Process Engineering Renewal 2

2Highly “Autonomous” Research

Everyone knows the usefulness of the useful, but few people know the usefulness of the useless. (Tchouang-tseu 1969)

The search for the hidden causes of things and events is always ambiguous. The cause, being hidden, does not impose itself by its obviousness. So the question always remains of whether the cause revealed by science, or knowledge – necessarily esoteric, since it concerns the hidden – is indeed an “efficient” cause and not a purely verbal explanation using a reason that has only the appearance of a cause. This is why explanation by hidden causes characterizes both magical thinking and scientific knowledge. (Atlan 1999)

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. (von Neumann 1947)

It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly! (Fermi, quoted in Gleick 2008)

Science has a time which is not that of practice. (Bourdieu 1990)

There always comes a time when scientists lose interest in searching for the new along old trails, when science cannot progress except by developing new methods of research. Scientific concepts themselves may lose their universality. […] Concepts and methods alike depend on empirical results. A new ...