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Comment by part1of2 | Hacker News Reader

> Most academic research is done by underpaid PhD and postdoc students for the love of science

I’d hardly call the graduate papers coming out of academia equivalent to the level of innovation & creativity of what the engineers above described. Perhaps they’re both underpaid, but one is certainly more amazing. Hardly the same.

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You should read Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” if you want to understand what incredible engineering feats academic scientists are capable of — when the people are tightly focused on achieving a single goal. You should also read Rhodes’ book if you want to understand why unguided fundamental scientific research itself is so critical, even when it doesn’t immediately seem useful to you: without the discoveries of science, nuclear fission wouldn’t have been understood. (Of course, many will disagree that the development atomic bomb is a good outcome, but that’s a very different conversation.)

I love that book. It takes a while to read but it's worth it.

That's a pretty amazing comment to me. Perhaps I am biased because of all the blood sweat tears and life I spent publishing papers in academia. Generally, with the exception of certain low quality publication venues, certain fringe areas of humanities, and of course review papers, each academic paper is a new contribution to science that has never been made before. Heating and cooling something to unjam it? That's been done since the dawn of modern engineering. A neat story (and I mean it), but hardly an astounding level of innovation and creativity.

This is clearly about more than just unjamming a part, but the work that was put into building the probe, sending it to the edge of the solar system, and the fact that it's still functional today.

Are you seriously claiming almost every academic paper in a prestigious journal demonstrates more innovation and creativity than that displayed by the deployment of the Voyager spacecraft? I strongly disagree.

Remember also that a large fraction if not a majority of the Voyager team almost certainly had PhDs or even came from academia. I think we can appreciate innovation and creativity everywhere without having to make it into a genital measuring contest.

I was responding to a comment about a story that was specifically about the unjamming by heating/cooling; a phenomenon which everyone above the age of six knows about. My comment was not a genital measuring context, nor did it have anything to do with the innovation and creativity displayed by the deployment of the Voyager space craft.

The person I was replying to was very clearly not calling the result itself amazing, but the fact that it was achieved by people whose budgets had been cut in half and who were not well paid.

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