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This passage is adapted from an essay published in 2010.
As I write, the Large Hadron Collider, the world`s biggest atom- smasher at CERN in Geneva, has switched on with almost unprecedented media jamboree. Asked about the practical value of it all. Stephen Hawking has said that "modern society is based on advances in pure science that were not foreseen to have practical applications." It's a common claim, and it subtly reinforces the hierarchy that Medawar identified: technology and engineering are the humble offspring of pure science, the casual cast-offs of a more elevated pursuit.
I don't believe that such pronouncements are intended to denigrate applied science as an intellectual activity; they merely speak into a culture in which that has already happened. Pure science undoubtedly does lead to applied spin-offs, but this is not the norm. Rather, most of our technology has come from explicit and painstaking efforts to develop it. And this is simply a part of the scientific enterprise. A dividing line between pure and applied science makes no sense at all, running as it does in a convoluted path through disciplines, departments, even individual scientific papers and careers. Research aimed at applications fills the pages of the leading journals in physics, chemistry, and the life and Earth sciences; curiosity-driven research with no real practical value is abundant in the "applied" literature of the materials, biotechnological, and engineering sciences. The fact that "pure'" and "applied" science are useful and meaningful terms seduces us sometimes into thinking that they are real, absolute, and distinct categories.
As I write, the Large Hadron Collider, the world`s biggest atom- smasher at CERN in Geneva, has switched on with almost unprecedented media jamboree. Asked about the practical value of it all. Stephen Hawking has said that "modern society is based on advances in pure science that were not foreseen to have practical applications." It's a common claim, and it subtly reinforces the hierarchy that Medawar identified: technology and engineering are the humble offspring of pure science, the casual cast-offs of a more elevated pursuit.
I don't believe that such pronouncements are intended to denigrate applied science as an intellectual activity; they merely speak into a culture in which that has already happened. Pure science undoubtedly does lead to applied spin-offs, but this is not the norm. Rather, most of our technology has come from explicit and painstaking efforts to develop it. And this is simply a part of the scientific enterprise. A dividing line between pure and applied science makes no sense at all, running as it does in a convoluted path through disciplines, departments, even individual scientific papers and careers. Research aimed at applications fills the pages of the leading journals in physics, chemistry, and the life and Earth sciences; curiosity-driven research with no real practical value is abundant in the "applied" literature of the materials, biotechnological, and engineering sciences. The fact that "pure'" and "applied" science are useful and meaningful terms seduces us sometimes into thinking that they are real, absolute, and distinct categories.
以上解析由 考满分老师提供。
