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PALESTRA ESPECIAL
Dia 7 - terça-feira
18:45 - 20:00
How advances in science are made
Douglas D. Osheroff
Physics Department, Stanford University
How advances in science are made, and how they may come to benefit mankind at
large are complex issues. The discoveries that most influence the way we think about nature
seldom can be anticipated, and frequently the applications for new technologies developed to
probe a specific characteristic of nature are also seldom clear, even to the inventors of these
technologies. One thing is most clear: Seldom are such advances made by individuals alone.
Rather, they result from the progress of the scientific community; asking questions, developing
new technologies to answer those questions, and sharing their results and their ideas with
others. However, there are indeed research strategies that can substantially increase the
probability of one's making a discovery, and the speaker will illustrate some of these strategies
in the context of a number of well known discoveries, including the work he did as a graduate
student, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1996.
This is a very popular lecture. In it I describe how a number of discoveries were made, and
how a few new technologies were developed and why. I spend quite a bit of time describing
the development of NMR, as a specific example of how important new technologies often
come from the world of basic research, and the the developers of these technologies often
haven't a clue as to what the ultimate value of their development will be. I also spend a bit of
time talking about my discovery of superfluid 3He, as I know more about that discovery than
any of the others.
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