We used to have timber, particle boards, fiberboards, OSB, plywood and we still have them, but it seems in "good" research these terms should be left out. Today, one needs to talk about bio-materials, bio-based materials, renewable materials, sustainable materials, bio-based green materials, bio-composites, and all the nano of course. It really has become kind of ridiculous. What are your thoughts and comments?
with time, the scientific community evolves in the outlook towards what is the "right research" If you look in to the 40s, majority of the chemical/process engineer's research was optimization and design of processing equipment's (distillation column, industrial drying chambers etc.) but you wont find anyone interested in doing that work in the 80s and 90s.
As we get our hands on newer research methodology (materials has become completely independent branch from mechanical sciences due to evolution of polymeric materials from the 60s ) "popular science" is born and everyone makes a run for it.
Apart from that, publication and funding does play a very big part as to how one shapes his research career
Pavel, i agree with you when it comes to industry, its research is based on the idea what will maximize the profit for them. The best would be to look into the number of "bad drugs" which have been released in the market to make a profit.
The idea of academia and industrial research is different to the very core. Academia would work on a problem which "may" impacts the worlds in the long long run while industrial research tends to focus only on short term (which makes sense since they do need t o make profit.)
Also, the idea of practical research is quite debatable. We all know, graphene has been present with us for 100's of years but it was an academic researcher from manchester who bought out graphene to the forefront. Without his discovery, none of the graphene based industry would have come into existence.
Basically, measuring the practical importance of a research should be taken in a time frame. We learn about density in our 5th grade now, while back in the " dark ages" its required someone like an Aristotle to explain the concept of density
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