When I came to the institute, my collaborator Kay invited me
for a dinner in the new town together with his friend Thilo and other guys. The
city is wisely divided into two functioning areas, old town and new town. All
the ancient buildings like King’s summer palace, women’s church and opera house
are in the old town; while the restaurants, bars and other modern buildings are
in the new town. Each is in harmony with its environment and cultural atmosphere.
We went to an Italian restaurant. The sentence on its menu board reads:”think
globally, eat locally”, which roughly means that even it is a local restaurant,
it offers global food options. It is true. After ordering the food, it turns
out that six of us ordered totally different food: Kay ordered American style
fish salad with chips, Thilo ordered Greece style salad with bread, Martin
ordered beef steak cooked in North European way, I ordered Chinese style fried
beef and vegetable with rice. It was still summer then.  We sit around a long table under the shade of
the vine in the backyard of the house. It was green everywhere, with green
plants covering the wall, lovely flowers blooming in the small Garden. There
was a well for fetching water, just like any ordinary local residence here.
Several big candles were burning since it is getting dark. A man in the casual
dress was playing his guitar and singing lovely Italian songs.

After the dinner, with beers in hands, Thilo began to tell
his stories when he once was a researcher in the math department of Princeton University. He said, academic jobs in
the university are quite demanding. You have to play a multiple roles in one
person, as a researcher at first hand, also as a lecturer to teach courses for
undergraduates and postgraduates; a fund raiser to get money for your research
group; a manager to handle with quite a few Postdocs and Phds in your
group;  a faculty member for the service
in the department; a paper reviewer or an editor for your academic community.
You don’t need to be smart to know how busy an academia is. “publish or
perish”, the cliche still works now days. Without enough papers published,
without enough founding, you will fail before this strict rule, “up or out” , if
you don’t get your tenure within six years.

“ Then how those big names do their research?”, somebody
asked.

“ Today I will reveal a secret”, he paused.

“ What secret? Don’t be mean, please tell us”, we said.

“ OK. Do you guys know Fermat's Last Theorem?”

“ Yes, we do”

“ Do you know who proved this theorem?”

“ Aha, you call it secret? Everyone here knows that is it is
Prof. Andrew Wiles who spent about 10 years to prove it. The final proof from
him came in publication in 1994”

“ It is correct. However, do you guys know how Prof. Andrew
Wiles found these 10 years to dedicate himself to the Great Fermat theorem?”,
he signed, “Prof. Andrew Wiles told me by himself, in order to focus on the
proof of  the Fermat's Last Theorem,
there was one year in which he worked extremely hard to write 20 papers and
locked them up in his desk drawer. Then he would pick up two to publish each
year. In this way, he gained precious ten years to allow himself to do nothing
else except Fermat's Last Theorem”

Nobody spoke anything for a while. Everybody was pondering
on something. Now days in the era of science research being measured by SCI,
Impact Factors, funding committees etc., most researchers would not risk
themselves to focus on some true problems which demand some deep insights and
long commitments. This is a simple fact in our current funding system. No
wonder, in a report to the US
president by President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, named as

“Computational Science: Ensuring America’s Competitiveness”, a group
of leading scientists expressed their concerns:

 “Based on its
analysis of Federal R&D agency activities, PITAC concluded that Federal
support for computational science research has been overly focused on
short-term, low-risk activities. In the long term, this is actually a high-risk
strategy that is less likely to yield the high-payoff, strategic innovations
needed for the future.”

Now we are in the age of competition: everything is required
to be done faster; everybody is required to produce more with less time. Nobody
knows what the end of this road is; Nobody knows whether it is the right way.
It is more or less to make people to feel nostalgia about the golden days of
science in the past time, before NSF or any other funding committees are
established. For example, in Cambridge
University, after
becoming a member of the faculty, you have the freedom to do whatever you like
to do within the university’s resources. You don’t need apply any special
funding for it. Nobody will evaluate your research every 2~3 years. However,
those golden time is gone. Now we can not undo what we had already done. More
importantly, we can not back to the age of doing science without complicated
devices and giant machines, which are essential for the progress of bio-science
and nano-technologies etc.

What could we do? It is impossible to ask researchers to
work harder, like Prof. Whils did his pre-work before the proof of the Fermat's
Last Theorem. Some young researchers have already died prematurely for their
overworking.
We also could not change the system of competitive application for funding and the
peer-review, which have been proved to be the pillars for the current progress
of science. Maybe there is NO solution for everybody in general. Each one has
to create your own means to meet your own ends. Just like what Prof. Wiles did,
we should know what our real interest is and hold it dear to our heart always,
and then try to do the best from the least.

Whenever I read the Steve
Jobs’ commencement address in Stanford, I could not help being
moved by his “three stories”, which are linked together to make his life shine
like a diamond. He is a real man, a true hero who sticks to his ideals always. At
the end his speech, he said:

“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole
Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created
by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with
his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and
desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid
cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google
came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great
notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,
and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the
mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a
photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself
hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words:
"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they
signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for
myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. “