The 1987 Nobels: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: A Very Silly Experiment Bears Fruit

A couple of years ago two eminent scientists performed an experiment. Nothing unusual in that, you might think. Think again; when did the eminent scientists of your acquaintance last perform an experiment personally? Come to that, when did you? These eccentrics proceeded in an odd way. They do not seem to have debated whether what they were proposing to do was respectable in Popperian terms, or only those of Feyerabend. No—they just did the experiment. They cannot have spent hours in the library looking into established knowledge and theory, for any newly graduated chemist or materials scientist could have told them what to expect. No, they shunned the library, left the office, entered the laboratory and performed an experiment. A very silly experiment; an undergraduate could have told them that they were measuring the conductivity of an insulator or, at best, a semiconductor. Predictably, it gave a very silly result: signs of superconductivity in a ceramic at far too high a temperature. I refer, of course, to K. Alex Müller and J. George Bednorz, the winners of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Physics. Their results show that we must scrap our theory of superconductivity and some of our theories of bonding in solids. They also call into question many of our assumptions about the structure of science. One of these is that scientists sit in offices and libraries, thinking, while research students and technicians do the dirty work. Research students and technicians often lack the experience or understanding to see minor anomalies and intriguing effects when they meet them. And those who cannot see that which is worth finding are not very likely to find that which is worth seeking. Many promising leads probably go unobserved and unreported. Very little important science ever came from offices, with the possible exception of the Swiss Patent Office. As for libraries, they are far from the womb of innovation, being, in fact, the tomb of dead ideas. This discovery also came from Switzerland. There may well be cultural reasons for this. Certainly it could not have come from neighboring Austria. Think of a well-known Austrian scientist. Freud? There is little scientific about Freud. Lorenz? Yes, but his views are now discounted. Schröedinger? Yes, he appears on a current Austrian banknote—he of the omnipotent equation, he of the equation that suffers the slight defect that it is insoluble in almost all cases of material interest. That is office science, and the Austrians I know are convinced that scientists belong in offices, preferably in managerial roles, but certainly removed from messy experiment. In Britain, too, most scientists over the age of 30 (in universities) or 35 (in industry) are office-dwellers, in what are really management functions. But the Swiss I meet include a number of very highly qualified men in their 40s and 50s who seem to practice science, with only one or two technicians working under them. So we have a discovery that overturns our basic theories in a corner of physics. We know whence to expect those: from government-sponsored international research institutions or our leading universities. Well, actually, this came from an industrial lab, that of IBM. But industrial labs do applied science, don’t they, exploiting the basic insights gained by the academic world? Measuring temperature variations in conductivity is applied enough, yet it will also revolutionize basic theory. However, plenty of universities have climbed onto this bandwagon and some of them are telling us that we must not think of exploiting it before the basic science has been worked out. So normality is to be restored. Is it? Do we understand the basic science of a wood fire? We have known the exploitation and technology for millennia, but our grasp of the basic chemistry of combustion is by no means complete. Hitherto humankind has always been wise enough to exploit effects it did not understand. That’s just as well, for the species would have died of thirst long before it had an adequate understanding of the liquid state. The IBM discovery resulted from what was in light of available understanding, a very foolish experiment. So it gives us cause to think that, despite Popper, we are not particularly likely to revolutionize our understanding by forming and testing hypotheses grounded in current theory. Often, when hearing of the Nobel Prizes, we secretly think that the committee must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel to find anyone to whom to award the prize. This is not one of those cases, and by this speedy award, the Nobel Prize Committee has performed a service to science. Ceramic superconductivity, despite the hype that has accompanied the entry of the universities, may never prove exploitable. But even if it does not, we have been given cause to question our assumptions concerning the organization and nature of science. The next thing is to obtain more results like this. Many industrial scientists have made anomalous observations. These often remain unpublished, and not only because of industrial secrecy. Frequently scientists are reasonably certain they have seen something worthwhile, but it was unexploitable and they could not justify the time needed to cross the i’s and dot the t’s to the extent needed for even a short communication. What we need is a Journal of Uninvestigated Results to help transfer hints from industry to academia. Simon Roman is a scientist working in industry His address is 2 Upper Rosemary Hill, Kenilworth, Warwicks, CV8 2PA, UK

The 1987 Nobels: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: A Very Silly Experiment Bears Fruit

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