从”原始创新”说起

这里谈论的”原始创新”的意思是 original and creative scientific researchworks.

这个词儿现在之所以变得流行，大概是因为中科院的院长路涌祥．他对研究人员讲要做原始创新工作．然后他又搞了中科院的”创新工程”．这在很大程度上是对研究人员的一次折腾．研究人员，包括院士，都要被重新评价合格后才能上岗．４年后再重评．连续三次上岗者方可成为”创新工程”内的永久研究人员．对很多人这只是走过场，特别是院士．所以折腾的并不厉害．

据我所知，路涌祥在视察理论物理研究所时，郝柏林院士直接了当的告诉他，创新这事本来就是做基础研究的人天天想做和在做的（当然做到什么程度，依赖于研究人员的水准和机遇）．路当然也不致于不知道之一点，他也是做研究出身的．其实文革时搞”革新”不是一个意思吗？但路为什么还要提呢？他提”原始创新”是为了配合江泽民在此之前说的发展中华文明需要创新．同时也是为了让国务院给中科院研究人员加薪有个好听的名目．简而言之，是为了其政绩．

站在管理者的角度，这种折腾并非完全没有道理．我相信，路也和大家一样，对国内的科学研究状况是不满的．一个诺贝尔奖也没得．就是拿的出手的工作也不多．可是喊创新后，新就能被创出来吗？当然不会．上面已经说了，大家本来就在创新，只不过（还）没创出来．

加工资有用吗？以前国内知识分子工资低，绝对应该加薪．但加薪对创新本身不会有直接的作用．而且４年一评，鼓励了短期行为．加薪可以稳定科研队伍，调动其积极性．但是如果某些研究人员的积极性还需要用钱来调动的话，他们的创造能力就值得怀疑了．已知的重要科研成就中，哪一项不是科学家们以其巨大热情努力工作的结果呢？何况全世界科学家都在竞争！

说来说去，”创新工程”也就是提高了科学家的生活待遇．这一点非常值得肯定．

再说说大学．最近清华大学提出”重新洗牌”．什么意思呢？就是以前评的教授都不算，要重新评（快退休的老教授不在重评之列）．因为以前的标准低了，现在要办成世界一流大学，标准要提高．这不也是折腾教授们么？反过来，从校方的角度，也是有道理的：如果你们这些年青教授大都作出很一流的工作，我们还会提”重新洗牌”么？如果清华大学”洗牌”成功，教育部也可能让其它大学效仿．

呵呵，现在国内科研的局面是：一方面学术研究水平普遍低；另一方面管理者急于求成．整体水平低是阻碍进步的内因．它会使投资浪费于没有创造性的工作和没有创造力的人上；它会使研究人员出现所谓学术腐败；它会使良好的学术制度建立不起来．没有重大成就，管理者就不可避免的要介入，来折腾你．但愿这些折腾有一定积极意义，别把真正埋头苦干的人给折腾掉．

怎样才能突破这个局面呢？怎样才能建立好的学术制度，从而使研究水平普遍提高呢？答案不同人有不同看法．我觉得有一种可能，那就是突然出现一个中国本土的诺贝尔奖得主．这种偶然性在这么大的国家是存在的．一旦有了这么个主儿，哪个管理者也不敢来折腾他／她．进而国家就以这个人的学术标准建立学术制度．管理者从此不再折腾科研人员．希望这样的事早日出现．

the greatest physicist in our time

edward witten has done many important works in theoretical high energy physics. since the mid 80's of the last century, he has been the leader in superstring physics. i believe if you have learnt his works, you would agree that he is the greatest physicist nowadays. although within one century it might be rare to see two newton-level scientists (another is albert einstein), it happens that witten is indeed great.

witten's thinking ability is very very strong. as far as this point is concerned, i think he should be ranked as number 3 in the history of physics. if his achievments is not as significant as einstein's, that is because he lives in a wrong time. (as far as contribution is concerned, the first three should be galileo, newton and einstein.)

he can work both in physics and mathematics (geometry). you know, only newton has this ability.

although i do not believe it, but there is a chance for witten to be as great as newton, or even greater. that is through his effort, the final theory for elementary physics is found. now he, and many others under his influence, are seeking for such a theory (string or m-) by studying the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as by thinking of smallness and positiveness of the cosmological constant.

this final theory, if it exists and can be found, still lies hid in night. string theorists have just found some small parts of it (pertubative string theories, d-branes and the string duality). the work of finding such a theory is somehow like that of newton for the classical physics or bohr for quantum physics. furthermore, because too little experimental facts are known, such working is also like einstein's effort in looking for the general relativity.

on the other hand, personally i do not blieve we can find such a theory within this thousand years, because we may lack of too much information of it, which human being cannot understand without further experiments at very high energy.

reincarnation (轮回) is just a belief

it is good that reincarnation is introduced in detail. however, whether there is reincarnation or not is purely a matter of personal belief. reincarnation has nothing to do with physics and science. it can be never proved nor disproved experimentally. let me explain the idea of reincarnation more theoretically.

the concept of reincarnation originates from the question "why echo?". every human being is essentially curious about the existence of himself/herself, like "why am i me?", "why am i not you or any other person?". these questions have no sense from the point of view of science. note that it is not asking why there is life, or why people can think, which can be studied scientifically in priciple. it is asking something about "echo". one further of such question is "is it true that after i dead, i will never sense the world although it lasts forever? in other words, will i totally disappear?". these questions maybe relevant to a person's attitude towards his/her own life. namely real religion sits on them.

buddha answered these questions by understanding echo as a composition of all the sensations. in certain sense, he thought that the world is made of sensations. therefore, after one life is dead, the echo does not disappear, because the world is there, all the sensations are still there. echo should re-appears in another living body. you see the concept of reincarnation comes out. note he did not deny, but was not interested in the real material world. he emphasised on the world of spirits. in modern language, budda's answer can be interpretted as follows. because of its self interactions, the universe can sense, can feel itself. that is echo! namely the universe knows the existence of itself. the sensation, or this "knowing" composes the echo. in other words, echo is nothing but the self interaction of the universe. therefore, echo exists all the time, currently in a manner from one human life to another.

many wise people have realized similar answer as buddha, they are all buddhas in the sense of original buddhism. (i do no imply that otherwise people are not wise.)

as far as the memory is concerned, it is a function of brains. it can be a subject of science. with the death of brains, memories are lost.

the above is my own understaning of the concept of reincarnation. i think it is more close to the original idea of buddhism, although it is in modern and some scientific terms. the understanding might be incomplete for some people. it deserved further developments. that is the reason that there have been so many different schools of buddhism. note from the explanation, you can see that reincarnation cannot be proved in any scientific way. it simply says that the universe feels itself.

in one sentence, you (the sensation of echo) are always in this world.

(i am sorry for using english with gramma and word mistakes, i cannot print chinese characters in my current computer.)

加入时刻: 20:30:32 3/31/02

see also: http://www.xys.org/forum/messages/62858.html

effective theories, dualities, and the chinese medicine

inspired by debates on the chinese medicine in xys, i would like to say something about concepts called effective theories and dualities. is it possible to incorporate the traditional chinese medicine into the framework of western medicine?

recent developments in elementary particle physics (and in superstring physics) have made some concepts, such as dualities, effective theories and so on, to be very useful and interesting. for an example, let us talk about the particle pion. the pion is a meson which mediates strong interaction (like that photons mediate electromagnetic interaction). this interaction combines protons and neutrons tightly inside nuclei. the quantum chromodynamics provides a basic description for the pion, such as a pion is made of quarks and gluons. at low energies, however, the quantum chromodynamics cannot give definite predictions to the pion behavior by ordinary calculations. at low energies, pion can be better described by the chiral perturbation theory. this theory is a low energy effective theory of the quantum chromodynamics. instead of being regarded as a composite particle, the effective theory takes pions as basic degrees of freedom. the effective theory provides a dual description to the quantum chromodynamics with a very different language.

dual theories often adopt totally different basic degrees of freedom, terminologies, and therefore different laws. the interesting point of dualities lies in the fact that duality is a general phenomena. an example in biology is that the darwin's theory of evolution can be regarded as an effective and dual theory of the dna theory in describing creatures in a long time scale. it is quite general that the microscopic description is more fundamental than its dual description. however fundamentalness does not necessarily mean usefulness. in certain cases effective theories make clear and powerful descriptions, whereas microscopic theories are incapable of working.

i know little about the chinese (oriental) medicine. its basic concepts are totally different from the western one. it uses different terminology. for examples, it takes the human body as a whole with a net connected; it roughly classifes some diseases according to "yin" and "yang". but i know that it is useful in some cases. since 1950's, china has tried to combine the traditional chinese medicine with the western medicine in medical research. there might be some progress. but i do not know how deep the reseach has reached.

i wonder if the basic chinese medicine, or some part of it can be regarded as a dual medicine which is an effective theory of the western medicine. if this is true, this part chinese medicine maybe given a real scientific foundation. if this conjecture makes sense, the following conditions must be satisfied.

1. the basic chinese medicine theory (or some part of it) is valid in some regions, and in some cases where the western medicine cannot provide clear description. even though the western medicine is more foundamental, it does not mean it has clear pictures everywhere. of course this part of chinese medicine should not be in contradictory with the western medicine. furthermore, it may have some general support from the western medicine's theory.

2. it must be a subject of sciences. namely it is based on experiments. it is falsifiable. but for the time being it is not necessarily to have obvious relation to the western medicine, because this detailed relation maybe hard to be found . in principle, the chinese medicine will be derived from the western medicine finally.

3. the other large part of the whole chinese medicine should be thrown away. it would be too much accidental if the whole chinese medicine is the dual medicine of the western medicine. in this sense, the chinese medicine must have limited application, compared to the western medicine.

i have noted that several days ago, a friend asked if the two medicine theories can be regarded as two different pictures of the same theory. i think it is more reasonable to regard the chinese medicine theory to be an effective one of the western medicine. the latter describes human body microscopically, which is therefore more foundamental. on the other hand, the chinese medicine theory takes a human body as an integral object. this picture should be only valid in some limited situation, if it is not nonsense at all. finally i want to add that this is not a hoax post. the relation between the two medicine theories is just a conjecture. other people might have the same idea.

see also: http://www.rainbowplan.org/lib/dir01.txt

theoretical physics as a subject of science

theoretical physics sometimes is regarded as a subject of purely thinking. however this is not really true. nevertheless it is based on experiments, like any other scientific subject.

science is a method to understand nature, the key point of this method is that experiment is the only way to verify if the understanding is correct or not. any understanding by definition involves certain logic (sometimes the logic is precise, that is mathematics). so it is very correct to say

科学 (science) = 逻辑 (logic) ＋实证 (experiment).

take quantum mechanics as an example. there is no any conflict between above statement and the establishment of quantum mechnics. without relevant experiments, no one could even imagine out the physics of quantum mechanics, no matter how free his/her idea is. new logic and concepts have been cooperated in the new theory, of course. but the above statement never insists on that the logic should be the one in the old theory. by the way, the physicists who proposed quantum mechanics were pretty aware that their new theory has to recover the classical physics in the area where the old physics had been verified experimentally. actually, this was their main working point.

in fact, einstein established his general relativity in a similarily scientific way. the special relativity and newton's gravity physics are in conflict with each other. motivated by this problem, he went to the general relativity with an idea of the curved spacetime. what i mean here is that he didn't come to the general relativity from nothing, or from his free willing.

it might be misleading to emphazise on idea freely invention. even scientist great like einstein, who failed in his effort to find an unified theory of gravitional interaction and electromagnetic interaction. such an unification is just his willing.

it is well-known that based on the same experimental facts, scientists may propose different theories with possibly very different logic. there is no mechanical relations between experimental results and theories. scientists have enough freedom in this sense. again, it is new experiments which exclude wrong theories, pick out the (temperally) correct ones and may motivate new theories.

finally i would say that physics is always driven by experimental facts, by real problem. it would be dangerous to think that progresses are by people's willing. the current elementary particle theories (for example, supersymmetry) are focus on the gauge hierarchy problem, the newest approach in gravity physics tries to solve the conflict between the general relativity and quantum mechanics (superstring). and the most recent studies in theoretical physics are based on the challenge imposed by new measurements for the cosmological constant.

see also: http://www.rainbowplan.org/lib/dir02.txt