Page 77 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - Vol 24 No 2 - February 24 2015

The Dumbest Question
You Can Ask a Scientist
The Daily Beast
The scientific discoveries that were made with
no thought of making money often turn out to
be the most profound science, and, ironically,
often lead to a gold mine.
The dumbest question you can ask a
scientist—or any other creator, inventor, or
discoverer—about his or her work is, “What’s
the economic value?”
One reason: In 1888, after eight years of
experiments, Heinrich Hertz created
electromagnetic waves in air. He died six years
later, believing his work was theoretical and
without practical value. (In an often repeated,
probably apocryphal story, Hertz tells students
the waves have “no use whatsoever.”) Then,
after his death, inventors found Hertz’s waves
could be used to communicate, renamed them
“radio waves,” and started a revolution of
immeasurable consequence. First came wireless
telegraph, then voice broadcasting, two-way
radio, radio telescopes, radar, television,
microwave ovens, radio satellites, cellphones,
radio-frequency identification, GPS, UAVs,
Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and, now, the Internet of
Things—Hertz’s children all.
Another reason: In 1924, Gordon
Dobson, working in his backyard in England,
invented a device for measuring atmospheric
ozone. In 1976, after deploying 100 of them
globally, he died. His work helped save the
world. Scientists discovered that CFCs,
chemicals used in refrigerators and aerosols,
could destroy ozone, exposing us to deadly
radiation. The chemical company DuPont,
which made billions of dollars selling CFCs,
demanded “reputable evidence.” NASA
satellites found nothing, but one of Dobson’s
devices, in Antarctica since 1957, detected a
massive ozone hole. CFC production stopped.
Now the hole, once larger than North America
plus China, will be gone by 2050.
Why does this matter? Because the
dumbest question holds us back. In 2009,
physicist David Kaplan gave a lecture on the
Higgs boson. An audience member asked,
“What do we gain? What’s the economic
return? How do you justify all this?”
Kaplan’s good-natured response appears
in the movie Particle Fever: “I have no idea.”
(Then he mentioned radio.)
The question must be especially painful
for American physicists like Kaplan. Scientists
discovered the Higgs boson—or something
almost exactly like it—using Europe’s Large
Hadron Collider. Members of Congress killed
the American equivalent, the Superconducting
Super Collider, in favor of what one, Don Ritter,
called, “making things people want to buy.”
Kaplan’s audience member was
interested enough to show up at the lecture, and
Ritter is an MIT alumnus who branded himself
“the scientist-congressman,” yet both make the
mistake at the heart of the dumbest question:
confusing unknowable value with no value.
History shows that basic science brings the
greatest economic value of all—Hertz and
Dobson are two of many examples.
Why? First, because of what economics
is. Science begets technology, which begets
products, which beget value. Science is the
principal source of value in modern economies.
Second, because economies are chaotic, most of
the consequences of any particular technology
are unpredictable. An example: The watermill
led to the automatic loom, which led to general
literacy.
Add in the fact that the point of basic
science is to know what’s unknown, and we see
that the dumbest question requests the
unknowable value of the unknowable
consequences of an unknown thing. Note that
only two of these are “unknowable.” The third,
the “thing,” is only “unknown.” And the
unknown, not the unknowable, is what should
guide basic science. Kaplan ended his answer
by saying, “Basic science needs to occur at a
level where you are not asking what is the
economic gain, you’re asking what do we not
know? And where can we make progress?”
He’s absolutely right. The work of basic
scientists like Hertz, Dobson, and Kaplan can
only be driven by curiosity, not purpose. What
is the value of a particular curiosity? There is no - Morgan T, Nationwide
way to know in advance. Discovery is
curiosity’s product; everything else, including
immeasurable economic value, follows. We
cannot know the worth of something we have
not yet discovered. In science, as in all truly
creative work, the joy is the rainbow, not the
hope of gold at the rainbow’s end. []
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