Purism in Science

One of the saddest sights in all of science is that of an expert whose interests have become so narrowed by their field of specialization that they regard everything else as irrelevant and an intellectual nuisance. An extreme manifestation of this is the bias that in their view, what they are researching is the only worthwhile intellectual goal, and everybody else is wasting their time.

In this context I am reminded of a limerick about Benjamin Jowett, a famous professor of Greek at Oxford:

My name is Benjamin Jowett

I am Master of Balliol College

Whatever is knowledge I know it

And what I don't know isn't knowledge

In fact, this kind of chauvinism is a common human trait, and can be observed in every field of human endeavor. I have met musicians who loudly proclaim their tradition to be the oldest and finest (or the newest and most modern); martial artists whose gambit is that their style is the only one that teaches proper punching or kicking; dancers who announce their genre is the best partnering style, and so on. While this attitude is not admissible in any field, it is particularly galling to find it in science, which is supposed to be impassionate and unbiased.

I believe this kind myopia can be traced to two sources. First is the containment within atomized disciplines and lack of regular exposure to other people's work. This is like not traveling to other countries - one starts developing unfounded biases about how these other places run and the kind of people that inhabit them. Visiting the countries completely changes our opinions. This is why travel is a - necessary - form of education. An acceptable substitute is reading.

The second is the natural human tendency to claim superior ground by association. I may not be as good a scientist as Fermat or Euler or Gauss, but I can claim distinction by association by announcing that I 'only do number theory'. I have nothing against people who do number theory - they are fantastic, I am sure, and the field certainly is; I have great admiration for it. My only objection arises when people use their association with fields like number theory to claim superiority over other, perhaps more applied, branches of mathematics, say like hydrodynamics.

The truth, of course, is that every field has its own beauty as well as use. Even in applications and experiments there is great art and beauty. Just look at the cell phone in our hands - what a marvelous construction. Moreover, if we examine the careers of the great scientists, we find they had no qualms about working in multiple (pure as well as applied) disciplines. Gauss made pioneering contributions to geodesy; Lagrange worked in ballistics; Fermi made the first nuclear reactor; von Neumann, Bethe, Feynman, Mandelstam and Oppenheimer worked on the bomb; Dirac participated in isotope separation; Einstein came up with torpedo designs. The examples are actually endless.

In my career I have learned to be wary of such 'experts'. They are useful, but a common problem is that they are not good at realizing their own limitations (the good ones do, of course). I have also found that people who go around posing as intellectual superiors are usually not very creative or productive. Not having down to earth accomplishments, they therefore they find it necessary to bask in reflected glory. To me, a topologist who has not published anything very original in twenty years does not carry much weight compared to an applied scientist who has moved the needle substantially in fuel cell technology (even though I think topology is a magnificent topic). In this context I find it useful to remind myself of a quote a colleague gave me a long time ago:

"I don't judge people by what they are doing; I judge people by what they have done."