by jcarden on 9/6/12, 6:25 AM with 19 comments
by rubidium on 9/6/12, 12:59 PM
Whitesides: "I don't have strong feelings about that. There are so many problems in the world"
I've was recently at a conference with a bunch of Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Chemistry. I was asking them a similar question, and some version of Whitesides reply was what I almost always got.
by 6ren on 9/6/12, 8:00 AM
it's very easy in academic science to end up working on projects that are just
little extensions of previously known stuff, and that's sort of a waste of time.by __Joker on 9/6/12, 7:58 AM
by 001sky on 9/6/12, 6:44 AM
Whitesides: There's an intellectual problem, which is the origin of life. The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a chemist, which I just don't understand. I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactions that are getting more complicated spontaneously. I just don't understand how that works. So that's a scientific problem.
--This is a rare, intellectually honest view of Evolution. Notice, there is reasonable doubt. However so constrained.