На информационном ресурсе применяются рекомендательные технологии (информационные технологии предоставления информации на основе сбора, систематизации и анализа сведений, относящихся к предпочтениям пользователей сети "Интернет", находящихся на территории Российской Федерации)

Feedbox

12 подписчиков

Scientists Left Behind

Author: Tommaso Dorigo / Source: Science 2.0

As the well-informed readers will realize, I am hat-tipping Hank Campbell and the catchy title of his best-selling book “Science Left Behind” with the title of this post, for lack of more imagination. What I want to discuss is, however, something only partly in line with the interesting topics of Hank’s book.

It is something that I see happening around these days, and which I ache for: the dumbing down of our decision making in science.

It so happens that the plan of building a “Future Circular Collider” (FCC), a new large particle collider, is coming up for discussion as one of the main projects in the forthcoming meetings of the European Strategy for Particle Physics process, a completely open, widespread initiative aimed at discussing among experts the future enterprises in this area of fundamental science, and at agreeing on which are the most proficuous and motivated ways to move forward in the investigation of Nature.

The FCC is an ambitious project, and it is more or less at the edge of our reach with the currently available technology. Similarly to what has happened in the past, pushing the frontier of high-energy physics requires the development of new technology (in this case, among other things the mass production of superconducting magnets capable of field strength well above 10 Tesla). It is a win-win situation for society, as we not only going to improve our understanding of the world, but we at the same time are pushing the limits of our engineering, computing, and electronics skills. In other words, this is nothing else than the good-old, hard way of progressing and deepening our knowledge: by choosing to face new, harder challenges we improve ourselves.

But there are naysayers around, and they are polluting the waters. It is not an unprecedented situation, of course – the LHC had similar opposers, as did other previous successful big projects. What is unprecedented is that the power of social media is promoting people with no credentials to become interlocutors on the matter. As I noted elsewhere, expertise and knowledge should be what we base our decision making processes on, in such a self-disciplined field as basic science is; but unfortunately, random folks with no qualifications are lowering the standards.

It is a bit sad to see that some of the more vocal critics of the FCC project are, would you guess?, ex insiders. For some reason they dropped out (I am not going to discuss why that happens – academic selection processes may be perfectible, indeed, but we have no substitute at the moment), and now they have…

Click here to read more

The post Scientists Left Behind appeared first on FeedBox.

Ссылка на первоисточник

Картина дня

наверх