Donald W. Braben - Scientific Freedom_ The Elixir of Civilization-Wiley-Interscience (2008)

Copyright © 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved

科学创新的良药—抛弃同行评审

选译

注：本书中心思想

现代科学（不包括技术）没有什么大的进步，现代技术只是牛顿时代辉煌成就的应用而已。

现代科学停滞、现代科学没有产生能与牛顿时代相媲美的理论的根本原因是：同行评审阻碍了科学的进步。

By the same author:

To Be a Scientist: The Spirit of Adventure in Science and Technology

Pioneering Research: A Risk Worth Taking

同一作者：

做一名真正的科学家：科学技术中的冒险精神

颠覆性研究：值得承担的风险

Introduction

引言

New products, new industries, and more jobs require continuous additions to knowledge of the laws of nature, and the application of that knowledge to practical purposes. . . . This essential, new knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research. Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.

— Vannevar Bush, Science — The Endless Frontier , Report to the US President, 1945, p. 5.

要开发新产品、开创新产业和创造更多的就业机会，就需要不断增加对自然规律的认识，并将这些知识应用于实际…. 只有通过基础科学研究才能获得这些基本的新知识。无论在和平还是战争时期，科学只有作为团队的成员才能对国家福祉做出贡献。但是，如果没有科学的进步，在其他方面再多的成就也无法确保我们在现代世界中拥有健康、繁荣和安全。

-Vannevar Bush，科学-没有尽头的前沿，《给美国总统的报告》，1945年，第5页。

Thinking has always been humanity’s greatest strength. That abstract ability separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom and has brought us to our present dominance. Like skipping in children, it is innate; it does not have to be taught. Civilizations have prospered or failed as our thirst for knowledge has been tolerated or suppressed. Remarkably, however, until the European Renaissance humanity’s progress had been glacial, and centuries might pass before a detached observer might have noticed significant changes to global population or ways of life. The Renaissance then stirred the human spirit, and later created the conditions that launched the Industrial Revolution, first in Britain, and then rapidly elsewhere. Slowly at first we began to harvest our understanding of Nature and to use it for the greater good — material and intellectual. The result was that by the end of the twentieth century the average productivity of every man and woman had increased more than a 100 - fold in real terms since the Renaissance. Global population also increased rapidly, but material wealth in the industrialized nations more than kept pace.

思考一直是人类最大的力量。这种抽象的能力将我们与其它动物王国区分开来，并将我们带到了目前的主导地位。就像孩子们跳跃，人类的思维能力是天生的；它不必被教导。人们对知识的渴望被容许或被压制决定文明的繁荣或失败。然而，令人惊讶的是，在欧洲文艺复兴之前，人类的进步一直很缓慢。一个客观的观察者发现只有经过几个世纪才能观察到可观的人口变化或生活方式的变化。文艺复兴搅动了人类灵魂，创造了发动工业革命的条件。工业革命首先是在英国发生，很快波及到其他地方。起初，我们慢慢地开始收获对自然的理解，并将其用于更大的利益——物质的和智力的。结果是，自文艺复兴以来到20世纪末，每个男人和女人的平均生产力实际增长了100多倍。全球人口也迅速增长，但工业化国家的物质财富增长远远超过人口增长的需求。

This prodigious progress came from our growing ability to harvest the fruits of humanity’s intellectual prowess — scientific endeavor, as it is usually called. Material wealth continued to accelerate through most of the last century despite financial crashes and global wars. But then gradually, around about 1970, signs of major change began to emerge. Science’s very success had unsurprisingly led to a steady expansion in scientists’ numbers. That could not continue indefinitely, of course, and the inevitable crunch came when there were more than could adequately be funded. This was not only a numbers problem — the unit costs of research were also increasing. The funding agencies should have seen this coming, but they did not. Indeed, as I shall explain, many today do not accept this version of events, and are thereby contributing to one of the greatest tragedies of modern times. This perhaps surprising statement arises because the agencies’ virtually universal response to the crisis was to restrict the types of research they would fund. Thus, to use a truly horrible word, they would prioritize , and focus funding on the most attractive objectives — that is, objectives the agencies perceived to be the most attractive. Thus, for the first time since the Renaissance, the limits of thinking began to be systematically curtailed.

这一惊人的进步来自于我们不断增长的智慧——通常所说的科学努力。尽管发生了金融危机和全球战争，但在上个世纪的大部分时间里，物质财富仍在加速增长。但后来，大约在1970年左右，逐渐地出现重大变化的迹象。科学的成功毫不奇怪地导致了科学家人数的稳步增长。当然，这种增长不可能无限期地持续下去。当资金不能支持时，就不可避免的要坍塌。这不仅仅是一个人数问题，研究的单位成本也在增加。资助机构本应预见到这一点，但他们没有。这些机构对危机的普遍反应几乎都是限制他们将资助的研究类型。真正可怕是他们会优先考虑并将资金集中在最具吸引力的项目上，即机构认为最有吸引力的项目。因此，自文艺复兴以来，思维第一次开始被系统地限制，从而导致了现代最大的悲剧。今天有许多人不接受这种说法。

The new policies would seem to have been phenomenally successful. Modern life is enriched by vast and expanding ranges of astounding technologies. Communications, entertainment, food production, leisure, travel, and many other aspects of modern life have been transformed. Closer inspection would reveal, however, that most of this bounty stems from generic scientific discoveries made decades ago, a source that seems to have dried up in recent years. Consequently, our intellectual account is becoming overdrawn at a time when the demands on it are increasing. There is no shortage of initiatives aiming to deal with such problems as global warming, population growth, and terrorism, but one vital factor is usually overlooked.

新的政策似乎非常成功。现代生活因种类繁多的惊人技术而丰富多彩。通讯、娱乐、食品生产、休闲、旅游等许多方面的现代生活都发生了巨变。然而，更仔细的观察会发现，这一切来自几十年前的科学发现，而这个源头近年来似乎已经枯竭。因此，在需求不断增加的时候，我们的智力账户正在透支。旨在解决全球变暖、人口增长和恐怖主义等问题的举措并不缺乏，但一个重要因素被忽视。

Imagine for a moment that you are invited to list humanity’s basic material needs. It would probably contain the obvious things such as food, water, heat, light, health, and security, but it might fail to mention the air we breathe simply because that vital ingredient can usually be taken for granted. Scientific freedom could indeed be placed in that latter category before 1970 or so because research policies then were usually based on laissez - faire. However, we have moved on, as they say. Nowadays, interference is the norm. However, as few funding agencies seem to have noticed, if current policies had applied at the beginning of the twentieth century, say, the world would now be a much harsher place. Today, far from being an inconvenience confined to featherbedded academics, their consequences are approaching “the operation was a success but the patient died” category, and will affect the very foundations of our civilization.

你被邀请列出人类的基本物质需求。你可能列出食物、水、热、光、健康和安全等显而易见的东西，但你可能没有提到我们呼吸的空气这个重要的东西。在1970年左右前，科学自由类似空气这个种类，因为当时的研究政策通常是建立在自由放任的基础上的。然而，正如他们所说，我们已经向前迈进了。如今，干预已成为常态。然而，似乎很少有资助机构注意到，如果在20世纪初实施现行政策，现在的世界将变得非常艰难。如今策略不是仅仅限制了边缘学者的发展。如今策略的结果是“手术很成功，但患者死了”， 如今策略动摇我们文明的根基。

Such abstract qualities as freedom are difficult or impossible to define. Freedom’s loss may be easier to recognize, but it does not necessarily lead to chains. Increasingly nowadays, freedom is a managed commodity, but the consequences are subtle and varied. Indeed, at least for the time being, it is possible for almost everyone to live happily and productively within the current bounds. That is also generally the case in the sciences except for one essential factor. Those exceptionally rare scientists whose revolutionary work can open new horizons can do so only if they have total freedom. The routes to new types of knowledge can be deceptively disguised, and may appear to ordinary mortals as unimportant byways leading nowhere. There must be no filters whatsoever on what they do, therefore, however well intended. Furthermore, their work is vital to future prosperity. In an increasingly complex and populous world, any attempt to limit it will lead us down the path to stagnation and pain.

自由这样抽象的概念是很难定义的。当自由的丧失时，它是显然的并不一定会导致枷锁。如今，自由成为一种被管理的商品，其后果是微妙而不同。就目前而言，几乎每个人都有可能在当前的容许的范围内幸福而富有成效地生活。科学界通常也是如此。但是有一点需要注意：只有在完全自由的情况，那些极少的科学家才能做出革命性的开创性工作。通往新型知识的道路可能隐藏的很好，在普通人根本看不到。因此，无论你的意图多么好，都不能对科学家们的研究爱好做任何筛选。科学家们的研究爱好对未来的繁荣至关重要。在一个日益复杂和人口稠密的世界里，任何限制科学家们的研究爱好的企图都将导致我们走上停滞和痛苦的道路。

Scientific progress comes in a vast number of ways, ranging from the apparently spontaneous comprehension of a new facet of Nature ’ s behavior as typified by Albert Einstein’s research on relativity, say, to the prolonged and often agonizing study of a perplexing phenomenon as typified by Max Planck ’ s work that led to the discovery of energy quantization. But if discoveries are to become part of the scientific lexicon, they must be endorsed by the scientific community, and that can often be problematic. However, leaving social problems aside for the moment, research for most scientists is indeed 99% perspiration with maybe 1% flashes of inspiration that hopefully culminate in the complex pieces coming together to form a coherent picture, at least in the investigator ’ s mind.

科学进步方式很多，难以预料。爱因斯坦的相对论是自发产生的对自然的新理解。普朗克的发现能量量子化是对一个复杂现象经过了一个令人困惑和痛苦的长期研究的结果。但是，如果新的科学发现要成为科学词汇的一部分，就必须得到科学界的认可，而这种需要被公认往往是有问题的。然而，对大多数科学家来说，需要99%的汗水，只有1%的灵感，有希望最终能把复杂的碎片连贯成一幅自洽的画面。

Max Planck was one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century, and therefore an appropriate role model for the story recounted here. In 1933, he wrote a typically succinct comment on the problems facing researchers who perceive serious flaws in accepted wisdom and know what to do about them:

普朗克是二十世纪最有影响力的科学家之一，他的故事为我们树立了榜样。1933年，他就写了一篇典型的简洁评论，内容是：当科学家发现公认理论存在严重缺陷时所面临的问题，以及我们应该怎么应对：

No doctrinal system in physical science, or indeed perhaps in any science, will alter its content of its own accord. Here we will always need the pressure of outer circumstances. Indeed the more intelligible and comprehensive a theoretical system is the more obstinately it will resist all attempts at reconstruction or expansion. And this is because in a synthesis of thought where there is an all-round logical coherence any alteration in one part of the structure is bound to upset other parts also. For instance, the main difficulty about the acceptance of the relativity theory was not merely a question of its objective merits but rather the question of how far it would upset the Newtonian structure of theoretical dynamics. The fact is that no alteration in a well-built synthesis of thought can be effected unless strong pressure is brought to bear from outside. This strong pressure must come from a well-constructed body of theory which has been firmly consolidated by the test of experimental research. It is only thus that we can bring about the surrender of theoretical dogmas hitherto universally accepted as correct.

— Max Planck, Where is Science Going ? Ox Bow Press, 1933, pp. 44 – 45.

物理科学，甚至任何科学中的任何学说体系都不会自行改变其内容。我们将永远需要外部环境的压力来改变公认理论。一个理论体系越是清晰和全面，它就越顽固地抵制一切重建或修正的企图。这是因为在一个有着全面逻辑连贯性的思想综合中，一部分的任何变化都必然会扰乱其他部分。例如，接受相对论的主要困难不仅仅是相对论是正确的还是错误的问题，而是它将在多大程度上颠覆牛顿理论的问题。除非外部施加强大的压力，否则，对一个构建良好的思想体系的任何改变都是不可能实现的。这种强大的压力必须来自一个构建良好的评估体系，该体系已通过实验验证。只有这样，我们才能使已经被公认的理论教条屈服。

-马克斯·普朗克，科学走向何方？牛津出版社，1933年，第44–45页。

These words are as valid today as when Planck wrote them a lifetime ago, and reveal something of the dilemma he faced when he began his remarkable career some 50 years earlier. But the issues he identifies are still relevant. Indeed, they seem invariant and timeless.

这些话在今天仍然适用。这些话揭示了他在大约50年前开始其非凡职业生涯时所面临的困境。但他指出的问题仍然存在。事实上，这些问题是永恒不变的。

One would hope, therefore, that research-funding organizations would have Planck’s thinking in mind whenever they were contemplating new policies. Until about 1970, that effectively would seem to have been the case. However, one must always be careful with generalizations. Not surprisingly, there is a voluminous literature, but it is concerned mostly with the qualities of freedom enjoyed by the profession as a whole. It deals with rights to freedom and academics’ responsibilities to their various sponsors — society, government, industry, charities, and philanthropists — but the extent to which individuals can acquire or lose freedom is rarely discussed. Change in the academic world is often slow, so that my cited date is the peak of a broad distribution. Before 1970 or so, tenured academics with an individual turn of mind could usually dig out modest sources of funding to tackle any problem that interested them without first having to commit themselves in writing. Afterward, unconditional sources of funds would become increasingly difficult to find. Today, they are virtually nonexistent.

因此，人们希望研究资助机构在考虑新政策时都能考虑到普朗克的想法。直到1970年左右，情况一直没有改善。的确有大量的相关文献，但它主要关注的是整个职业所享有的自由、它涉及赞助机构、学会、政府、行业、慈善机构和慈善家的自由，但很少讨论个人的自由。学术界的变化往往是缓慢的，所以我引用的是科学进步的巅峰时期。在1970年之前，终身教授的个人想法通常获得适度的资金来研究他们感兴趣的任何问题，而无需首先以书面形式写申请本子。之后，无条件的资金来源将变得越来越难以找到。如今，它们几乎不存在。

The way forward for ambitious young researchers was once clear, therefore. All they had to do was to acquire the necessary qualifications, and then to find a tenured appointment. To say the least, that was not easy, but not substantially more difficult than it would be today. However, having served their apprenticeship, they were free. They may have had to overcome the inevitable peer pressure if their plans were controversial, but their peers did not have power of veto — see Poster 1. Written applications were necessary if expensive equipment or large teams were required, but tenured researchers with modest needs would meet few obstacles. One’s dedication and talent would usually be sufficient to silence the critics if the problem chosen were controversial, or if progress appeared to be lacking.

因此，年轻研究人员晋升道路曾经是清晰的。他们所要做的就是获得必要的资格，然后获得一个终身职位。当然这并不容易，但也不会比现在难多少。晋升他们就获得了自由。如果他们的计划有争议，他们也有同行压力，但他们的同行没有否决权——见贴子1。如果需要昂贵的设备或大型团队，书面申请是必要的，但需求不大的终身教授几乎没有障碍。如果选择的问题有争议，或者缺乏进展，那么一个人的执着精神和能力通常足以让批评者噤声。

Poster 1: Charles Townes and the Laser

贴子1：Charles Townes 和激光

Charles Townes was awarded his PhD in physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1939, and went on to join the Bell Laboratories, then located in Greenwich Village on Manhattan Island. Soon after, the Bell management directed him to help develop radar-guided bomb – aiming systems as part of the US war effort. This intense work on radar and microwaves, as he describes it, led to his career’s work on molecular spectroscopy. Similar war work had been done at the nearby Columbia University in New York, so when at the end of the war Bell suggested, as they say, that he should focus his work on subjects of interest to the company, he decided in 1948 that he would pursue his own interests, and accepted an appointment as associate professor of physics at Columbia.

Charles Townes于1939年在加州理工学院获得物理学博士学位，随后加入了当时位于曼哈顿岛格林威治村的贝尔实验室。贝尔管理层指派他帮助开发雷达制导炸弹瞄准系统。这项关于雷达和微波的工作导致了他在分子光谱学方面的职业生涯。附近的纽约哥伦比亚大学也做过类似的工作，所以当战争结束时，贝尔建议他应该把工作重点放在公司感兴趣的课题上时，但是他在1948年决定追求自己的兴趣，因此接受了哥伦比亚大学物理学副教授的职位。

For some time, he had been trying to make intense beams of submillimeter radiation, rather than the centimeter or more wavelengths that he had been working with. Eventually, he conceived a possible method to generate photon “avalanches” using excited ammonium molecules. But he could not get it to work. As he relates in his book (Townes 1999):

一段时间以来，他一直试图制造亚毫米级的强烈辐射束，而不是他一直使用的厘米或更长波长。最终，他试图建立了一种方法，利用激发的氨分子产生光子“雪崩”。但他一直没有成功。正如他在其著作（Townes 1999）中所述：

[After] we had been at it for two years, Rabi and Kusch, the former and current chairman of the department — both of them Nobel laureates for work with atomic and molecular beams, and both with a lot of weight behind their opinions — came into my office and sat down. They were worried. Their research depended on support from the same source as did mine. “Look,” they said, “you should stop the work you are doing. It isn’t going to work. You know it’s not going to work. We know it’s not going to work. You’re wasting money. Just stop! ”

在我们做了两年之后，Rabi and Kusch（该部门的前任和现任主任）来到我的办公室，他们都是因研究原子和分子束而获得诺贝尔奖的人，他们都很有分量的人物。他们的研究依赖于与我相同的资金来源。他们说，“你应该停止你正在做的工作。这行不通。你知道这行不通。我们知道它行不通。你在浪费钱。停下来！”

But Townes had come to Columbia on tenure, so he knew he couldn’t be fired for incompetence or ordered around. Nevertheless, the awesome weight of Rabi’s reputation in particular — a one-time senior member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s legendary Radiation Laboratory set up by Vannevar Bush to develop wartime radar — must have been daunting. Such top brass cannot be defied lightly, and showing extraordinary courage, this junior faculty member stood his ground, and respectfully told his exalted colleagues that he would continue. Two months later (in April 1954), his experiment worked, and the maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) was born. Three years after that Arthur Schawlow, Townes’ postdoc at Columbia, had moved to the Bell Laboratories, and their collaboration led to the optical version of the maser — the laser. Townes was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for these discoveries [shared with Aleksander Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov (USSR), who developed the maser and laser independently]. Schawlow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1981 for his work on laser spectroscopy.

但Townes在哥伦比亚是终身任职，所以他知道自己不会因为无能而被解雇或对别人惟命是从。然而Rabi的名声让人望而敬畏——他曾是Vannevar Bush建立的开发战时雷达的麻省理工学院辐射实验室的资深研究员。这样的大领导不能轻视，然而这位初级教员表现出非凡的勇气，坚守自己的立场，并毕恭毕敬地告诉他的崇高同事，他将继续下去。两个月后（1954年4月），他成功了，微波激射器（通过受激辐射进行微波放大）诞生了。三年后，Townes在哥伦比亚大学的博士后Arthur Schawlow搬到了贝尔实验室，他们的合作产生了激光激射器的光学版本—激光。Townes因这些发现于1964年被授予诺贝尔物理学奖[与独立开发微波激射器和激光的Aleksander Prokhorov和Nikolai Basov（苏联）分享]。Schawlow因其在激光光谱学方面的工作于1981年获得诺贝尔物理学奖。

As Planck says, researchers who claim that an accepted dogma is seriously flawed have a duty to persuade the scientific community that their alternative is better. Planck was indeed his own severest critic in this respect as serious researchers often are. As he would have been the first to point out, the status quo should not be changed lightly. He was, in his own words, a reluctant revolutionary. In Planck’s time, academic research was essentially unmanaged, whether by objectives or otherwise. There was no central direction or coordination. The issues involved were largely scientific. That is no longer the case. Now that the new policies are firmly established, for the first time in science’s long history researchers must submit their proposals in writing to an appropriate agency. Spontaneity has been lost. The funding agencies subject these proposals to an arcane set of tests (peer review) designed to flag what they perceive as the best, expecting thereby that the rest will probably be lost.

正如普朗克所说，那些发现公认理论存在严重缺陷的研究人员有责任说服科学界，他们有更好的替代理论。在这方面，普朗克作为严肃的科学家，在这方面是自己的最严厉批评者。他第一个指出现状不应该轻易改变。用他自己的话说，他是一个不情愿的革命者。在普朗克时代，学术研究基本上是无人管理的，无论是客观上还是其它。没有中央指导或协调。所涉及的问题在很大程度上只是科学本身。现在已经不是这样了。新政策已经确立，科学史上第一次，研究人员必须向适当的机构提交书面项目申请。自发研究已经丧失。资助机构对这些提案进行了一系列神秘的评审（同行评审），旨在标记他们认为最好的提案，显然其余提案可能会丢失。

These well-intentioned changes have created lumbering bureaucracies to ensure compliance. They have also inhibited exploration outside the mainstreams and challenges to convention. This is most unfortunate because the great discoveries that transformed the twentieth century came out of the blue. There was no demand for them. One might suggest that the Manhattan Project and the Human Genome Project are among examples to the contrary, but the unexpected discoveries on which they were based had come much earlier. Their successes are monuments to organised creativity and depended on exquisite fine-tuning of existing knowledge and orchestration of resources on unprecedented scales rather than on new science perse. However, scientists today with radical turns of mind — the successors to Planck et al. (see Poster 2 ) — are unlikely to get funded because their ideas are unlikely to impress a committee before they have been confirmed. Consequently, there has been a dearth of major scientific discoveries in recent decades. We are living off the seedcorn.

这些善意的改变造成了笨拙的官僚机构来确保同行评议程序的遵守。它们还阻碍了主流之外的探索和对现行理论的挑战。最不幸的是，改变二十世纪的伟大发现不再能够产生。再也没人需要这些伟大发现。有人可能认为曼哈顿计划和人类基因组计划是相反的例子，但是实际上它们都是以更早的意外发现为基础的。他们的成功是有组织创造力，依赖于对现有知识的精细微调和前所未有规模的资源调配，而不是颠覆性的新科学。然而，如今思想发生根本转变的科学家——普朗克等人的继任者（见帖子2）——不太可能获得资助，因为他们的想法在得到证实之前不太可能感动评审委员会。因此，近几十年来重大的科学发现已经灭迹。我们靠种玉米为生。

Poster 2: The Twentieth-Century Planck Club

帖子2：二十世纪普朗克俱乐部

The twentieth century was strongly influenced by the work of a relatively small number of scientists. A short list might include Planck, Einstein, Rutherford, Dirac, Pauli, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Fleming, Avery, Fermi, Perutz, Crick and Watson, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley, Gabor, Townes, McClintock, Black, and Brenner (see Table 1). However, I give this list only to indicate something of the richness of twentieth-century science. I wrote it in a few minutes, and it obviously has many important omissions. Other scientists would doubtless have their own. If the criteria for inclusion were based on success in creating radically new sciences, or of stimulating new and generic technologies, a fuller list could easily run to a couple of hundred. I will refer to the extended list as the Planck Club or alternatively as

Planck et al. for the remainder of the book.

二十世纪的科学是少数科学家工作创造的。一个简短的名单可能包括普朗克、爱因斯坦、卢瑟福、狄拉克、泡利、薛定谔、海森堡、弗莱明、埃弗里、费米、佩鲁茨、克里克和沃森、巴丁、布拉坦和肖克利、加博、汤斯、麦克林托克、布莱克和布伦纳（见表1）。然而，这份清单只是列出了最富创造性二十世纪科学的人物。我只用了几分钟就写完了，显然有许多重要人物被省略。毫无疑问，其他科学家也会有自己的列表。如果标准是颠覆性科学创新或激激励新技术和通用技术，那么一个更完整的名单很容易达到几百个。我将把扩展的名单称为普朗克俱乐部，或者称为普朗克等人。

However, issues much wider than research are at stake. In everyday life we rely, usually unquestioningly, on humanity’s basic needs being available at affordable prices so that we can get on with our lives at our own pace. For those of us living in the industrialized countries — say, the 20 or so richest states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — we can usually take them for granted. But global population is steadily increasing. In addition, many millions in China and India, for example, deemed hitherto not to have such needs are now beginning to assert their rights to them. Demand for some vital resources — oil, copper, * and water — is increasing rapidly. Many doomsayers take the Malthusian line. Earth’s resources are strictly limited, they say, and we are all going to hell in a handcart.

They are wrong, because they reckon without humanity’s apparently boundless command of the intellectual dimension. Thanks to that precious gift, and despite the havoc of world wars, financial crashes, and a threefold rise in population, per capita economic growth † soared in the twentieth century, reaching a peak, coincidentally perhaps, around about 1970. It then began a steady decline. Unfortunately, however, that decline is now being masked by unprecedented rises in residential and other property values dubbed by The Economist as perhaps the biggest bubble in history (see Chapter 3). Bubbles usually collapse more quickly than they inflate, and who knows what the effects will be. Humanity is indeed blessed with the ingenuity necessary for survival, but much of this priceless asset will be wasted if we smother it with consensus. See Poster 3 .

* The Economist’s metal index published on March 22, 2007 — which includes aluminum, copper, lead, nickel, tin, and zinc — was at its highest level for 16 years.

† During the twentieth century, the average real - terms productivity of every person on the planet increased 4.3-fold despite a 3-fold increase in population.

This book seeks to extend the debate to anyone who takes a serious interest in global affairs — industrialists, academics, legislators, consumers. Sadly, however, even though the fruits of research are essential for modern life, the media seem to confine their interest to specific discoveries; research as an enterprise is generally ignored, and research policies have even less appeal apparently, if that is possible. This indifference would seem to have a simple explanation. Since the Renaissance, the policy on academic research has generally been not to have a policy. Patronage and sponsorship have always been important, but their agendas were diverse and they often backed creative talent for its own sake. Society’s reward was a remarkably steady trickle of astonishing miracles. But times have changed; funding agencies’ mission statements (or other expressions of purpose) are now de rigueur, and often cast in stone. This situation has long been the case for researchers in the industrial sector, but that is to be expected. Industrialists must know where they are going. Now, academics, too, are almost invariably subject to externally imposed constraints. Unfortunately, these dramatic changes seem to have passed the media by, so would - be reformers are starved of the oxygen of publicity.