And that by happy accident the person observing something weird figures it out it the limited time he or she has to devote to it. That person has enough leisure time to mess around with what they observed (because no employer lets anyone “tinker randomly” for a living). Most (maybe close to all) initial observations at TRL 1 are the result of a happy accident : someone with the right training is in the right place at the right time to notice something unexpected. You might want to know “why can’t I speed run TRL 1, 2, and 3”? It’s a fair question. But they will very likely be at best ineffective, and at worst harm people. You might even be able to deliver more products to market than real science. You can spend a lot of money trying to speed run hopeful guesswork. This is one of the reasons the usual approval process for new medicines and new techniques requires years (used to be generations) of observing those who did and didn’t take a product, because medicine lacks the tools to honestly assess long term effects. It also lacks the tools to really gang up on problems at the TRL 3 through 9 levels. So, Medicine doesn’t have the tools at the moment for good ideas at the TRL 1 and 2 levels. Medical science would use better tools if they existed (and there’s work being done on computer simulations of medicine, but discouragingly the same Mathematians who have helped before believe that modeling medicine may be too complex a problem to ever solve). And there are some publications that are even more tolerant at 50%. Medical “science”, motivated by a fervent desire to provide life improving products fast, tolerates a 30% chance of your idea being fiction. Thankfully, Mathematicians also gave us techniques to assess the quality of our use of statistics on a set of measurements, which quite nicely resolves into a percentage chance that we are completely lying to ourselves about what is being observed.īack to academic rigor: physical sciences tolerate no more than a one-in-a-million chance that you are lying to yourself (also called six sigma) in order to publish an idea. We are applying arbitrary rules to a set that might not apply. However, by using statistics, we invite the possibility that we are lying to ourselves about what the measurement really is. Mathematicians gave us statistics, which allows us to look at a group of measurements and infer from that group where the real answer is. And there are errors in every instrument we use to measure the world, which make all of the conclusions we draw from them slightly flawed. There are certain things we don’t know how to measure accurately, or would be too expensive to measure accurately. There is a stupendous gap in academic rigor. However medical “science” and physical science are very different sciences. You can speed run TRL 4 through 9 until you run out of ideas (0 through 3) (pure science). It goes from 0 “a fervent wish” (my extension to the scale), through observing something that might be a big idea (1), reproducing that observation, coming up with an idea about how it why it works (2), writing an idea how to prove the big idea down (3), actually proving that idea in a lab (4), proving that the idea works in the less than lab perfect conditions (5), coming up with a new idea for how to use the big idea and building a working model (6), a first run copy of the final new technology that requires a lot of handholding from designers (7), a first run copy that can work without the designers on standby to fix problems for a short run (8) and a proven model (9) There’s an existing concept in the literature called Technology Readiness Level. But, with very few exceptions, they are not coming up with any new big ideas, ready to be proven. They are re-discovering processes and construction techniques, improving some old ideas with better new ones. There’s a big difference between applied science and pure science.Īpplied science is what engineers speed running our return to the moon are doing.
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