There are two things that this program made me think. The first is that in cases of this magnitude, anything is possible. In fact it might be both the heat and the impact. That's kind of logical conclusion. But I don't claim expertise on that and hence won't comment on it further. However, the second point is the relevance of investing so much effort into finding evidences and then dismissing them. Evidences are definitely needed to substantiate a claim but my point is at what cost? Take another example, in education research, millions of dollars are spent every year identifying and analyzing problems and then designing solutions for them. We even spend a lot of time investigating issues which are kind of obvious (like if a kid studies in a quiet room then he/she would learn better). We also spend considerable research effort (time and money) into proving the value of a particular education technique (like learning by doing is better than rote learning... kind of obvious too huh?). My point here is not that finding evidence is not necessary or useless. It is absolutely needed but what I am asking is to consider the cost involved in the task. Is it worth the cost?
Saturday, February 6, 2010
What's the price of evidence?
For me this question is mainly situated within the context of research and hence my focus is on experimental evidence. Is spending billions of dollars and thousands of man hours worth the effort in trying to find evidence to support a claim? I was recently watching a National Geographic program where they were investigating the horrible 9/11 attack. There is a lot of controversy surrounding why the twin towers fell down - because of heat from the burning aviation fuel or because of the impact. Numerous agencies have investigated this controversy and have their stories ready for the consumer. Purdue even got a grant allowing them to model the whole incident in way that allows everyone to analyze each second of the impact from 360 degrees and find out what happened. They spent almost 2 years and (I am guessing) millions of dollars in addition to the thousands of man hours into building this excellent model from scratch. In the end they concluded that the building collapsed as a result of heat that melted the steel beams holding the tower upright. However, another agency dismissed this evidence claiming that it wasn't representative of what actually happened and started their own investigation.
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I agree with what you said above. However, you never know what evidence might lead to what. Sometimes, seemingly small findings were later proven to be gigantic because of the kind of applications it was used in. For example, a a marine biologist, Osamu Shimomura found out the cause of the fluorescing jelly fish, the green fluorescence protein. He isolated this protein without knowing what to do with it. Who knew at that time that this protein would be used so much in today's biomedical research world? It is now impossible to imagine developmental, cellular and molecular research without this protein.In 2008, the Nobel prize for Chemistry went to the Chemists Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie for initial discovery and application of this protein in biological research.
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