"Patrick Elliott" <sel### [at] npgcablecom> wrote in message
news:48de7b90@news.povray.org...

> Experts are often blinded by their own narrow expertise. And as much as
> you hate examples. One group of Computer Science people went in to look
> over the systems used by Astrological researchers and found that their
> "expertise" was so narrow they had no clue that modern debuggers
> existed, where still coding their projects by hand using text editors,
> and that 9 out 10 ten of all experimental projects would **failing**,
> for no other reason than that they couldn't debug the complex code well
> enough to make those experiments "work properly".

I assume you mean "astronomy", not "astrology". Yes, I agree with the fact
that today's science is extremely specialized and often, scientists miss
cross discipline applications, or, like you mention above, don't work
efficiently because they do not keep up with technology. But neither of
these are specific to science. I know many manufacturers firsthand that
employ outdated technologies, and do things the hard way. That's not an
argument against directed research. The solution is not to do away with
directed research, but to hire programmers and organize the research so that
the astronomers write the specifications, and pass in on to coders; they do
not write code. It's absurd to expect an astronomer to wear a programmer's
hat too *and* excel at both tasks.

And yes, unexpected applications of scientific discoveries of course occur
from time to time. But that's not an argument against directed research
either. By definition, there's no telling when or what the unexpected
applications may be. It's a bonus when they happen, but you cannot model a
research project after that. You still plan your research, set your goals,
but keep an ear and eye open to other researchers who are doing interesting
things, as well as communicate your discoveries to them so that you can
maybe mutually benefit. There's already the mechanism of refereed journals
to facilitate this type of communication. Again, it gets harder and harder
as volume and depth of research increases. But doing away with directed
research is not the solution.

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