Unfashionable science

[Howie]

An interesting question comes from one of the chapters in Freeman Dyson's book From Eros to Gaia. It comes from a paper he wrote in 1981.

Dyson – with a long and distinguished career that includes quantum field theory, solid state physics and nuclear engineering - is quite scathing about what he calls 'fashionable science' and the pressures on young scientists to follow beaten paths if they care about their own survival.

If we we are going to have breakthroughs in frontier territory, he says, then we will have to 'proceed with good sense and courage to support unfashionable people doing things that orthodox opinion considers irrelevant or crazy'.

And he goes on to give examples from the past from his own field of mathematical physics where people came up with unfashionable ideas which proved their worth nearly a century later - for example Sophus Lie with continuous groups and Hermann Grassmann with vector spaces, both concepts now key to so much of modern physics.

That leads to the question as to where are the unfashionable places in which an enterprising young physics might look today. And again Dyson is clear.

Look, he says, at those areas of mathematics that are beautiful but which don't seem to fit in coherently to the rest of the field.

'Unfashionable mathematics is mainly concerned with things of accidental beauty, special functions, particular number fields, exceptional algebras, sporadic finite groups. It is among these unorganised and undisciplined parts of mathematics that I would advise you to look for the next revolution in physics.'

This has implications all the way through the teaching of physics, since the sooner that students encounter such ideas - with short-term unfashionability but longer-term potential - the better.

If we believe that he is right (which is clearly a matter for discussion), then we should for instance think about more emphasis on something like number theory - something that can be brought in at quite a young age.

And in the light of Dyson's pointers, are there any other areas of unfashionable science which we could highlight for the really keen researcher – and the eventual benefit of us all?

For more background I've set this out in a little more detail in a blog on the Highland Science Festival site (http://www.highlandsciencefestival.com/blog.asp) and would be glad to hear here some views on what Dyson says and what it may mean for science teaching.

Howie (with greetings from Scotland)

[Stanko]

Howie,

I like Dyson and his fresh ideas too. Especially about global warming. He thinks that we are looking on wrong place because there is less CO2 in athmosphere, than we produce annually. So there has to be mechanism which absorbs CO2 (forests, oceans). At Velenje we were thinking to measure CO2 around power plant which is producing about 5 million tonnes of CO2 per year and in forests around Velenje. However the measurement equipment was not available (and to expensive to purchase). Maybe in future we will do something in this field, together with young people.

greetings from Slovenia

Stanko Blatnik