Accounting for Mystery in Future Ventures

Brand Age, 2022

This exploration is for commercial purposes and it is within the nearest commercial galaxy. It is not about Socio-political galaxies that exist beyond the Kuiper belt of the human mind. The unknown supersedes the known by an infinity. That creates uncertainty and doubt about virtually everything. It also leads people to seek guidance. At times it appears that the circle of the unknown widens the more we know, but in reality, the acquired knowledge is of immense benefit. It enables us to expand our knowledge base and verify the information. Undoubtedly it is easier to create attraction by finding suitable appearances and practicing narratives that resonate with people. While this may generate the desired attention for a while, such common tactics tend to soon lose their effectiveness. After having tried the obvious brave entrepreneurs may take the initiative and embark on a search and discovery journey that does not have predetermined resolves.

New Astronomy Reviews, 2004

The discovery of cosmic radio emission by Karl Jansky in the course of searching for the source of interference to telephone communications and the instrumental advances which followed, have led to a series of new paradigm changing astronomical discoveries. These include the non-thermal emission from stars and galaxies, electrical storms on the Sun and Jupiter, radio galaxies, AGN, quasars and black holes, pulsars and neutron stars, the CMB, interstellar molecules and giant molecular clouds; the anomalous rotation of Venus and Mercury, cosmic masers, extra-solar planets, precise tests of gravitational bending, gravitational lensing, the first experimental evidence for gravitational radiation, and the first observational evidence for cosmic evolution. These discoveries, which to a large extent define much of modern astrophysical research, have resulted in eight Nobel Prize winners. They were the result of the right people being in the right place at the right time using powerful new instruments, which in many cases they had designed and built. They were not as the result of trying to test any particular theoretical model or trying to answer previously posed questions, but they opened up whole new areas of exploration and discovery. Rather many important discoveries came from military or communications research; others while looking for something else; and yet others from just looking. Traditionally, the designers of big telescopes invariably did not predict what the telescopes would ultimately be "known for," so we may anticipate that the place in history of the next generation of telescopes will not likely be found in the science case created to justify their construction, but in the unexpected new phenomena, new theories, and new ideas which will emerge from these discoveries. It is important that those who are in a position to filter research ideas, either as grant or observing time referees, as managers of facilities, or as mentors to young scientists, not dismiss as "butterfly collecting," investigations which explore new areas of phase space without having predefined the result they are looking for. Progress must also allow for new discoveries, as well as for the explanation of old discoveries. New telescopes need to be designed with the flexibility to make new discoveries which will invariably raise new questions and new problems.

TechTrends, 2003

Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2022

book New Challenges to Philosophy of Science, 2013

This paper offers the philosophico-methodological framework for two aspects: 1) scientific disciplines that has received little attention so far in the mainstream philosophy of science, and 2) new topics in well-stablished disciplines, seeking novelty from different angles of the philosophical research.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2020

The new logic of financing innovation: from uncertainty reduction to shaping the unknown Handbooks in finance, as well as literature reviews, recall that financing innovation and financing productivity investment differ in their level of uncertainty. 1 Students learn that financing production investment requires a positive net present value (NPV), whereas financing innovation requires taking into account multiple uncertainties by computing expected NPV. Models of decision-making in uncertainty helped to compute the value of reducing uncertainty. 2 This approach is considered the best way to value investment in research and development (R&D)-R&D being considered an activity to reduce uncertainty. 3 In this time of "disruptive innovation" in the context of multiple socioeconomic and technological changes-such as energy transition, aging, and digitalization-it is tempting to consider that innovation dynamics tend to be characterized by an increase in uncertainty. Investments would, therefore, become much riskier, and financing might seem almost impossible. Fortunately, this "wisdom" misses a critical feature of contemporary innovation: it is not mainly about uncertainty but much more about "the unknown". In contemporary innovation, one has to deal not only with uncertain events, such as unstable markets and technological advances, but also partially unknown chimeras, such as inclusive mobility, smart cities, and sustainable energy. Therefore, it is critical for innovation success to deal with these initially unknown situations and shape them in a beneficial direction. 4 This distinction between uncertain and unknown has major consequences on innovation investment: the financing approach must not only consist of reducing uncertainty but also of shaping the unknown, i.e., through a capacity to design new alternatives, worlds, opportunities, markets, and usages.

Approximately one hundred participants met for three days at a conference entitled “Uncertainty and Surprise: Questions on Working with the Unexpected and Unknowable.” There were a diversity of conference participants ranging from researchers in the natural sciences and researchers in the social sciences (business professors, physicists, ethnographers, nursing school deans) to practitioners and executives in public policy and management (business owners, health care managers, high tech executives), all of whom had varying levels of experience and expertise in dealing with uncertainty and surprise. One group held the traditional, statistical view that uncertainty comes from variance and events that are described by usually unimodal probability law. A second group was comfortable on the one hand with phase diagrams and the phase transitions that come from systems with multi-modal distributions, and on the other hand, with deterministic chaos. A third group was comfortable with the emergent events from evolutionary processes that may not have any probability laws at all.

2010

Knowing tomorrow?: how science deals with the future, 2008

This book is about how in various scientific disciplines the concept of the future is being addresed.