Study of path from science to technology

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

Much of the advertised reason for scientific research is that there is a trickle-down effect from science to technology. For instance, here is a quote by Enrico Fermi that I grabbed from Wikipedia.

Some of you may ask, what is the good of working so hard merely to collect a few facts which will bring no pleasure except to a few long-haired professors who love to collect such things and will be of no use to anybody because only few specialists at best will be able to understand them? In answer to such question[s] I may venture a fairly safe prediction. History of science and technology has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life.

In talking to people, I have more or less found two ideas for how scientific research affects technology:

1. Most scientific research projects result in tiny advances that primarily feed back into more research, but which also have the potential for small applications. Huge numbers of these projects eventually sum to tools and technologies that have an impact outside of just scientific research itself.

2. There are many scientific research projects, most of which don't come to much outside (or sometimes even inside) of the scientific community. However, the ones that do have an enormous impact on technology, and it is difficult to tell which ones will beforehand. The impact of the projects that do come to something is so profound that it justifies all of the research that is done.

Here is my question: Does anyone know of any studies that attempts to verify, quantify, and understand these science-to-technology trickle-down ideas, beyond just assuming that one of the above statements is true?

As an example, it could be something like surveying numerous patents in the last decade that are deemed to be very impactful to civilization, and looking at the papers cited in those patents, and then looking at papers that those papers cite in turn, etc. In this way, citations among papers could be used to get a rough idea of what technogical impact factor a paper has had, provided that one or more significant patents cite either that paper, or other papers which are linked to it via citations.

I am asking this for several reasons. Some of them are:

1. A lot of research seems very obscure. It is not uncommon for papers to be aimed at only a handful of scientists other than the authors. Even for papers that are aimed at a much larger scientific audience, it is often very hard to connect the dots from their scientific interest to how they will affect life outside of scientific fields. And, even when these dots are connected, a lot of times it is in such a way that they hint at a hoped-for technology, and it is still unestablished whether or when that technology will be attained.

   It seems like it would be important to know to what degree things like this could actually be expected to broaden their relevance over time. How often are the hoped-for technologies attained? How often are other technologies, which are not the ones that were originally being aimed for, attained? What shape does the path from highly specialized papers, to more generally understandable papers, to technologies take? How does this vary by field? What percentage of papers are likely to be impactful outside of their field? Etc.

2. I am curious as to what kind of time scales are typical to go from research to technologies, especially technologies that are relevant to every day life in an obvious way.

3. I am curious as to how true arguments 1 and 2 above are. I have had conversations with people, both scientists and not, where they show at least a partial disdain for both arguments. So, the fact that they are both heavily used arguments, but also doubted, makes them seem like an interesting thing to understand better. Additionally, most applications for scientific funding rely more or less on arguments 1 and 2 above. It seems like we should understand as well as possible how true they are if we're going to keep using them.

Thanks for any help!

P.S. I'm not positive that this is the correct Stack Exchange site to post this thread on - if it's not, could someone please point me to a better one?