Samsara, as taught to me at highschool and stated by Wikipedia, refers to the Buddhist belief in a "cycle of reincarnation and ... mundane existence". To a Buddhist, then, all life, riches and success are pointless with the exception of attaining enlightenment.
We scientists should heed this lesson, for this logic applies equally well to our set of axioms. Our Nirvana consists of making the most accurate observations of nature, creating falsifiable hypotheses which best fit this data and developing a technology which is demonstrably better or more useful than all others in some way.
Let this sink in. Publishing countless highly-cited articles in Nature on the most mathematically elegant theory of the luminiferous aether is garbage science, if it fails to describe experiments in photonics better than our current leading theory. Controversially, I would even argue that such work advances science less than the discovery of some beetle by a retired hobby gardener, much as I am indoctrinated as a physicist to believe that my branch of science is superior to biology. Continuing to develop thermionic valves for computation, or - even more controversially - to work on supersymmetry, is Samsara.
Our cousins working in the tech industry, who have short-term profit and loss hanging over their innovation as the Sword of Damocles, have long known about technical debt, whereby it is ill-advised to struggle with something that would yield little benefit today and would in any case be more easily solved tomorrow. Consider that, assuming a Moore's Law with a doubling time of 2 years, delaying the ill-fated National Ignition Campaign from 2009 until now would have allowed scientists a theoretical factor of 16 improvement in computing power to help direct their fusion experiments. On the other hand, the technology to build LIGO, develop diode-pumped solid state lasers or launch a solar orbiter was just as mature back then as it is today. If we are honest, aside from making a quaint story, the work of Charles Babbage to build a steam-powered computer has had little practical impact on modern computer science.
In debates like "those coal miners made unemployed by their mine closure should find other jobs", I have heard the argument that it would be difficult to retrain to another career. I would question how scientists who intellectually cannot change research fields were able to reach the forefront of their profession in the first place.
Let me end with a different theology, the ending of Medea:
Our wishes do not always come to pass,
yet some god will find a way to make unexpected happen.
So with this story.
Our cousins working in the tech industry, who have short-term profit and loss hanging over their innovation as the Sword of Damocles, have long known about technical debt, whereby it is ill-advised to struggle with something that would yield little benefit today and would in any case be more easily solved tomorrow. Consider that, assuming a Moore's Law with a doubling time of 2 years, delaying the ill-fated National Ignition Campaign from 2009 until now would have allowed scientists a theoretical factor of 16 improvement in computing power to help direct their fusion experiments. On the other hand, the technology to build LIGO, develop diode-pumped solid state lasers or launch a solar orbiter was just as mature back then as it is today. If we are honest, aside from making a quaint story, the work of Charles Babbage to build a steam-powered computer has had little practical impact on modern computer science.
In debates like "those coal miners made unemployed by their mine closure should find other jobs", I have heard the argument that it would be difficult to retrain to another career. I would question how scientists who intellectually cannot change research fields were able to reach the forefront of their profession in the first place.
Let me end with a different theology, the ending of Medea:
Our wishes do not always come to pass,
yet some god will find a way to make unexpected happen.
So with this story.
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