Crossdisciplinary fundamental research—the seed for scientific advance and technological innovation

Abstract

As it was earlier in the 1980's, so it is now, fundamental science research is under threat as decisions are made on science funding by people who do not do fundamental research, seem congenitally incapable of understanding what it is and furthermore in the face of countless examples seem blind to how important it has been to the technologies that govern our modern life and will be to the future technologies that we desperately need to develop to survive. In this article some general observations are made on how the fascination for what happens in space and stars was the key trigger that gave birth to Science itself and a particular case is outlined which indicates that this same fascination is still the catalyst of some fundamental breakthroughs today. This article also outlines an archetypal example of the way major breakthroughs are often made by the synergy that comes from cross-disciplinary research in a way which is totally surprising. In this case it started from a curiosity about the quantum mechanical description of molecular dynamics and involved pioneering advances in synthetic organic chemistry which led to the suprising discovery that some exotic carbon molecules were abundant in space and stars. These results initiated an experiment using a new technology that represented a major breakthrough in cluster science. The upshot was totally unpredictable, the birth of a whole new field of Chemistry as well as a paradigm shift in major areas of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology.