History of Science

 March 2007. I looked out of the window of the airplane to see the snow-covered fields of Denver, Colorado where I was flying in to attend my first American Physical Society (APS) annual conference. I was quite determined to make good of this opportunity. I had the plan to attend all talks related to "behavior of water in confinement", which was my research project at that time. Next on the priority list was all talks related to protein adsorption and protein folding, followed by talks on new simulation methods. If I would not find talks on any of these topics during a time-slot then I had decided to attend any session that captures my curiosity. That was the plan and I followed it quite religiously for the first three days. On the afternoon of the fourth day, I did come across a time-slot wherein I could not find any talks related to the topics of my interest. So, I selected a session which sounded interesting, while totally not related to my field of research. I do not recall the name of the session, but this session has remained vividly in my memory for the last 14 years. The researchers were performing experiments in which they were dropping strips of paper from a height and were using slow-motion camera to capture the motion of the strips. They were developing numerical solutions to describe the motion of strips of paper falling down in air. Interestingly, this work was sponsored by DARPA - the research division of the army of the United States. NASA has been sending missions to moon and far-away planets, F-16 and 18s are soaring the skies and we do not understand how a strip of paper falls under the action of gravity in air. Interesting. The session led an indelible impression on me. It is important to understand what we know and what we do not. The scientists know that there are simple-looking phenomena that we do not understand. Interestingly, it is the non-scientists who think that we know a lot more than we actually do. When I started my graduate studies, I got to know that Prof. X works on studying the properties of water. Water! Don't we know everything about water already? I asked myself. Fast forward five years and I attended a conference on water where the leading scientists of the world were arguing about the structure of water and the debate got hot a few times. 

Our theories, our knowledge of science is constantly being updated and what we think of something as true today may turn out to be quite wrong in the future. It may be useful to learn about how scientific ideas evolved over time. Most of us know about the story of ether that was thought to be permeating the empty space, or the story of black-body radiation that led to quantum mechanics. Around a century back, scientists believed that chemical reactions occur because different molecules have different shapes - hydrogen is a ball, oxygen is donut shaped and so two hydrogen balls fit well on both sides of the donut to form water. We now know that this picture is incorrect but I would be careful to say whether our current picture is completely correct. I think I have painted a gloomy picture. Should we throw away our science books? No! Our precision and accuracy of experimentally probing physical systems have been steadily improving. Computational research has grown quite rapidly and is aiding our understanding. We may not completely understand quantum mechanics, but we do have a mathematical structure for it that describes quantum phenomena quite accurately. The number of people pursuing research has been growing. The amount of research money being invested has also been overall rising at the global level. Research is shared digitally and is not obscurely available only in few libraries of the world. At Intel, we used to say that "not all zeros are the same", implying that at the start of a new technology, even though our yield for working microprocessors remains zero for long periods, but we keep making improvements in removing defects. Similarly, all "lack of understanding" is not the same.