E.W.Dijkstra Archive: By way of introduction (EWD 1041) EWD 1041<br>By way of introduction<br>Because most of this introduction is non-technical and yet I want you to believe me, I feel compelled to offer you my credentials. I have now been employed for 37 years, 30% at a Government-sponsored Research Institute, 30% at a computer manufacturer, and 40% at Universities, and most of this at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. I want you to be convinced that I know what I am talking about.<br>If we want to understand the world around us, we must be willing to face the facts, even facts we usually don’t talk about because we have been educated to be a little bit ashamed of them. Here is one such fact:<br>Science is hated because its mastery requires too much hard work, and, by the same token, its practitioners, the scientists, are hated because of their power they derive from it.

Let me repeat this, so as to help it to sink in:<br>Science is hated because its mastery requires too much hard work, and, by the same token, its practitioners, the scientists, are hated because of their power they derive from it.

I should repeat it a third time because whatever I say three times is true. Deem that done.<br>From the above, please don’t conclude that I am bitter, for I am not; I am just realistic: destroying scientists and their work is a time-honoured tradition. Archemedes was murdered by the Romans, Hypatia was murdered by the Christians, the Moslims burned down the library of Alexandria, and in 1794, Lavoisier lost his head on the guillotine because of the verdict of the populace that the French Revolution had no use for scientists. (Less than a decade later, France had its next dictator, but the rabble never made the connection.)<br>For reasons I don’t quite understand —partly, probably lack of instrumentation— the science of chemistry was very slow to emerge. So slow, as a matter of fact, that in the first decade of this century, Albert Einstein developed the theory of Brownian motion because of the large number of chemists that still refused to believe in the atomicity of matter. Because Brownian motion can be seen through the microscope and “seeing is believing”, Einstein naively thought that the atomistic explanation of the quantitative, observable aspects of the phenomenon would be convincing. This was very na&iuml;ve —but don’t blame Einstein, who was very young— for he only convinced the already converted; the stubborn chemists found it much easier to declare Einstein’s theory of Brownian motion to be “too mathematical”.<br>When the science of chemistry eventually emerged, alchemy had already all but disappeared. Chemically speaking, there has been an intellectual interregnum, but I invite you to join me for a short while in the thought experiment of envisaging chemistry with alchemy still in existence. Needless to say, almost all the funding goes to the alchemists, who, in their effort to make gold from cheap base materials, at least attack a problem of the highest social relevance, viz. enable the government to finance its wars without inflicting poverty on the people. The chemists are derided because none of their work has contributed anything to the central problem of gold-making. When chemistry then makes assumptions about matter that would exclude gold-making, it is accused of being counterproductive, demoralizing, and harmful to the national interest. By the time chemistry accurately predicts the failure of alchemy’s next attempt, derision turns into open hostility, and, accused of wasting the taxpayer’s money, several state universities are forced to close down their chemistry departments. Well, I think that that is enough for our thought experiment: phantasy has already come too close to reality.<br>Well, we all know what happened. Chemistry is accepted as a science: we hate it for its pollution and our dependency on its products, but we no longer blame it for not trying to make gold. Medicine has been accepted as a science: we hate it for the overpopulation and the soaring medical bill but no longer blame it for not producing the Elixir that gives eternal youth. Astronomy has been accepted as a science; we hate it for removing the earth from the center of the universe but no longer blame it for not realizing the astrologer’s dream of accurate prediction of the future. They are accepted as sciences; at the same time, the flourishing business in Healing Gems and Crystals, the horoscopes in otherwise respectable magazines, and governments relying on astrologers are a healthy reminder that Science as such remains rejected and that the old dreams linger on. Finally, one general remark about how sciences emerge: sciences become respectable by confining themselves to the feasible and successful by allowing themselves to be opportunity-driven rather than mission-oriented. (This, by the way, is why managers hate successful science: because it is not mission-oriented, they cannot manage it.)<br>Let us now turn our attention to...