Archive for the ‘Amazon EC2’ tag
The Lone Ranger
I suspect that most people who enter the sciences are inspired by tales of the great scientists of yesteryear: bold luminaries who, through brilliance and ingenuity, helped uncovered the laws which govern the universe. For me, one of the most inspiring stories was that of Albert Einstein who, as a mere clerk in a Swiss patent office, published four papers which shook the foundations of physics in the span of one year! After all, who becomes a scientist who doesn’t have the dream of making a discovery or two so great that you become recognized as Person of the Century?
But, is this conception of science as a world where scientific Davids slay the Goliaths of orthodoxy and ignorance too romantic to be accurate? Is science still a field driven by brilliant individuals? This is a question which was top of mind for those attending the meeting of the International Astronomical Union, held in Rio de Janeiro from Aug 3-14, 2009 (HT: The Economist).
While theoreticians and well-funded groups in certain fields may still be able to comfortably push the “lone ranger” model of scientific research, in many areas (especially astronomy), the scientific frontier is being increasingly dominated by massive endeavors which consume enormous amounts of resources. After all, if your brilliant idea requires long, uninterrupted access to the Hubble Space telescope (i.e. the Hubble Deep field), you either get in line and save up, or you try to convince the rest of the astronomical community that your idea is worth pursuing (over their own, other, projects). This need to allocate very limited resources to a wide range of demands in astronomy has led to what The Economist refers to as “managerialism”:
The present is a “golden age” [for astronomy]. The rate of discoveries has been increasing, along with the means to keep up with the details. That has, in turn, led to bigger and more expensive telescopes, and the introduction of management techniques intended to ensure the smooth running of large projects. But it is that managerialism that is beginning to worry some of the more thoughtful members of the union. They fear that although it brings short-term benefits, it may, in the long run, crush individual flair.
This same clash between the desire to foster scientific Davids, but the need to build scientific Goliaths in order to use the latest and greatest (and most expensive) equipment is probably not unique to astronomy. After all, advances in technology have made possible new types of visualization (i.e. Imaging Mass Spectrometry to visualize how and where molecules move within a cell), new collections of vast amounts of data (i.e. the Diseasome), and even new ways of analyzing these new vast collections of data (i.e. the Millennium Simulation).
So is the “lone ranger” scientist doomed to have to one day ride off into the sunset? I don’t think so.
As we’ve discussed many times here at Bench Press, there are still plenty of innovative and relatively low-cost things that enthusiasts and scientists can do to push scientific inquiry. While there is no doubt that a lot of good can and will come out of big projects requiring costly equipment (I’m looking at you, LHC!), I think we’re far from the point where all experiments and models require multi-billion dollar investments.
Furthermore, while more expensive technology has made it more expensive to do experiments at the cutting edge, the advance of technology has made many other forms of inquiry much cheaper. For instance, technology has now made it possible for more and more people to collaborate and have access to data and the computational tools needed to analyze and report on it. If you had told Watson and Crick back in 1953, that every researcher would one day be able to as easily search a public database of nearly every gene and DNA/RNA sequence known for a match as they could read a book, they probably would’ve thought you were insane. And yet, today, I can not only randomly and arbitrarily search as many sequences as I want by using the NIH’s BLAST tool, I can quickly and cheaply deploy my own computing cluster using Amazon EC2 or, for specific types of computational workloads, even a graphics card/GPU!
I also think that, on some level, the fears about growing managerialism come from people who dramatically underestimate the value of collaboration between multiple scientists who can bring multiple specialties to the table, and the new ease of collaboration enabled by tools like Google Wave and Friendfeed.
In any event, even the field of astronomy seems to be trying to swing the pendulum back in favor of the Davids and Lone Rangers of the world:
Dr White suggests astronomers should ensure small science can flourish alongside its larger counterpart by, for example, ensuring that telescopes designed to look for big fish can also be used for projects that might be considered as small fry.
Another way to encourage gifted individuals might be to reform the way time on telescopes is allocated. The IAU’s new president, Robert Williams of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, is a supporter of this idea. He reckons decisions about who gets what observing time should be made by the directors of observatories, answerable to a governing body, rather than by groups of the great and good, as tends to happen now.
Williams is a particularly good authority on this – as he was one of those responsible for allotting the time necessary for Hubble’s Deep Field to be captured.
Viva la Lone Ranger!
