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A Computer Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page M S BE aG F 6 THE KNOWN WORLD Utter Chaos As far as I can tell, they live <strong>lives</strong> of utter chaos. The three of them, all young physicians who seem no older than 16, seize control of the locker room every morning. They apparently finish a rather raucous game just as I arrive to begin my swim. They typically appear with an explosion of noise, a clash of locker doors, and a litter of sweaty athletic clothes that bear the seals of expensive and exclusive institutions of higher education. They talk as if no one else is listening, as if they were standing in the most private seminar room of the local hospital, albeit standing buck naked, dripping wet, and yelling for no good reason. Surprisingly, they talk not of women or sports or one of the few topics of male discourse but of medicine. They pay inordinate attention to every corner and fold of their own bodies and speculate on what signs of good or ill they find. If you believe their words, these young doctors are the most medicated human beings on the planet. They spend an unusual amount of time talking about the medicines that they prescribe for themselves in much the same way that a small child will discuss the color of a recently encountered COMPUTER David Alan Grier, George Washington University No matter what we may believe, scientific practice often begins with a season when we don’t know what we know. puppy. One can be grateful that these physicians know the effects of their own medicine but simultaneously worried that these pharmaceuticals will impair their judgment when they recommend some treatment. For the most part, these young men talk about their cases and the treatments that they recommend. Although most of the medical terms are a complete mystery to the rest of us, we can all tell that these are young doctors who don’t know yet how to be professional physicians. They’re a little too offended when someone questions their judgment. They give far too many details about their patients and make it far too easy for the rest of us to identify, or at least imagine, the individual in question. These young physicians, in spite of their enthusiasm, their elite educations, and their practical experience with drugs, are still learning how to organize and discipline their practice. They’re living a medicine of utter chaos. Their conversation cycles around the various bodily systems, maps every symptom to every possible cause imaginable, and identifies extraordinary lists of information that they would like to extract from their patients. Even with this chaos, they’re still in love with their profession and still excited to encounter new problems. Yet they don’t realize that they’re only now learning to discipline their professional activity, to build a framework that will guide their work. Well before they reach the age of 30, they will learn to organize their professional knowledge into a structure that will guide the rest of their <strong>lives</strong>. UNINHIBITED SPECULATION We usually live so completely within our professional knowledge that we remember the effort required to discipline our thoughts only when we approach a topic that is new to us. New ideas can dislocate that mental structure, that vague semantic network, which gives us a foundation in the field. Over the past three months, I have had many opportunities to demonstrate that a career in computer science can still leave you grossly ignorant of many subjects and completely disoriented as you try to learn the basics of a new topic. The search tools of modern digital libraries give you little guidance in this work. You can retrieve hundreds of articles that seem relevant, spend hours reading material about some peripheral bit of research, and never find that key document describing the basic concepts of the field. Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0018-9162/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE A Computer Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page M S BE aG F
A Computer Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page M S BE aG F After years of doing this kind of research, I’ve learned that all new fields of scientific endeavor will go through periods of utter chaos before they settle into a regular discipline with well-defined terms, stable categories, and general methods. The task of any researcher is to work through the early literature and find that key moment when ideas begin to solidify. THE CHAOS OF RÖNTGEN’S XfiRAYS The early days of physics produced many fields that began in chaos and moved quickly into order. Few present a more dramatic story than the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen in late 1895. To both scientists and the public, X-rays seemed to be an entirely new phenomenon that didn’t exactly fit into the theories of electricity and magnetism that had been maturing over the prior 50 years. Röntgen discovered X-rays in early November and was mystified by them. Being a careful scientist, he attempted to identify the basic nature of this radiation. He assembled his notes from this work into an article that is little more than a list of observations. “A Discharge from a large induction coil is passed through a Hittorf’s vacuum tube,” he begins. This apparatus will cause a piece of paper covered with barium platinocyanide to glow. “The fluorescence is still visible at two meters distance,” he wrote. “It is easy to show that the origin of the fluorescence lies within the vacuum tube.” In the last paragraphs of the article, Röntgen admitted that he didn’t have a theory that explained the properties of X-rays. He rejected as “unlikely” the idea that they were a form of electromagnetic radiation and hence related to visible light. Instead, he speculated that his discovery was an entirely new form of energy. “Should not the new rays,” he asked, “be ascribed to longitudinal waves in the ether?” Had X-rays been less novel, had they not been able to a pass through soft human tissue and reveal the hidden bones, then Röntgen’s speculations about the luminiferous ether and longitudinal waves would have percolated through the community of physicists and would have been tested in a relatively systematic way. However, X-rays were indeed novel, and they could reveal the inner parts of the human body, so Röntgen’s ideas quickly moved into the laboratory and living room. All new fields of scientific endeavor will go through periods of utter chaos before they settle into a regular discipline with welldefined terms, stable categories, and general methods. THE EXCITEMENT OF THE POPULAR PRESS Barely four weeks after the original article appeared, news of this strange new ray reached all the capitals of Europe. “The invention of neither the telephone nor the phonograph has stirred up such scientific excitement as this Röntgen discovery in photography,” reported the London correspondent for The New York Times. “The papers everywhere are full of reports of experiments, and of reproductions of more or less ghastly anatomical pictures.” In general, the Times and other newspapers offered accurate descriptions of the experiments and the phenomena that had been observed. Yet, the papers weren’t scholarly journals and couldn’t distinguish well-conceived theory from rampant assumption. They speculated about what Röntgen meant when he mentioned “longitudinal waves in the ether” and listened to everyone who claimed credit for the discovery. “A French savant is said to have been securing similar results for several years by the use of an ordinary kerosene lamp,” offered the Times, which also claimed that it had found “that this discovery was not only made by a Prague professor in 1885” and that “a full report of the achievement was made to the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1885.” ORGANIZING IGNORANCE Surprisingly, the popular press wasn’t alone in publishing speculation. The discovery of X-rays created a massive wave of papers that crashed on the scholarly community that winter. More than 125 appeared before the first anniversary of the discovery. Some were good. Some were poorly conceived and ill written. Some identified the major applications for the waves. Some wandered into strange and unsupported speculations. The articles appeared so quickly that few could have been reviewed only by an editor and not an outside referee. Researchers would read a description of X-rays in a newspaper, conduct an experiment, and see their results published in fewer than six weeks. Many of these articles were part of a growing chain of work, in which one article spawns new experiments, which in turn spawn new work. Unfortunately, most of these researchers were engaged in speculation that was no better informed than the newspapers. On 14 February 1896, Columbia physicist Michael Pupin published a simple framework for studying these waves, but his ideas had limited influence in those first months. Less than two weeks after Pupin’s paper appeared, a pair of researchers built a simple X-ray apparatus and started applying it to everything that they could find. A colleague asked them to “undertake the location of a bullet in the head of a child that had been accidentally shot.” They agreed APRIL 2010 A Computer Previous Page | Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page M S BE aG F 7
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