The Scientific Elite and the Oppression of Pessimists
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The Scientific Elite and the Oppression of Pessimists Are you an optimist or a pessimist? An optimist, we are told, will describe a glass as being half-full, while a pessimist sees the same container as half-empty. Engineers, who pride themselves on being objective, understand that the glass is just twice as big as it needs to be. And administrators, who deal in vessels that tend to be cans of worms, are actually happier to find them half-empty. I am concerned that there exists a pervasive bias against pessimists among the intellectual elites. The scientific elite, in particular, is overwhelmingly optimistic, and it is increasingly clear that optimism is, in fact, a prerequisite for membership in this club in the 21st century. We must ask ourselves seriously, “Is there a place for a pessimist in our Society?” Of course, we all have a little pessimism in our personalities, and the question is one of degree and also the manner in which the pessimism manifests itself. The darkest pessimists among us have learned that they must be careful to pass as optimists in their laboratories, and they can only really let their guard down in the safety and privacy of their own homes. These are the people who know with certainty that in the Supreme Court of Fate, Murphy’s Law always takes precedence over the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They know, too, that there is no point in doing the experiment, because it will not work as planned; and that the proposal will never get funded anyway. They believe that a more useful definition of the word “optimist,” had it not already been claimed, would have been “a film of condensation on a lens.” But despite their inner certainty that things will only get worse, they will never admit that they are pessimists. When challenged, the most that they will ever confess is being a “realist.” This is indeed an oppressed minority. Optimism is a characteristic of a researcher: How many of you have done an experiment “just to see what happens”? And how many such experiments would be done if all researchers were pessimists? There are a few classic experiments where 920
the level of optimism displayed by the perpetrators is truly astounding, and this is perhaps the hallmark of really great experimental science. Among my favorites in this regard is the first measurement of the vacancy content of various metals by Simmons and Balluffi, allowing the determination of the vacancy formation energy: They measured the difference between the bulk thermal expansion coefficient and t
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