Friday, June 17, 2011

Kulturkampf

Eli has been thinking for a long time about the motivation for science and come to the conclusion that it has much to do with Einstein's statement of faith, the Lord is subtle, but not malicious.

Scientists do science to learn the ways in which the Universe, or the part of it we are interested in, work, and the best (and quietest) pleasure is figuring something out and contemplating new understanding. Each has problems we worked on, figured out, and never published (well, maybe less so today with the various pressures to get funding), thinking, well, we'll get around to that in time. Eli has three or four thing like that sitting int the archival layer. Maybe more if he dug down a bit.

4 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

> figuring something out and contemplating new understanding.

The chief joy of software engineering, too; though the turn-over cycle tends to be more rapid.

Hank Roberts said...

> figuring something out
And explaining it successfully, if working in a corporate environment.
http://home.comcast.net/~ghaff/docs/theword.html

EliRabett said...

Substitute journalists for senior management

Jim Bouldin said...

"Each has problems we worked on, figured out, and never published"

The discovery's the fun part. The publishing, not so much frankly.