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Know Your History

8 January 2004

Physicist Steven Weinberg has published an interesting short article about doing research (Nature 426, 389 (27 November 2003)). In this paper, he presents four most sensible pieces of advice to young researchers. The fourth of these reads:

Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science.

In Weinberg's words

More importantly, the history of science can make your work seem more worthwhile to you. As a scientist, you're probably not going to get rich. Your friends and relatives probably won't understand what you're doing. And if you work in a field like elementary particle physics, you won't even have the satisfaction of doing something that is immediately useful. But you can get great satisfaction by recognizing that your work in science is a part of history.

I like to read texts and interviews that describe the history of ideas in computer science and mathematics, and, wearing my editorial robes, I would like to encourage the members of the concurrency theory community to write pieces that help preserve the collective memory of the community. These papers can help educate new generations of researchers, and create a heightened sense of achievement amongst researchers in concurrency theory.

As an example, I encourage you to read, and learn from, Gordon Plotkin's The Origins of Structural Operational Semantics. I am glad to announce that this paper will be published, together with definitive reissue of Plotkin's seminal 1981 DAIMI memo, in a special issue of the Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming on structural operational semantics that I am about to wind up with Wan Fokkink. I'll post the publication details for this volume on this forum in due course. For the moment, I wish a happy and successful 2004 to the concurrency theory community.