California Association of Chemistry Teachers George S. Hammond Colifornio Institute of Technology Pasadena, 91 108
If
this topic were put in the form of a question, I guess that my short answer would be, "Pure research is just as relevant as it ever was." The short answer doesn't really satisfy me for several reasons. First, it doesn't really say anything unless one has a solid measure of the relevance of pure research a t some time in history, and I do not. Second, I don't really have any sound grasp of the meaning of purity in respect to research. If it means 100% something or other, the term doesn't make sense. If pure means chaste, the idea doesn't apply to much of the work that I know of, although, unfortunately, it may apply to a few research workers. Finally, I am intensely unhappy with the use of the term "relevance" without any indication of what things are, or are not, related. Having given the short answer stated and some of the reasons why the answer is nonsense, I will now proceed with a long commentary which does not really give answers. I believe that two of man's most fundamental desires are to predict and control his own behavior and that of his environment. Since the beginning of recorded history, the desire for prediction and control has stimulated wonder and study of the way things work. I believe that this is research. If so, research is relevant to the needs of man since it is stimulated by some of those needs. Whether or not research fulfills human needs is a question that cannot be answered in a generally definitive manner. My own evaluation leads me to conclude that some research is rather sterile in this respect and some directly significant. Thus far I have attempted no distinction between pure and impure research. Although I detest the term, we should probably make an attempt to deal with the purity issue. I honestly believe that to some people, a test of purity has come to be total irrelevance of the research to anything else. If this is an actual objective, fulfillment must necessarily make research one of the most harmless and most meaningless of the games that people play. I see no reason for discouraging such work, but cannot make a strong case for supporting it with public funds or publishing the results. The desire to publish the results of research implies, among other things, belief that the work will be found relevant bv someone else. There may be some Presented at the 12th annual summer conference of Californir Association of Chemistry Teachers, Aug. 16-22, 1970, Asilomar, Calif.
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research reports in science which are never read by a single person other than the authors, but this is probably uncommon. There is, however, a serious problem revealed when we examine the audience that does read scientific papers. Most papers are read only by a small group of people who are doing work nearly identical to that reported. This is disquieting, since one can conceive of an international group of scientists who communicate only with one another. Unless something occasionally spills out to register an impact on the rest of the world, the group is no real improvement over the individual who researches in complete privacy. Scientists have a shibboleth to deal with this problem. We say, "Leave us alone to do our thing. Eventually something of general interest will come from it." The assertion is then fortified by accounts of the seemingly serendipitous impact of "pure" research on human affairs. Furthermore, there is more than a grain of truth in the assertion. Surely Priestly was not thinking about air breathing rockets when he was tooling around with combustion; yet, his work and that of many others helped t o create the theoretical models on which rocket technology depends. I think that there is always a chance that if a man searches for answers to unanswered questions, and shares the results of his search, ultimately he will have some impact on the affairs of other men. However, we must face the fact that modern science is constructed so as to guarantee its perpetual survival. If we define the unknown sufficiently narrowly, we can be certain that more unanswered questions can be defined than can ever be answered. Let's take a bizarre example. A chemist may measure the rate of a reaction a t 50"; 75", and 100°C. Does he then know the rate a t either 90°C or llO°C? Of course not. We have theoretical models which allow him to make reasonable guesses of the rates at other temperatures, but he doesn't really know. Furthermore, the theoretical model has a built-in justification for continuation of the series of rate measurements uithout limit, if our clod of a chemist cannot think of anything better to do. Theory says that the heat capacity relationships in the reacting system must vary so as to guarantee that the approximate linear relationship between the logarithm of the rate constant and the reciprocal of the absolute temperature must fail. Faced with an infinity of definable problems we have
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