Web Letters: Lab Test

I received my PhD in physics in the 1970s and moved in the early 1980s to what was just becoming Silicon Valley. The valley was then dominated by aerospace and circuit-fabrication companies; as Pentagon money diminished and the new microprocessors allowed the members of the homebrew computer club and other such garage experimenters to flourish, the outlines of the present valley emerged.

After watching and participating in all this for the last twenty-five years and more, I mostly agree with Mr. Deresiewicz's thesis; certainly money and its corruptions have had a bad effect on what science is still done here. But there's another problem, which is that many of the technical dreams of the last thirty years have for various reasons remained just that, making the pursuit of billions a sort of consolation prize for those who will never make an importaant scientific discovery. Thirty years ago we were trying hard to apply artifical intelligence to medical diagnosis, speech understanding and other problems; some people are still trying, but few are looking for real advances soon. Thirty years ago we hoped that numerical solutions of field equations might give us useful solutions of intractable problems in particle physics; part of the hope remains.

The problems that were solved in the '60s and '70s are by definition easier than the ones we're working on now. Discouraged by the lack of basic progress, many people have decided to seek their fortunes in building social networks or (at least until recently) applying elaborate statistical methods to analyzing the markets. As scientists we should be more introspective than most people, and if we're pursuing consolation prizes we should be clear about that, and say so. And we should also be clear about something Mr. Deresiewcz describes well in his opening paragraphs: the way science, and scientific thought, have receded into the wallpaper. This is partly a problem of society and its distractions, of which money is the first, and partly a problem of the current difficulties of the sciences. Rather than let polticians and public figures cut ribbons at laboratory openings and speak of the hopes for the future that will be brought nearer by the new funding for Program X, we need to talk about the near-stagnation that is rather common now, explain it as well as we can and invite the rest of society to speculate about where we are, how we got here, how we move on and in what directions.

Steve Merlan

Redwood City, CA