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Scientific
dreamers
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EMIL
RØYRVIK (32) qualified as a social anthropologist
at NTNU
and is now a researcher at SINTEF Technology and Society where
he works with learning, knowledge and culture in the working
life.
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| Photo: Roar Øhlander |
Many of us live in the delusion that the
apparently respectable success stories of our western world are
due to the fact that science, wielding the weapon of common sense,
has forever displaced barbarianism, superstition and ridiculousness.Many
would even claim, in controlled attacks of self-aggrandizing petty
importance, that it is common sense that distinguishes us from animals.
But common-sense science is not concerned with truth, and it creates
nothing. On the contrary, the science that has created things of
lasting value is a happy science, a fantastic science, a different
science, a science that is completely lacking in “common sense”.
A quick glance at the history of science
should be sufficient to confirm our claim. The greatest scientists
were dreamers and visionaries. Take Nikola Tesla, for example, tamer
and master of light and discoverer of alternating current, the man
who revolutionised industry and modern society,who invented the
use of wireless energy transmission and was the real inventor of
radio and robots. Tesla described a huge number of fantastic inventions,
most of which were written off as madness; among them was a way
of capturing solar power by means of an antenna and a method of
controlling the weather by means of electrical energy. Tesla wished
to make war impossible by (his) inventions. All this was at the
turn of the previous century.
Of the other scientific dreamers who we celebrate
today, we do not even need to mention Leonardo da Vinci or, for
that matter, Copernicus, who not only put a whole cosmology to the
torch but was a painter and also translated Greek poetry into Latin.
The Theory of Relativity came to Einstein while he nodded off in
the sun in Tuscany. And it was the knowledge-hungry joker and Nobel
Prize-winner Richard Feynman who goaded a whole world into developing
nanotechnology in 1959 with the two simple questions:
“Why can’t we write the Encyclopedia
Britannica on the head of a pin?”, and “What about collecting
all the books in the world in a grain of dust?” “Everything
you can imagine is real”, said Pablo Picasso.
But we have no need to cross the ocean in
search of visionary scientists. Kristian Birkeland was probably
Norway’s most original and independent scientific mind, the
man we all know from the 200-kroner banknote, nominated seven times
for the Nobel Prize, and with his name linked to the epoch-making
discovery of artificial fertiliser and the founding of Norsk Hydro.
Admittedly, many people are impressed that he also invented margarine,
caviar and the mechanical hearing aid, but that he believed as early
as 1906 that we would be able to release enormous quantities of
energy by splitting the atom, or that he wanted to treat cancer
by irradiation therapy, no, such ideas were nothing but madness.
No-one would finance the necessary research. Fifty years later,
it turned out that Birkeland had been right. The USA’s “Star
Wars” programme, for example,was based on Birkeland’s
ideas. He also solved the mystery of the aurora borealis, the Northern
Lights, as was confirmed much later by modern satellites.
Would the Research Council of Norway have
financed Birkeland? Would Hydro or Statoil? The man took such a
nonchalant view of the financial aspects of his projects that research
policy administrators would have refused to read his application
forms. Through the apostles of mediocrity, as the clerks and the
managers parade-march through the world of academe, the rules that
define good science and research have been transformed. Enthusiasts
and researchers who swim against the current, people who think differently,
fabulists and visionaries, those who have always saved us through
their originality and their dreams – all have to dig themselves
deeper and deeper into the ground in order to be able to think.
But out-of-the-box thinking will prevail in the end.
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