On the recent SLAC/Fermilab/U.S. LHC trip to Washington D.C., a challenge was put to us: high-energy physics, as a field, needs a “Theory of Spinoffs”. We sell our field based on the compelling nature of the science, and it’s a great story. But, went the argument, the Congress (and others) need to know the value of every dollar put into HEP. They need to know what the field produces besides knowledge.
We often argue that one of the benefits of HEP is that it constantly redefines the “frontier” of our knowledge and then operates at that frontier, pushing the limits of technology and naturally creating new technology in the process. There are plenty of tangible examples of this. For instance, accelerators were developed to study subatomic particles but it was the ingenuity of a few (Henry Kaplan, for instance) that turned their purpose from the frontier of basic research to the frontier of medicine [1] [2]. Could we have foreseen this cross-purpose for such technology? In hindsight, it seems “obvious” – but ahead of that insight by Kaplan, did anybody really predict that such a spinoff would occur?
As physicists, we often look at these spinoffs as the product of ingenuity and serendipity. As author and thinker Nicolas Nassim Taleb puts it, ” . . . you find something you are not looking for and it changes the world, while wondering after its discovery why it ‘took so long’ to arrive at something so obvious” (The Black Swan, p. 167). That’s the narrative that everybody I know uses to describe the occurrence of the spinoff – we ask certain questions and build new technology to answer them, and along the way we or others think of new uses for that technology that change the world. Accelerators are one example; another would be the creation of industrial infrastructure for the mass production of superconducting magnets, which allowed physicists to build supercolliders but also had the benefit of making it cheap and easy to make MRI magnets. Yet one more example is the World Wide Web; while the DOD developed the internet, it was HEP and its desire to rapidly and easily share papers that developed the web on top of the internet, making finding documents very easy. Think about how that technology, opened up into the hands of entrepreneurs across the world, has changed the world.
In Washington, however, we were being asked for something other than the narrative of the spin-off. The HEP story is “We ask it, we build it, we learn something, and the technology is useful for other purposes we didn’t foresee.” It’s a great story, I think. But Washington wants a better story. They want a “Theory of Spinoffs” – a story that tells them and the public that investment in HEP inevitably leads to new technology, something which changes the world (and makes big bucks for the economy). This more concrete, more cause-and-effect theory, is different from the usual narrative. It goes more along the lines of “We ask it, we build it, we learn something, and we will use the technology to do other things that weren’t foreseen but were inevitable.”
It’s this inevitability that worries me. That suggests certainty about the future, something that we cannot have. The history of physics is the story of the unexpected discovery, the unintended use of an idea or a technology, the application of that which was not thought applicable. My favorite example of the latter is the story of semiconductors. Through the hard work and very basic research of chemists and physicists in the 19th century, we came to document a class of atoms that, in solid form, are semiconductors. That is, they conduct electricity under certain conditions (and even then, not very well) and resist electricity under others. They were seen, to some extent, as uninteresting materials, since metals were deemed more important.
The semiconductors went into books, which went onto shelves, and which them probably gathered a lot of dust. It was much later, in the middle of the 20th century, that work to develop a solid-state current amplification system led to the construction of the first semi-conductor-based devices, and the transistor was born. Did the researchers cataloging the physical properties of semiconductors foresee the boom of the microprocessor, the revolution of miniature and fast electronics on human society? Likely not [3]. Silicon, for instance, was just another interesting substance, confused with a compound at first and then later identified as an element, its properties dissected and published and argued about.
Yet, given the humble beginnings of the computer revolution – the study of silicon and its siblings out of pure curiosity, for the hope of learning about the world and beating your peers to the answers – we live in a world today that cannot IMAGINE a world without the semiconductor. The entire foundation of modern banking, the electrical grid, the government, and your day-to-day American life is built on the semiconductor. Take it away, and you erase a hundred years of human technological evolution.
The theory of spinoffs would have us sell a bill of goods to the public. You give us this machine and we’ll give you that society-altering breakthrough. The theory doesn’t tell us to be specific – just sell the unknown benefit, given the history of all previous documented benefits.
This is where the idea of a theory of spinoffs breaks down, becomes dishonest. You cannot say that the next scientific project will, for sure, yield the next great spinoff. The history of spinoffs from physics tells us that they happen – yes – but it gives us no information for predicting them. That’s the problem, because if we had predicted the spinoff then its impact wouldn’t have been so life-altering. By definition, the history of basic research benefiting society is one of fits and starts, of unexpected twists and turns. We can say for sure that by doing basic research, you will get tangible benefits to society. We cannot say, however, that if you do Project Y you’ll get medical benefit X, or widget Z.
Spinoffs are what Nicolas Nassim Taleb terms “Black Swans”. They are unexpected events that lie outside of the body of our experience, but by being so are life altering and define the march of history. As discussed by Taleb in his book, “The Black Swan”, you cannot predict when a Black Swan will occur but you can predict that they will occur someday. You can only prepare for the Black Swan, but you cannot prevent it because it is, by definition, the thing that happens that you could not predict. There are positive Black Swans – the use of the semiconductor as the basis of modern society – and negative Black Swans – the use of the special theory or relativity and quantum mechanics to create the age of nuclear “mutually assured destruction”.
I’ll conclude this short discussion by saying this: if we are to have a theory of spinoffs, it must go something like this: “We ask much, we build much, we learn much, and we expect that something unexpected will come of some of it that can benefit the nation.” That’s the theory of spinoffs, and that’s how you should sell science (specifically HEP, I guess) to the nation. If you’re a nationalist.
How does such a theory of spinoffs, rooted in the recognition of “black swans”, affect HEP itself? More on that next time.
[1] Physician-physicist partnership built first U.S. medical accelerator
[2] Medical linear accelerator celebrates 50 years of treating cancer
[3] The History of Silicon
