The New Frontier

The time to pull the trigger on my life has finally arrived. I find myself deciding between working for five years for three letters (P, h, and D), or one year for (hopefully, but unlikely) six digits. I must say, after Summers’ installation, the cult of academia seems pretty cool, with all the robes and the pomp and the circumstance and the bagpipes. But scooting around on the Internet investigating graduate programs, I realized that much of science has become as stale as the moldy bread from the perennial junior-high microbiology experiment.

Each scientific discipline tirelessly plugs away at its own little well-defined niche of the physical world, collecting its stamps. Yes, much of mainstream science has come to resemble philately. Mathematicians dig their way to yet another Truth, even deeper and less applicable than the last. Evolutionary biologists scour the hills for one more pelvic girdle to add to the collection. Physicists build gi-normous machines to refine their test parameters of desiccated theories that have been around for decades, if not centuries. Molecular biologists use polymerase chain reaction on everything in sight to find the next link in some signaling pathway. Linguists chronicle yet another moribund language. Computer scientists, taking shelter from the dot-com disintegration, fret over the computational efficiency of the next trendy problem. Economists run endless regressions on the next exogenous variable they have failed to account for, and get it wrong anyway. Each field has its stamps, and all are licking and sticking in their favorite journal.

Have I unfairly characterized your beloved field? Maybe. But the fact remains that in all of these fields, the standard methods of data collection and the major theoretical superstructure are all well established, and all that remains is to flesh out the skeleton. Not much earth-shattering, pedestal-smashing paradigm shifts are likely in such well-buttressed fields.

Ok, this is not quite true either. A revolution will come with the marriage of gravitation and quantum mechanics in physics, economists don’t really know what is going on out there (no matter what Paul Krugman says), and linguists are groping in the dark for foundations as well. But the wild days before the structure of DNA, or before an expanding universe, or before the periodic table, or before Chomsky, Turing, Darwin, Keynes and Einstein are long gone. The great men and their great discoveries have sucked the exhilarating marrow out of the great fields of science. All we do now is stand on their shoulders to collect stamps that nature has stuck to the ceiling.

But I am not trying to belittle these efforts. The stamp collectors who will determine the biochemical pathways of the human body will bring more good to this world than anyone might imagine. However, the “Eureka,”—the breathless chase of uncharted physical processes—is what I am after.

So where is the great wilderness of science, the frontier of the known universe? I think of the major scientific fields as blots of ink on a pristine white cotton-blend paper. As the inkblots themselves expand, the remaining unsullied stretches of undiscovered phenomena exist just where these blobs are about to merge with one another. The edges, the boundaries, the regions straddling two expanding scientific enterprises represent the cross-disciplinary jackpots of the 21st sanctuary. These are the wild fields, the fields in flux, the fields that make you want to ride on out on the range and pan for scientific gold.

What are these cross-disciplinary Wild Wests? Here are a few I am aware of, and spark my interest: 1) Mesoscopic physics: The interaction of matter right between the quantum level and the classical level. 2) Quantum computing: Using the quantum world to perform what seems like black magic inside of computers. 3) Genetic algorithms: Merging CS with evolutionary biology to evolve efficient programs, getting useful algorithms without actually having to think about their design. 4) Bioinformatics: A melange of mathematics, CS, biology and accounting. 5) Rational drug design: Coupling molecular dynamics modeling with physics and chemistry to intelligently design useful compounds. 6) Rational choice theory: A shotgun marriage of mathematics and social studies with weird, but thought-provoking results. 7) Nanotechnology: An amalgamation of robotics and molecular chemistry. 8) Computational linguistics: A dash of mathematics, a pinch of CS and a smattering of linguistics. 9) Memetics: The red-headed lovechild of evolutionary biology and sociology.

Before you sell your soul in order to become a cog in the capitalist machine, you might consider strapping on your six-shooter and carving out your own interdiciplinary realm in a still-fertile fielda of science. But you had better hurry, as we humans feel it is our sacred duty to explore and conquer all that is unknown in what might be considered a scientific Manifest Destiny. So if you want to get yourself your own little homestead, well you had better hitch up the wagon before The West becomes domesticated, and riddled with post offices.

B.J. Greenleaf ’01-’02 is a physics concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.