Not-quite-ivory towers
“How to make the damn thing work?” is the key question guiding most engineers. To answer it, reality has to be faced head-on. As you test your ideas against it, you get to watch again and again “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact”. Incidentally, this is the phrase Thomas Huxley used to describe “the great tragedy of Science”. This tragedy is clearly shared with engineering.
But any tragedy - metaphorical or literal - can also bring improvement, as brilliant people work together to dispel the darkness. In science, this has been the role of academia as an institution and a community of communities devoted to collaborative search for truth.
It is no secret that the academia of yore is gone. Bureaucrats and careerists have infiltrated the ivory tower, which remains standing only thanks to the valiant efforts of true believers. I’m grateful to have done my PhD at a lab where integrity is taken seriously and good science is being done and taught - which definitely left a positive mark on me. Still, not every PhD student is as lucky as I, and so finding honest work amid derivative papers and misleading claims is a disheartening endeavor.
During the first year of my PhD, I wasted time and effort engaging with results from other labs that never should have reached anyone’s eyes - or left the authors’ fingertips. I grew ever more skeptical (anyone who knew me before would be surprised this was even possible!) and disillusioned with the prospects of academia-driven science beyond the walls of (unfortunately) not-too-common good labs.
As an engineer at heart, I’m interested in building things that work and improve the world, so after submitting my thesis, I sought to switch to industry. Of course, industry is no fairy tale, with some companies peddling hot air and some working hard to usher in the apocalypse. Still, it is possible to find a place where reality is faced and then molded to become more accommodating to humans.
When I joined Plumerai last December, I expected to work on a concrete, useful application - and so I do. What I didn’t expect was that, at the heart of the company, there is a little tower of academia-as-I-wish-it-were. Where positive and negative results are written up with no pretense, and the formulaic rigidity of mainstream scientific writing gives way to brevity and humor. Where the tools used to cut the building blocks of a solution are the most applicable ones - even if they are not the fanciest or the most novel.
In short, I found a group of people shaping a part of reality together, building a little tower of our own knowledge. While I find myself happy to be lending a hand, it irks me that the wider world cannot learn about the imaginative designs developed here (building a tower does require resources and therefore secrets) - and that the culture of honest inquiry is spread across separate towers like this one, each built away from others.
I believe that a more collaborative way can be achieved, with innovation shared more broadly and efforts aligned to speed up the building process for everyone. Although shaping institutions is not my calling, I’m convinced it is a job that needs doing. I’m delighted that people stronger than me put their hours and their sweat into trying to revamp the large ivory tower. I salute you as I turn back to our plainer tower and heave another stone on top. It may not be as fancy as ivory but it gets the job done - and the elephants will surely thank us.
(source: Unsplash)