29/05/2018

Science & Math Blog: What is the purpose of Science?

Reproduction from the IMPA Science & Mathematics blog, from O Globo, coordinated by Claudio Landim.

Luiz Davidovich ¹

A theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct.

than an ugly theory that agrees with some experimental data.

Paul Dirac (1902-1984)

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young people sparked a revolution in science by formulating a theory that radically departed from classical concepts: quantum physics. A new vision of nature emerged: light behaves sometimes as waves, sometimes as if it were composed of particles; atoms and electrons could also exhibit wave-like behavior. The first glimpse of this appeared in the work of Max Planck in 1900 and Albert Einstein in 1905. The young people responsible for this conceptual revolution had no idea about the possible applications of this new physics: they were driven by curiosity and a passion for knowledge.

One hundred years after Planck's work, an article published in Scientific American by American physicists Max Tegmark and John Archibald Wheeler showed that, in the year 2000, approximately 30% of the American Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was based on inventions made possible by quantum physics, from semiconductors in computer chips to lasers in CD and DVD players, magnetic resonance imaging machines in hospitals, and much more.

History is rich in examples of discoveries in basic science, driven by curiosity, that ended up causing great transformations in the daily lives of humanity. This was the case with electricity, explored in experiments by the great British physicist Michael Faraday. In 1831, he discovered that an electric current was produced in a copper wire when it was moved in a magnetic field—a discovery that gave rise to electric power generators. When questioned by the then British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Gladstone, about the usefulness of the effect he had just discovered, Faraday replied: "There is a high probability, Sir, that you will soon be able to tax it."

In Brazil, too, science has had a fantastic return: it has enormously increased the efficiency of agriculture, made possible the extraction of oil from the pre-salt layer—today more than 50% of Brazilian production—, allowed for the tackling of emerging epidemics, the enrichment of uranium for nuclear power plants, and the emergence of several high-tech companies with international prominence.

Today, the increasing speed of scientific and technological advancement is narrowing the gap between basic scientific discoveries and their applications. For this very reason, in 2012, amidst a global crisis affecting its economic growth rate, China increased its resources for basic research by 26%. The European Union plans to reach 3% of GDP in research and development by 2020. South Korea and Israel already exceed 4% of GDP. Meanwhile, research funding in Brazil is stagnant, at around 1% of GDP, threatening the achievements already attained and undermining the country's economic and social development.

1Full Professor, Institute of Physics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and President of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

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