Claim: Researchers should not limit their investigations to only thoseareas in which they expect to discover something that has an immediate,practical application.
Reason: It is impossible to predict the outcome of a line of research withany certainty.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree ordisagree with the claim and the reason on which that claim is based.
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This statement bridges the fact that most predictions about research haveuncertainty with the conclusion that researchers are not supposed to only dothe investigations which are more practical. While I totally concur with thespeaker's conclusion and the reason that outcomes of a line of research arealways not certain, I'm not so sure about the inference process between them.We should encourage scientists to make deep and profound researches becausemany scientific innovations are made because of the research in deep and theoreticallevel.
As the speaker says, scientific research is rife with uncertainty.Therefore, we do not able to predict the outcome. For instance, it is alwaysthe case that a scientist doesn't agree to a point of view initially, and hedesigns a host of experiment to prove that stand point is wrong. But after heconducts these elaborate tests, he found he was wrong and that opinion istotally correct, so he changes his mind eventually. In this case, the scientistpredicts an outcome at the beginning, but it turns out to be wrong after theexperiments. This implies that prediction errors are quite common in the fieldof science. Nobody can be sure about some predictions.
Although the reason part of this statement is correct by itself, but wecannot effectively get the conclusion that researchers should not limit theirresearch in areas that are more likely to bring benefit to the society. If nowwe assume that we can identify which area is more likely to benefit people, weshould devote much effort in investigations about them. Even though theoutcomes are not predictable, once we shut one way to the wrong direction, itbecomes easier to find the correct way to success. And once we get closer tosuccess, we stand closer to put the research into practice or even industries.Hence, it must better our life more directly. In this sense, wrong predictionsshouldn't be the obstacle of doing research in practical fields.
So why shouldn't researchers concentrating more on practical areas? Thereason is that in most cases, nobody knows which area is the practical one andtheoretical research which seems pretty far from the real world can enlightenscientists to discover other things practical. A very classical example is thefoundation of complex number system. No one can imagine a number can be thesquare root of -1 in the real world. But when Cardano encourage people to use"i" to indicate this imaginary number, everything becomes clear andthis "i" turns out to be really useful. It was likely that peoplethought Cardano was insane because he came up with something that is notpractical at all in daily life, but when the complex analysis system wasestablished, this unnoticeable lower case letter helped people with solvingmany difficult problems both in physics and even biology fields, which arerecognized as practical to the society. To sum up, doing theoreticalinvestigations can encourage and enlighten researchers to discover new factsthat are practical.
A location problem of theoretical researchers is an abstract but interestingproblem. It's obvious that theoretical investigations are not always thatwelcome than immediate and practical research. But they are necessary to thesociety because they can always give some hints to people for dismissing themysteries in our daily life. | 
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发表于 2013-2-15 16:31:29
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