Disrupting Science

Disruption is new the buzzphrase for everything entrepreneurial. However, I am not sure how many of the innovations that excite the press are truly disruptive in the way that perhaps we might see before too long.

Certainly, we live in a time of greatly expanded business opportunity as digital platforms for innovation proliferate. There are many pretty conventional ideas that can receive a welcome and rewarding face-lift with new technology.

The sharing economy is one stellar example. 

The disruptive idea at the core of Uber and similar firms is to increase the asset utilization of private assets by creating a two-sided marketplace between the owner of the asset and those who might well pay to use it. Labor might well be part of that service and with the very low search costs provided by the cloud and mobile app delivery you soon have a massively scalable business.

This is most definitely new, disruptive of old practices and (I think) exciting.

However, I do wonder if we have really seen the true disruptive possibilities on offer once one begins to think differently about social organization.

The area I have been thinking about most in the last five years concerns what I think is a massive opportunity in disrupting the practice of science.

This is not an idle thought, nor really an original one, but part of a trend which has been building for some three decades as a natural reaction to the steady institutionalization of scientific research.

We can see early signs of change in the movement towards open access scientific publications, the renaissance of the corporate R&D department (Microsoft and Google are prime examples, but now Facebook) and the return of some pretty standout private science-based entrepreneurship like Craig Venter's Celera Genomics and Elon Musk with Space-X.

On the one hand, there is nothing new about private science. Think Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi or Nikolai Tesla. Not many remember now, but Marconi actually won the 1909 Nobel Prize for physics for his work on the practicality of radio transmission. Even fewer people today would know that Alfred Nobel intended his prize to reward scientific discoveries in the practical service of mankind. It was (of course) to be a predominantly academic reward, but the tilt towards that goal has now become so extreme that I doubt Nobel himself would recognize the present prize as his own brainchild.

Private science is nothing new, but the phrase today does seem somewhat odd in the context of typical reporting, commentary and funding discussions. Here in Australia I see substantial press commentary on the "need for more Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduates". I welcome this renewed interest in "growing the seed corn" of tomorrow, but find myself rather bemused by the commentary. Since I am a STEM graduate who specifically left academic science due to the then poor career structure and overly bureaucratic R&D management process, I find it difficult to comprehend why any young person in their right mind would study science or engineering today!

While I personally excel in mathematical physics, these days I rarely, if ever, do much in the field because the reward structures and incentives are non-existent.

Perhaps not everyone with a scientific or mathematical talent is as mercenary as I am, but I would suggest that the policy folk might usefully consider the career experiences of talented R&D people over the last three decades.

It has not been a bed of roses.

In my case, I made a very simple summation on note pad in 1995:

1) Time until present crop of professors retire... 20+ years, most likely starting in earnest around 2010 and peaking out around 2020

2) Ratio of pay between what I do now and what I would earn if I went into finance and fixed the broken Excel spreadsheets of Wall Street ... x2 to x5

3) Likelihood that any original research I do actually gets public recognition... ZERO (I had already had one person plagiarize my work in the premier physics journal of the day, which situation I am sorry to say has not changed)

When you put it like that, with a pinch of reality thrown in, then it should not come as any surprise that I quit theoretical physics and went into finance.

However, like many smart and forward-thinking youth in the 1990s, my brain did not immediately turn to mush just because I went to Wall Street.

Quite the contrary...

I learned something deeply amazing.

Wherever there was money and the right incentives to innovate then private innovation would very quickly outpace public innovation. 

Needless to say, this was not then in physics.

It was in financial economics and decision theory. The innovations that were made in those fields did not really become discussed or current in the academic literature until some ten to fifteen years *after* they appeared in private. This I can say with some confidence, having rubbed shoulders with some of the folk that made such innovations in the field of high frequency trading.

One might lament the fact that private interests profit from innovation of this kind before it becomes widely known and the academy brings up the rear!

I must admit, I find the disconnect I experience between the reality of leading private R&D efforts and the public perception quite disconcerting.

It seems like somebody is not quite being truthful somewhere.

However, I am no fan of conspiracy theory. I am in the camp that most every failure of the human condition is down to ignorance over malice.

In the case of Academia the problem is very plain to see.

The R&D effort has become too narrowly divided and overly specialized to permit much breakthrough thinking to flourish. It is in the nature of the scientific enterprise that innovation on a broad front must undermine established reputation and authority.

The great German physicist Max Planck put it very succinctly:

Science advances one funeral at a time

It might seem harsh, but is accurate and apropos of our time in history.

The very same logic I wrote on a napkin in 1995 now informs my entrepreneurial activity. As a mathematician, I know where the bodies are buried, so to say.

The strange irony of our time, and the very great spur to action I would offer to anybody contemplating a career in STEM, is this:

The great trans-formative discoveries needed to advance most scientific enterprise on a broad front have already been made.

What I mean by that statement is something rather simple. 

I am not talking about anything I may have personally done. I am simply making an observation, in general, about a moment in history.

If you pick most any science since 1960, you can observe a trajectory of increased specialization, expanded public research, a rapidly growing administrative bureaucracy and perverse research incentives.

In particular, there was in the post Cold-War era a steady and increased emphasis on popular research, as measured by citation indices. The more popular the work, the more a researcher could attract funding, and the more popular a niche topic, the more researchers crowd into it. This peculiar behavioral anomaly is not really natural to the scientific instinct.

The scientists I know are not given to seek popularity for its own sake. However, the way global publicly funded R&D grew made it so. The natural result of this period of history should not surprise anybody.

There  were some splendid discoveries made but they were not popular.

I can think of a few in my own area of physics. They were not popular when made (not by me, I hasten to add), in the 1980s and early 1990s. They are still not popular now, and perhaps not even widely known.

This is a kind of social paradox, really... and one open to entrepreneurship.

Why let good ideas go to waste?

If someone, a scientist, made significant progress along an unconventional path at a moment in history when the Academy went senile, then why waste that?

I, for one, have identified several such opportunities across a range of largely mathematical areas in which I feel comfortable making my own bets.

However, I say this publicly since I think the phenomenon of Academic Senility is so widespread that we are really on the cusp of a giant trend.

Perhaps I am wrong, but the situation is not unprecedented in history.

There are some periods of the human evolutionary trajectory which are best considered an anomalous degeneration: Peak Stupidity, if you will.

They are temporary, and amusing while they last, but a very poor guide to what happens next, which is generally a flowering of true revolutionary advances. I have seen enough encouragement in the growth of new business activity to feel that such a time is now upon us. All it takes is one Elon Musk to light the way...

Perhaps we will look back on the period 1985 to 2015 as the Dark Age of Science.

It was the time when the edicts of Academic superstition prevented new ways of thinking coming into the light of scientific understanding.

Certainly, I believe this to be true of mathematics which seems now to be highly arid, overly pedantic and very disconnected from real-world problems.

Somewhere among those folk considering a career in STEM I am sure we will find the Einstein's, the Poincare's and the Tesla's of tomorrow.

The time is very ripe for Scientific Disruption.

That time is now.