Thursday 11 December 2008

Steven Chu is Obama's secretary of energy!

This morning, read the news that Obama has chose Steven Chu as a secretary of energy. hmm.. thats a chinese-american... Well, actually, my dear friend highlighted to me, and so I thought it must be interesting. Turns out, he was a nobel laureate, and having read about his work before, he must be kinda of a cool guy. And it just so happens that he shares the same surname as me! haha.

But other than that, I was watching the youtube video, and making mental notes, and one of the things that I realised was that his nobel work wasn't even related to his own field of specialty!
At least, not directly related. He was doing high-energy work related to lasers, but his nobel was about using lasers to trap atoms! hmm... thats one. The other interesting thing was thing he was also doing work in biology, and what he did was, he looked at some small problem of a much bigger problem, and started reading the literature and all. It just appeared to me that what I learnt in writing is the same approach as doing academic work. We can't handle the biggest problem and claim that we have a solution. Interesting stuff have also be done in dissecting a big problem into many small parts, and see how the small parts can contribute to the greater whole of the problem you are looking at. you don't just handle the problem of consciousness - thats too big! You look at the approaches there are to consciousness - such as perception and how the brain works, and maybe you look at how changes in perception translate to changes in the structure of neurons. The point is, you don't tackle a HUGE problem head on. Thats stupid and cliche. Rather, you find your way into a small segment of the problem, and work at it, and more often than not, there will lie opportunities for horizontal leaps - into other disciplines - and thats where the interesting stuff is - between different disciplines.

I think what he did, as he changed fields, is an example of how education itself might be transformed. More likely, education is going to be less structured, in the sense that students will be able to conduct their own kind of learning, structured by interests, pursuing threads of knowledge at their own time and pace, and interacting with other senior students who might be more settled or something. There is still a place for specialty, in the sense as vaults of experience, to know which areas could be more interesting than other areas...

Others ideas come into mind as I am blogging. I realised that the department of energy is just a cover for 'department for basic science'. And I realised that Singapore has no such cabinet position. Perhaps MEWR, but its disappointing. The closest equivalent we have is probably A*STAR, the body that coordinates scientific research in Singapore - but its not a cabinet level position, and I think is subordinate to another ministry - MOE, education. Which... is... well... it can be the subject of an essay...

But just a sidenote, it is interesting that a nation which says so much about 'innovation' doesn't have a cabinet-level head talking about government policies... oh wells.

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Posted by eddie/shiqin at 21:10
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