Originality in Research can work against Science

I’ve encountered some situations in recent weeks that made me think about a short essay in Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham: “Design and Research“. In particular, this paragraph:

The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn’t have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn’t have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but actually worth solving. So ultimately we’re aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.

 

Using old ideas in new ways that actually work better, is actually considered less interesting in research than  proposing original ideas that have have such apparent drawbacks that make them totally useless (if you do not count writing a paper as “use”).

This issue is of course very serious in engineering and all the so-called “applied sciences”. In those fields, when you propose something new, you typically have an incumbent technology or technique to use as a benchmark.

But it is serious in an even subtler way in the so-called “basic sciences” [1]. Indeed, since several years, as a way to increase the chance of getting funded in basic science projects, researchers are repackaging them as “applied science” projects, or simply stress the fact that results can have a large impact on applications. Examples of the latter are “mesoscopic transport”, “quantum computing”, or “molecular electronics”, just to name few fields I’ve been working on or close to. What I observe repeatedly is the proposal of new ideas, new devices, revolutionary technology without a due diligence, a detailed understanding on the incumbent solutions and of the important metrics for that field of application.

There is also another issue in which originality in research works against science. For science to work, experiments should be tested and reproduced several times. However, all credits goes to the first. If you are just the second, your work gets published in a less exclusive journal. Therefore if often happens that competitive research groups in a rush to complete an experiment just stop – if another group finish first and publishes results – and start working on something else. This is bad for science, because experimental results are less verified than they should be. This happens also for complex theoretical derivations and numerical simulations, because you typically cannot even publish as a second, unless you find an error in the first work.

One should not be surprised, by this behavior, anyway. Scientists are simply professionals, and of course they respond to professional incentives.

This is also true for me. I appreciate the multifaceted advantages of originality, and have choses to focus on new device or circuit concepts and on new methodologies. However, I have in time published several papers on the tune of “why this proposed technology cannot work”. I will continue, since I believe it is important. Still, it makes you appear as a grumpy old man.

[1] At my venerable age, I have not really understood the difference between basic science, applied science, and engineering, for that matter. That is why I use to specify “so-called”. but this will be the topic of another post.

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