A recent piece by Nobel Prize Laureate Donna Strickland titled “Scientists Need Time To Make Discoveries” is incredibly relevant in today’s landscape of grant and proposal scrambling. People don’t want to pay for things if they have no use.
Therefore, here is yet another piece I did for my science writing class (which previously included a paragraph that my teacher commented were “seems like a bunch of loosely related things you’ve been wanting to vent about and figure this is your chance. ” but would make for a great separate article…so maybe, that’ll happen too!)
Buzzwords, quantum computers, and hoverboards
Here’s a secret: quantum computers are not in our immediate future. But pick up a physics paper written by sensible academics, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that a future with hyperfast, ultra-secure computing is just beyond the horizon. Or maybe one with ‘spintronics’, devices that go beyond your conventional electronics in some vague, nebulous way. Endless electric currents, memory devices that will never fall prey to stray magnetic fields, unbreakable cryptography, thermoelectric power generators, and the always popular but rarely defined ‘future applications.’
This problem is particularly pervasive in the field known as condensed matter physics or solid-state physics. Grab a person off the street, and I can almost guarantee you your average person won’t have a clue what those words mean. But space? Stars? The universe? Who doesn’t want to go to the moon. Of course, we should be spending billions of dollars on a mission to Mars. But spend a couple million dollars on something no one’s ever heard of? Why would anyone do that? It’s no wonder that these physicists wrap up their work in exaggerated buzzwords that border on magic, even if they’re rooted in reality. (After all, ‘quantum physics’ is the basic building block of fundamental physics and the only way we can describe nature as we go down to the atomic level.) Maybe if we get a couple hoverboards back to the future style, we’ll talk about it. Oh wait, you mean this ‘condensed matter physics’ thing can give us hoverboards? Now we’re talking.
Hoverboards are cool, and the prototype Lexus developed in 2015 is beyond cool, but that’s old science. (It works by exploiting how magnets and superconductors repel each other, but even the ‘high temperature superconductors’ it uses needs to be cooled to about -320 F.) We got there in the 90s. Physics is out here studying phenomena no one’s ever heard of and discovering phenomena even physicists never guessed existed. But what physics does run on is money. Lots of money. Funding agencies are well beyond hoverboards but throw in words like ‘topological quantum computation’ and they’re listening. The idea of ‘braiding’ these ‘non-Abelian’ ‘Majorana fermions’ for ‘fault-tolerant’ computation is too good to resist, even if no one understands what these words mean individually, never mind when they’re combined. But buzzwords are useful for getting across the idea that this is important. Neon flashing lights important. Even without these nebulous ‘future applications’, these buzzwords signal that this is the cutting edge of research, that this is what’s new, this is what you should be paying attention to.
But none of this means that the science isn’t valid. The science is fascinating. In the words of every physicist ever: it’s cool. The very frontiers of human knowledge and understanding are being pushed beyond imagination, and incremental discoveries are being made every day, one painstaking cup of coffee at a time. The investigation of fundamental physics has resulted in ‘future applications’ like the well-known transistor, and transistors have grown so small that quantum effects do need to be taken into account. The discovery of high temperature superconductors like the ones that were used in the working hoverboard has been instrumental in developing powerful magnets and are so common in medical uses that no one stops to think about the science and fundamental physics that went into understanding superconductivity.
For every published paper that leads to advancing the well-being of society, there are thousands that represent the tiniest steps in advancing an obscure, insulated field. Ultimately, this is what science–and especially physics–is. An incredibly slow learning process of what makes the world tick. Every now and then physicists might need to fall back on quantum computing or hoverboards to explain why they’re doing what they’re doing, but at the end of the day, physics isn’t about ‘future applications’. It’s about breaking through frontiers, one quantum leap at a time.
Oh, and it’s just really, really cool.
a cat's journey through academia 