is another year of Nobel Prize awards season. It has been seven years since the last time the Chinese won the Nobel Prize, that is, Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in Pharmacology. During this period, in addition to making up for the lessons in order to better understand the content of the award, we melon-eating crowd are also thinking about a question: Why are we not there this time?
There is a voice on the Internet, that is, it takes at least ten to twenty years to cultivate a scientist. It is normal that China's scientific research career is "just starting", and it is normal that it cannot achieve success in a while. However, now it is clearly past the "just starting" era, so what is the problem?
I have always been slow to new things. Although the word "small town questioner" appeared a few months ago, I didn't even check its meaning until I started writing this article. At least my first impression of it is still in line with its definition: those who are born in small towns and only care about doing questions and don’t do anything else. The meaning of the word can provide some explanation for the questions we raise today.
Tu Youyou Picture source network
Dr. J, the chemistry teacher who is the best relationship with me in high school, once used this to tell what scientific research is: If someone synthesizes carbon chains one by one, and you synthesizes a carbon chain of two carbons on his basis, it is not scientific research, it can only be called repetition; but if you can synthesize a carbon chain of 1,000 carbons on other people's basis, it is called scientific research. But if someone synthesizes 1,000 carbon chains and you make 1,001 carbon chains, it is no longer called scientific research. If you think the concept of carbon chain is a bit difficult to understand, you can think of it as building a building, one or two floors, 1,000-story building.
J's words show that if you want to make scientific research results, you must be brave enough to innovate boldly on the basis of others, quantitative change leads to qualitative change and a qualitative leap. Why is it said to be based on the predecessors? Because looking at the history of science, there are not many times when it opens up a new discipline, but looking at the history of physics, it only takes seven or eight times. Such things are hard to come by and cannot be expected to encounter. Therefore, the work we are doing now is basically standing on the shoulders of giants and looking forward, and further creating new results on the achievements of others. Despite this, innovation is still inevitable, because only it can achieve a qualitative leap, and with it, it must also have the courage and vision of scientific research people, and at the same time, first-class theoretical and practical means.
So what are the traits of our small town worker? If they really become excellent small town testers, they undoubtedly have relatively excellent computing skills. If others come up with a new model, they can solve it. But it seems that it is limited to this. Others throw them new models, they can do them, but they can't think of a new model by themselves. Therefore, they cannot even be considered "first-class theoretical and practical skills", and can only be said to be "having a good knowledge base." It's like saying that a man wants to build a new house. He bought enough bricks and cement, but he would never do anything else.
This can explain why many people have a very painful life after finishing their undergraduate studies and entering graduate school. Because at this stage, the process of learning knowledge has ended, and all we need to do is do some groundbreaking work, which they have never learned or thought about in the past 16 years of education. Even people who live a pretty good life may not have the qualities mentioned above.
A particularly typical example is a Chinese graduate student at the University of Manchester in the UK. His supervisor is the Nobel Prize winner Andre Heim . At that time, the instructor gave him a piece of graphite and asked him to make the graphite sheet as thin as possible. He still adopted the most traditional and most likely polishing method for us. After hard work, he could only make graphite sheets of hundreds to thousands of layers.His mentor chose to use tape to stick graphene and successfully separated it and won the Nobel Prize six years later.
Andre Heim Picture source network
We usually say that if you do too many questions, you will be easy to do. In fact, doing questions is a process of solidifying thinking. The more you do, the more times your thinking is solidified. The advantage of doing this is that it is easy to think of the thinking you have used before when doing the test, so as to successfully solve the problem. But the disadvantages are also obvious: from now on, it will become very difficult to think about problems from a new perspective, and this is precisely the key to pioneering. Therefore, the closer a person is to the small town to do the tester, the farther he is to be away from the scientists.
Of course, I am not saying that scientists do not need to do questions. On the contrary, they need very deep foundation and knowledge accumulation. Without these, research will definitely not be possible. Therefore, just like I oppose blindly practicing questions, I oppose blindly reducing the burden, and advocate that we should still let students master the most fundamental scientific knowledge and skills by doing questions. But at the same time, we should not let questions be the only purpose of teaching, but let students have pioneering thinking.
I did this very well in the middle school: our school is of course very good at doing questions, but that is not all we teach. All teachers are very clear that what they should teach students is the knowledge themselves, not just to do the questions. For example, when we take chemistry class, we will not talk further after we finish acetaldehyde according to the textbook. On the contrary, Teacher J took us to explore the properties of formaldehyde and explore the changes in the properties of matter after one carbon is missing. When Teacher J designed this class, I used him as an assistant in the experiment and designed the experiment we wanted to do in this class with him. It is no exaggeration to say that when I was doing experiments with Teacher J in that dim open laboratory, it was my favorite time to have chemistry.
After entering university, my active brain still didn't stop. Now there are at least five or six ideas in my mind to realize it. I often wonder: What would have happened if I hadn't entered that high school at that time and hadn't met those teachers represented by Teacher J? I don’t think about anything else. The long year of high school full of questions was enough to wipe out all the innovations in my mind. It is very likely that the teacher would say that those are obstacles on my way forward, not my biggest advantage. I may also become a test worker in a small town - to be precise, because I am in Beijing, I am a test worker in a big city, and like others, I live an ordinary and mediocre life.
So back to our original question: How can we make more Nobel Prize winners? I think we don’t need advanced equipment now. What we need is people who can use advanced equipment, nor is it to reduce students’ schoolwork. We hope they can spend the time they save on exploring rather than playing games. What we need to do is to let education return to knowledge itself, based on knowledge and innovation-oriented.
At the same time, we also see that many high-IQ graduates have gone to high-paid industries such as investment and finance. There are fewer and fewer people who can truly be content with loneliness and not rich income to do scientific research in universities and research institutions. Doing scientific research requires enduring years of cold benches and loneliness, because scientific research is a process of accumulating strength. There is no need to say much about the importance of a country's basic discipline research. Historically, it was first of all the breakthroughs in basic scientific research that caused pioneering technological revolutions and changes. For example, Newtonian mechanics and thermodynamics supported the birth of industrial revolution , mainly steam engine and machinery. The development of modern physics represented by quantum theory directly drove the birth of semiconductor technology, nuclear technology , laser technology, information and communication technology and other high-tech industries, which can even be said to have triggered and driven the rapid development of the entire Western high-tech technology.
Without innovation in these basic science fields, there will be no leading in the high-tech industry.Only by effectively improving the treatment of scientific researchers and equipped with a free and relaxed, truth-seeking research environment and research atmosphere can we create a breeding ground for innovation. Even if this cannot bring about changes overnight, perseverance will be possible. In more than ten or twenty years, not to mention cultivating a large number of Nobel Prize winners, at least several Tu Youyou can come.
Author: space author Erxiang's eleven-dimensional space 2022-10-09
His mentor chose to use tape to stick graphene and successfully separated it and won the Nobel Prize six years later.
Andre Heim Picture source network
We usually say that if you do too many questions, you will be easy to do. In fact, doing questions is a process of solidifying thinking. The more you do, the more times your thinking is solidified. The advantage of doing this is that it is easy to think of the thinking you have used before when doing the test, so as to successfully solve the problem. But the disadvantages are also obvious: from now on, it will become very difficult to think about problems from a new perspective, and this is precisely the key to pioneering. Therefore, the closer a person is to the small town to do the tester, the farther he is to be away from the scientists.
Of course, I am not saying that scientists do not need to do questions. On the contrary, they need very deep foundation and knowledge accumulation. Without these, research will definitely not be possible. Therefore, just like I oppose blindly practicing questions, I oppose blindly reducing the burden, and advocate that we should still let students master the most fundamental scientific knowledge and skills by doing questions. But at the same time, we should not let questions be the only purpose of teaching, but let students have pioneering thinking.
I did this very well in the middle school: our school is of course very good at doing questions, but that is not all we teach. All teachers are very clear that what they should teach students is the knowledge themselves, not just to do the questions. For example, when we take chemistry class, we will not talk further after we finish acetaldehyde according to the textbook. On the contrary, Teacher J took us to explore the properties of formaldehyde and explore the changes in the properties of matter after one carbon is missing. When Teacher J designed this class, I used him as an assistant in the experiment and designed the experiment we wanted to do in this class with him. It is no exaggeration to say that when I was doing experiments with Teacher J in that dim open laboratory, it was my favorite time to have chemistry.
After entering university, my active brain still didn't stop. Now there are at least five or six ideas in my mind to realize it. I often wonder: What would have happened if I hadn't entered that high school at that time and hadn't met those teachers represented by Teacher J? I don’t think about anything else. The long year of high school full of questions was enough to wipe out all the innovations in my mind. It is very likely that the teacher would say that those are obstacles on my way forward, not my biggest advantage. I may also become a test worker in a small town - to be precise, because I am in Beijing, I am a test worker in a big city, and like others, I live an ordinary and mediocre life.
So back to our original question: How can we make more Nobel Prize winners? I think we don’t need advanced equipment now. What we need is people who can use advanced equipment, nor is it to reduce students’ schoolwork. We hope they can spend the time they save on exploring rather than playing games. What we need to do is to let education return to knowledge itself, based on knowledge and innovation-oriented.
At the same time, we also see that many high-IQ graduates have gone to high-paid industries such as investment and finance. There are fewer and fewer people who can truly be content with loneliness and not rich income to do scientific research in universities and research institutions. Doing scientific research requires enduring years of cold benches and loneliness, because scientific research is a process of accumulating strength. There is no need to say much about the importance of a country's basic discipline research. Historically, it was first of all the breakthroughs in basic scientific research that caused pioneering technological revolutions and changes. For example, Newtonian mechanics and thermodynamics supported the birth of industrial revolution , mainly steam engine and machinery. The development of modern physics represented by quantum theory directly drove the birth of semiconductor technology, nuclear technology , laser technology, information and communication technology and other high-tech industries, which can even be said to have triggered and driven the rapid development of the entire Western high-tech technology.
Without innovation in these basic science fields, there will be no leading in the high-tech industry.Only by effectively improving the treatment of scientific researchers and equipped with a free and relaxed, truth-seeking research environment and research atmosphere can we create a breeding ground for innovation. Even if this cannot bring about changes overnight, perseverance will be possible. In more than ten or twenty years, not to mention cultivating a large number of Nobel Prize winners, at least several Tu Youyou can come.
Author: space author Erxiang's eleven-dimensional space 2022-10-09
