The NSF has a press release out today about students and the environment titled, "Students Least Informed About Environmental Science Are Most Optimistic". I ended the last posting with a shot at ignorance, so in an effort to be fair here is a contrarian view.
Experience can make us jaded to the point where we loose our youthful enthusiasm. This is in part due to our accumulating enough experience/wisdom to recognize our own limitations and those of the world around us.
The researcher is a bit of an odd duck in that we must ground our work in the real world, but our true calling in to change the conditions of the world to the point where we can do the "impossible". The funding we depend upon to perform our research comes from the optimism of the donors and taxpayers who believe that we can cure cancer or seek new life and new civilizations going where no man has gone before.
When the pundits become old cranks they complain about how little they have got in return for their investment in research, yet they many times got a great deal. It's just that our results did not match their youthful optimism. We got to the moon, but no one lives on mars yet.
Some will say we over promise, and perhaps we do, but we are human too and those that lose their tendency for optimism can't stay in this game of research for very long. The crushing defeats in the lab will chase them from the field of play.
T.S. Hall
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