On satisfaction in research

The following ‘muses’ are my view point based on my limited experience with research through a little more than a yearin a corporate research center and about a couple of years of research that resulted in my graduation. This is a personal opinion and therefore is ill-formed, biased and limited in its perspective. And I’m sharing it purely out of interest in sharing, with no ideas or thoughts on improving or judging current day research.

I do not know if Newton was known as researcher by the time he was working out calculus or if Galileo or Kepler was known as one. But to my opinion, what they did was research. They investigated physical phenomena or explored space and invented necessary language to express it. In case of Newton it was gravity, calculus and in case of Keppler, the laws of motion. And many more like that. As I said before, I’m stunted by my knowledge in finding better examples.

Research changed its form, capabilities and scope over time. In those days, research was out of curiosity and it resulted in pleasure. As Feynman puts it, it was the pleasure of finding things out. The intentions, aspirations and foresight were limited to the point of finding it out and hence the focus. The results were marvellous and carried a kind of beauty and generality and were open to change if attacked by counter arguments of sufficient potential.

The founders of science had a pleasure trip. They did not care about the monetary and societal implications of their work. One might argue that it was easy in those days to make a breakthrough discovery in science because many of the fundamentals were not yet formed. But even so, it required clear and original thinking to come up with rules based on observations all by themselves. So did Mechanics, Electricity, Magnetism, Thermodynamics happened.

The science was entirely mathematical; and mathematics, simple. For that matter, a majority of fundamental properties are but constants defined to satisfy equations. Otherwise, how can one define mass? Mass is but a constant that satisfies the equation ‘F=ma’ as defined by Newton. Its just a constant, a notion, as ‘m’ is in ‘y=mx’. Or so was entropy in Thermodynamics. As Stephen Hawking puts it, entropy is just a matter of notion. Reasonably consequently, the notion of unidirectional arrow of time is also a justification to support the asymmetry in human perception of past and future.

Perhaps in the 18^th Century, the notion of engineering has swept in. To my understanding, engineering is application of physics or rather physical laws to make life better. Engineering in many ways set or limited the scope of growth of research. Research was all focused towards making better automobiles, electricity and so on.

The liberty in thinking and exploring new avenues or ideas turned even limited with the advent of corporate research. Here, the researchers are but a part of a manufacturing chain where all they concentrate is on minute incremental work to the existing product or technology. I agree that one need not undermine the effects of these minor increments. What is really bothersome in this chain is that the researcher has no liberty to focus his effort or drive with passion an idea to reality. Because he is just one in the chain, his ideas need not necessarily fructify even though they might be good. A good example would be the invention of GUI by a researcher in Xerox, which would have never turned out to be an ingredient of a product if Steve Jobs were not to pick it up.

The point I’m trying to make here is, as soon as engineering swept in, research was forced to justify itself on the grounds of whether or not it is useful to the society; and in case of corporate research, the justification is in terms of the business impact and profit for the company. The capacity and capability of scientific experiments was more or less aligned towards delivering an important and relevant goal and hence stunted growth in all of its possibilities.

Now, an immediate question can be as to what are those fields where science is terribly restricted. And I will be just as stumped as a theistic, when asked to show God. Being a part of the system, the current day, I cannot make out what would be outside. What I cannot understand, I obviously cannot explain. But still, the argument is simple and logical; as long as you are focusing on one thing, perhaps very justly so, you are missing on the liberty to explore the rest.

I’m not saying that the liberty depleted in entirety or that free explorers of science or nature do not exist anymore. Those who do so, unfortunately form a minority despite the humungous increase the percentage of population that are acquainted to science in the modern day.

So in this present scenario, on what basis should a ‘researcher’ derive satisfaction from his work? Because it is all hazy as to what ‘end goal’ is he working towards? Should he come up with evasive counter –logical statements like those that support existence of God as made by intelligent God-men or should he accept his limitations and be termed as a ‘resentful employee’, thoroughly disappointed with his current status and work scope?

.. to be continued