refining ignorance

[keannu]

Source : 2019 Korean SAT, No 21
21. Although not the explicit goal, the best science can really be seen as refining ignorance. Scientists, especially young ones, can get too obsessed with results. Society helps them along in this mad chase. Big discoveries are covered in the press, show up on the university’s home page, help get grants, and make the case for promotions. But it’s wrong. Great scientists, the pioneers that we admire, are not concerned with results but with the next questions. The highly respected physicist Enrico Fermi told his students that an experiment that successfully proves a hypothesis is a measurement; one that doesn’t is a discovery. A discovery, an uncovering ― of new ignorance. The Nobel Prize, the pinnacle of scientific accomplishment, is awarded, not for a lifetime of scientific achievement, but for a single discovery, a result. Even the Nobel committee realizes in some way that this is not really in the scientific spirit, and their award citations commonly honor the discovery for having “opened a field up,” “transformed a field,” or “taken a field in new and unexpected directions.”

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1. According to the underlined parts, does it mean the Nobel Prize committee doing something wrong for only focusing on discoveries, not on lifetime commitment to refining ignorance(finding a new discovery)?
2. What does this refer to? Does it mean the previous sentence that the Nobel Prize Committee is doing something wrong?
3. There appear "discovery" a lot of times, but it seems to mean different things.
Does the whole paragraph mean that a discovery is worth finding or less important than refining ignorance or are the two the same?

 

[jutfrank]

1. The Nobel Committee realises that the way it selects its awards is not really in the scientific spirit.
2. Awarding people for single discoveries.
3. The writer is using 'discoveries' to mean 'results'. What's more important than discoveries/results is understanding. That is, a gradual refining of which questions to ask.

 

[Tarheel]

The term "refining ignorance" is an odd one to me. But it did get your attention.

Abe: The plane landed successfully.
Bob: What does that mean?
Abe: It didn't crash.

 

[keannu]

Thanks, but this is hard to understand. It seems to disregard discoveries in favor of refining ignorance, but this sentence seems to say that discoveries are more important than measurement, which is contradictory. Could you clarify this, especially the meaning of "one that doesn’t is a discovery"?

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The highly respected physicist Enrico Fermi told his students that an experiment that successfully proves a hypothesis is a measurement; one that doesn’t is a discovery. A discovery, an uncovering ― of new ignorance.

 

[jutfrank]

According to Enrico Fermi, an experiment that doesn't successfully prove a hypothesis is a true discovery. That goes against what people normally consider a discovery to be. Fermi was defining the idea of a discovery in his own unique way, by saying that discoveries are not new knowledge but new ignorance.

 

[probus]

In the same vein, a senior academic (possibly Richard Feynman) pointed out that we spend enormous amounts of time, effort, and money teaching graduate students everything we know, whereas we should focus on showing them what we don't know.

 

[Tdol]

Discoveries open new avenues to explore, areas that were not previously known.