Why Do Basic Research? And Why Double It?
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Letter from the President
Why Do Basic Research? And Why Double It? More so than in any previous year, this year’s Nobel prizes in both chemistry and physics stand as triumphal moments for materials research. The physics prize to Herbert Kroemer, Zhores I. Alferov, and Jack S. Kilby for semiconductor heterostructures and integrated circuits recognized the profound link between seminal research ideas and enormous societal impact. The chemistry prize to Alan J. Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid, and Hideki Shirakawa recognized ideas critical to the understanding of electrical conductivity in polymers, which hold promise for organic light-emitting diodes and plastic transistors. Against tradition, the Nobel committees cited achievements that are indisputably technological, in contrast to the usual tendency to favor discoveries probing extremes of nature that are inaccessible to the knowledge and imagination of most people. Because this year’s chemistry and physics prizes celebrate the Materials Research Society’s values of interdisciplinary, goal-oriented materials research, they have for all of us a special tangibility and proximity. And so, now it is indeed possible to find a few past (and probably some future!) Nobelists in the MRS directory.* As never before, a young MRS member somewhere can say with conviction, “Gee, I could win a Nobel prize….” Was this work basic research? Science writer John Horgan in his 1996 book The End of Science asserts that all the truly important and knowable basic scientific ideas and phenomena have already been discovered and understood. From Horgan’s perspective, all that lies before us are the unknowable or untestable ideas of “ironic science,” such as the existence of superstrings or the end state of the universe. Beyond that, all that remains for him is the dull and dreary task of sorting and matching known basic principles to churn out mundane applications. Such a viewpoint, it seems to me, belies the magical premise of materials. For what is science, if not the attempt to make sense of the world around us in its complexity as well as its simplicity? And materials are complex ensembles of atoms that in concert—almost in conversation— define the macroscopically observable * Heeger and MacDiarmid are currently members of MRS.
MRS BULLETIN/DECEMBER 2000
“It is a different sort of genius that audaciously posits the subtle interactions among a complicated ensemble of atoms.”
properties of the physical world around us. To reach an understanding of materials, it is necessary but ludicrously insufficient to know the masses of the nucleons or the force laws governing two-body interactions. We materials researchers also have to postulate notions of complexity, such as the idea that many atoms might be involved. Or that subtle changes in atomic positions, coupled with the presence of astutely chosen impurities, might enable the high conductivity in Heeger et al.’s polymers. Or that substituting some Al atoms for some Ga atoms would allow electrostatic potential wells to be created that allowed
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