect in the study of materials. But does this mean that too often fundamental insights are neglected in favour of a material’s commercial potential?

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Hong Kong’s airport. Photo by “countries in colors” via flickr.

Conferences are a crucial part of science, because they offer scientists a platform to discuss their latest research results, exchange ideas for future research, and initiate scientific collaborations.

The benefit to attending conferences, along with reduced travel costs, has led to an ever increasing amount of travelling, with sometimes crazy implications. At a large international conference in Singapore earlier this year I met a European researcher who flew in for one day only. And so did a colleague of his from Japan. Another researcher once told me he travels to 27 meetings a year, which is perhaps not even that unusual. Such trips may not be limited to conferences, administrative trips can be even more frequent. Some Chinese professors fly from the provinces to Beijing for grant reviews and other administrative business about every two weeks, if not more often. I suppose it is the same elsewhere, although Japanese and European researchers have the advantage that in most cases they can use trains.

Of course, these are just personal anecdotes. So let’s consider the travelling involved for a larger international conference attended by about 5,000 researchers, as they exist for pretty much all major research fields. Let’s further assume that on average the participants live about 2,500 kilometres (1,500 miles) away from the conference.  That’s 25 million kilometres flown in total. An airplane uses about 3 litres of fuel to fly a passenger for 100 kilometres. This means that 750,000 litres of fuel (200,000 US gallons) will be consumed to fly researchers to the conference alone. To move those 750,000 litres around by the way would require about 30 large tank trucks. And in terms of CO₂ emissions, well, it’s an estimated 2825 tons.  […]