Symmetric Metrics for Materials
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Symmetric Metrics for Materials Congress, the pressure transducer of public opinion, is squeezing our formerly sacrosanct budgets, not just with dollar dings but with relevance requirements. Written on all walls (with expletives deleted) is "Scientists beware! Justify your existence or perish." In response, we panic in our typically quantitative, logical, and methodical manner. We wring our hands as we strain our brains to devise justifications for basic research. Neither worry nor wisdom has helped us much so far. You'd think we materials researchers would find justification easier than would, say, the high energy physicists (but not nearly as easy as the viscerally self-justifying biomedical community). Still, we are pummeled by demands to explain ourselves better and, of all things, in plain English. A recent well-meant jibe from a medical doctor pointed out that "scientists at the leading edge are in the business of change but get nervous at the prospect of change in science policy."1 This was an MD telling us that we are behaving like everyone else with a special interest under siege, whereas we should be welcoming what we are already familiar with. One wonders if vaccine experts welcome the corresponding virus. Let's take a fresh look, not just at our interrogators' explicit questions, but also at the character of the answers that really work for them. They ask us about new products, new jobs, quality of life, trade deficits, and so forth. Their rhetoric is couched in such altruistic metrics. We hear the questions as if posed at a dissertation defense rather than in a congressional hearing and persist in trying to explain the nation's return on its research investment, the eventual value of new knowledge, the intricacies of technological gestation, incubation and innovation (and whether it's all linear or not), and the foolhardiness of mortgaging our technological future.
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i• International incidents, and i• Grand jury indictments (but, please, no convictions). We are locked in a political, not pedagogical, battle for survival. As our doctor colleague also preached,1 "First do no harm." No harm will be done, of course, by demonstrating links of basic research to national needs, but this is certainly not a sufficient condition for support, and may not even be a necessary one. Have no doubt that our victories will rest on the sensational. Who believes, for example, that the Hubble survived its trouble just because we fixed it? To discount the public's fascination with Roddenberry's and Sagan's portraits of "Billions upon Billions of stars in the universe" is not only to bury one's head in the sand, but to be condemned to inhale it. We must grudgingly agree with Koshland, who advises that if government wants to solve difficult problems, it can do so with a "policy that uses scientific, not emotional, standards."3 But before anyone is authorized (much
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