[jjoonathan]

The discovery of the displacement current was extremely important: it proved that light was an electromagnetic wave, paving the way for how we would come to understand the interactions between light and matter.

It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!

[ucee054]

No, the application comes first, the theory follows.

I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first.

Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis".

They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't grounded in anything.

In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a real problem. Because who cares about applications, right?

The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.

[kyzyl]

> The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.

No, no, no, no, NO! That is just wrong. Yes, a lot of PhD work is highly specialized and remains largely unapplied (at least directly). But that is the nature it; science is an affair of serendipity. You simply do not know what problem you're going to figure out, what problem you're going to make progress on, or where you're going to get stuck. In fact, science largely has very little to do with YOU in particular. It's about building a body of work that many people to come can work with.

This notion that most of science is brilliant people going "ahah!", and subsequently publishing a seminal work in their field that drives industry for decades to come is bullshit. That is not how it works. In very rare circumstances people have really significant eureka moments, but even then it takes the body of researchers, engineers, undergrads, and all their combined work to make things really happen.

Most breakthroughs do not come from drop-outs in silicon valley hacking on Rails apps, or building PCs out of wood and spite, or figuring out how to make lasers encode information at very high density. Those are the exceptions. As a culture we just love to hear about the exceptions that made it big, complete with the highly biased, over-simplified and glory hogging narratives that accompany them.

So stop spreading disinformation and putting down PhD students, and other academics, who are devoting years of their life to figuring out how to cure your ailments, build your LCD screens and save you from dying of hunger.

[ucee054]

save you from dying of hunger

The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it.

So stop spreading disinformation

I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure.

Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.

[kyzyl]

> The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses.

Are you trying to sound like an idiot? Don't be so narrow minded.

> Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed.

This is a very typical argumentation failure. I make a statement where specifics of the examples are entirely irrelevant to the point, and you cherry pick one of them and throw some info about it that you presume I'm not aware of. You then go whole hog straw-man, trying to tear me down over the apparent ignorance, which you manufactured. Yet, it remains that you missed the entire fucking point. Let me get my crayons out: Academia does research into many, many problems, and some of it is 'pure', meaning there is no accompanying application. Some other research does have immediate applications. Nevertheless, research is a highly complex process, but has tremendous value... beyond it's immediate commercial ramifications. This is why people are complaining about the NRC's recent claims, which are bullshit.

>I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure.

I'll grant you that some, even many, academics are highly driven by things like publications, fundable research and tenure. However, if you'd had any experience in academia (and kept your eyes open!) you would have seen that this is merely a circumstantial hoop, and often times the top level academics who are doing this are also the ones get the funding to allow all sorts of other research to continue for its own sake. Sometimes applications come early, sometimes not. You're being naive to think that all academics are simply giving us 'the run around'.

> If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.

And he would be correct to do so. Getting something into the shop for people to buy is not the job of academia. Go buy a year supply of ramen noodles and drop out of that's what you want to do. You may not like it, but science actually, really does have a theoretical component to it, and a lot of your fancy shit (which you bought in stores) is the direct result of people using academic research. If you can't understand that, then you're the one who is badly informed.

[ucee054]

I'll say it slowly point-by-point so you understand:

Point 1: Fuck your "edification". Grandma doesn't want to be "edified". She wants to not starve. She isn't starving because of fertilized crops. We have fertilizer entirely because of the Haber Process. That's REAL science. Also known as "deployment", "engineering" and "application".

Point 2: The point of theory is to make application more efficient. IE Tesla's claim that knowing theory could have saved Edison 90% of his labour. That's the ONLY value it has, and the ONLY thing that makes it different to eg Lesbian Poetry as a discipline of study. But Lesbian Poetry sure does "edify" Grandma.

Point 3: Theory comes from application, not from the fever dreams of the publish-or-perish crowd. You get math from trying to deploy a seige engine, not the other way around. So real science is application, theory is just documentation.

Point 4: We don't force everybody in science to go straight for application, because some speculative theory may turn out to be useful later, the way finite field arithmetic turned out to be useful for RAID6 arrays. Most theory without application turns out to be junk but we could justify it having some salvage value as insurance.

Point 5: The publish-or-perish crowd have got Point 4 backwards. That's your crap ideology too. They treat theoretical junk as having the only value and they give you more credit if you write about something than if you build the fucking thing. You've heard about the "idea guy" who just wants a techie to build his "vision"? In academia, that cocksucker is the one who's valued.

[ucee054]

Are you trying to sound like an idiot?

No, but YOU are succeeding.

And he would be correct to do so

Bingo! There you go, sounding like an idiot and proving my point.

Getting something into the shop for people to buy is deployment. Deployment is how science started. Look up Archimedes, because he was the guy who started math and physics, building siege engines to defeat the Roman navy. Oh yeah, and medicine and biology started with Imhotep and also the Sassanid hospital system.

This crap ideology you are pushing only came about relatively recently, and I don't remember anyone asking the taxpayers about it.

Something that only exists on paper is no good to anyone, especially since it hasn't been tested so it is not known what it's true costs are and whether the assumptions behind it are even valid. The only reason for pure theory to even be allowed to exist is because it might lead to application in future, but science has become so corrupt that the dominating majority of the "scientific" output is stupid theory, and actual application gets no respect at all, or as you say "is not the job of academia".

The corruption has gone even further, because there used to be a division between scientific fields and engineering fields, where engineering specifically meant application. But now you can get the same "That's not SCIENCE" bullshit from Professors even if you're in the engineering department.

I'll give you one of many concrete examples. Design for manufacture for antennas could really help improve wireless internet, if you could get handset antennas to narrowcast data instead of broadcasting it, thereby avoiding interference. Try pitching that to a Professor and you'll get shot down.

Next, try AI-based packet scheduling and collision prediction for wireless handsets. The topic is a complete fraud, because you have no idea when the other handset is going to transmit without knowing the future. But you can get lots of Greek squiggles out of that topic, so you'll get greenlighted.

and often times the top level academics

So if there's a problem with academics it's because they're not top level academics, and somehow only the tiny percentage who are top level count... You love your No True Scotsman fallacies, don't you?

[kyzyl]

> No, but YOU are succeeding.

You actually just used the "No YOU'RE stupid!" retort. I'm afraid I'm not the one making sweeping generalizations like "the work of everyone else is irrelevant" when speaking about the development of global agriculture.

There are so many things in your post I want to respond to I don't even know where to begin.

> Bingo! There you go, sounding like an idiot and proving my point.

All you've done is quoted me disagreeing with you and then called me an idiot. And pray tell, what exactly is your point? That deployment is all that matters? This is a pretty common sentiment among engineers... that the general edification of the human race is not a worthwhile endeavor. You know, to become smarter and better people, in addition to building bridges? Unfortunately a lot of the rest of the educated world seems to disagree.

>Getting something into the shop for people to buy is deployment. Deployment is how science started. Look up Archimedes, because he was the guy who started math and physics, building siege engines to defeat the Roman navy. Oh yeah, and medicine and biology started with Imhotep and also the Sassanid hospital system.

What does this have to do with deployment vs. theory? You're giving examples where those people worked on what you call deployment. I'm sure they also worked on theory, because you don't know what theory is going to be deployable until you work on it. Even if those guys were pure engineers, and never worked on theoretical matters, how does what some guy decided to do in triple digits BC have to do with what the NRC should/shouldn't fund now? Nothing.

> This crap ideology you are pushing only came about relatively recently, and I don't remember anyone asking the taxpayers about it.

Okay just to be clear, what ideology is it that I'm pushing? That theoretical work can have some intrinsic value? People have been working on theoretical pursuits for a long time.

> Something that only exists on paper is no good to anyone, especially since it hasn't been tested

Do you seriously propose to know what could come of every piece of theoretical work that could be? No? Well then you also don't know what is and is not of value. Do you disagree with that? Please explain. Also, you seem to be talking about pure theory ("hasn't been tested") on one hand, and on the other hand speaking about unproven technical work (such as AI packet inspection) that has a theoretical bent. Do you think that literally everything that is not yet working and sold is useless? I doubt you do.

>The corruption has gone even further, because there used to be a division between scientific fields and engineering fields

What you're seeing is engineers intelligently realizing that there is more to engineering that just jumping right into the lab.

> you can get the same "That's not SCIENCE" bullshit from Professors even if you're in the engineering department.

It sounds to me like you've had some experience asking professors to let you build something you wanted to build just because you wanted to, and they told you no, so you're angry about it. I have never heard a professor exclaim "That's not SCIENCE!" to any reasonable request. That doesn't mean I haven't heard them say "No.", but I'm sure some other folks here on HN could tune in (if anybody was still reading this thread) and back up my feeling that this sounds like fiction.

>I'll give you one of many concrete examples

I don't know anything about your specific examples, so I can't speak to the details. However, are you claiming that the antenna idea is a sure thing and needs development, yet has been shot down (you've tried?) by many professors (surely you wouldn't characterize all of science based on your experience with one person...) simply because it's not theoretical enough? That hardly seems likely.

> So if there's a problem with academics it's because they're not top level academics, and somehow only the tiny percentage who are top level count...

Erm... I don't think you understood what I said. I said that perhaps the top level academics, who often run labs full of many other academics, are highly driven by the publish-or-perish game because that is how they get funding, and without funding NO research gets done, applied or theoretical. I don't think there's any logical problem with what I said.