I was catching up on my podcasts yesterday and came across an interview with wealthy bazillionaire, Elon Musk, who used some of the money he made from PayPal to create space exploration technologies company, SpaceX. When explaining his reasons for investing in (and encouraging governments to invest in) space exploration, he said that “life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems”.
It got me thinking about curiosity-led science and the strange divide that exists between it and problem-solving science. It also, somehow, got me thinking about late-night television.
I’ve always enjoyed a late-night C.S.I. marathon on Living. There’s a sense of closure and satisfaction with each episode as they use DNA, molecules of paint, and impossibly fast lab equipment to convict a lonely Las Vegas card-dealer of putting a 3 year old tabby in a wheelie bin. It also represents a particular strand of science that is driven directly by the need to solve problems using information we have on how the world works; the kind of science motivated by the need to cure diseases, improve technologies, and combat climate-change.
In the 90s, my late-night televisionary marathon of choice was the back-to-back episodes of Star Trek TNG shown on Sky 1 of a weeknight – all wormholes, time-travel, and inertial dampeners. Star Trek camply captured the essence of curiosity-led science; the kind driven by the need to explore and understand the Universe; Darwin’s theory of evolution, the Apollo missions, and the Large Hadron Collider are all products of this curiosity.
Curiosity-led scientific research and problem-led scientific research are not mutually exclusive – to combat viruses, we need to know how they evolve; to make computers, we need to understand the subatomic particles in their silicon chips; and to get a decent 3G signal, we need to understand magic and witchcraft – they are part of the same overall process. In other words, we wouldn’t have Grissom without Picard.
Problem-solving research is undoubtedly essential, but it relies on a solid foundation of curiosity-led research. When the Governmental departments were renamed and reshuffled earlier this year, science was essentially remarketed as commercially driven ‘innovation’. My worry now is that only research with a direct commercial return will get supported. Maybe this will satisfy an understandable new culture that wants a C.S.I.-like return on their investment, but I think that now, more than ever, is the time to encourage the Trekkies.
Plus, Deanna Troi is awesome!
