One evening Alexander the Great as a youth comes up to his tutor and says:
Alexander: ‘I have a problem.’
Aristotle (who happened to be his tutor): ‘Yes?’
Alexander: ‘In my plan to conquer the world it is obviously best to use a single well-organized army. But as I capture each country, and then move on to the next, how do I keep control of the previous country?’
Aristotle (after a pause with a far-seeing glint in his eye): ‘Aha! I think I have the solution. You want to found a government research establishment. You could even name it after yourself. Then the sociology department could manufacture suitable religions grafted onto the appropriate local beliefs that would keep the natives happy.’
‘As a matter of fact’, and at this juncture Aristotle’s tone of voice becomes noticeably casual, ‘as a matter of fact I have a very good student (Dinocrates) who could do the architecture for you - he’s eager to experiment with white marble - and another senior student (Demetrius Phalerus) who would make a splendid first director of the place.’
Arsitotle’s voice regains its normal timbre: ‘I suppose you’ll have to have an arts man as first librarian - and there is an early Homer scholar (Zenodotus) who would do - and he would have the advantage of being near retiring age so that as soon as he’d done the chore of setting up the catalogue system you could get rid of him and replace him by a proper scientist.’
Aristotle’s voice goes casual again: ‘And as a matter of fact I have just the man (Eratosthenes) for the job, a student who is a brilliant all-rounder, interested in astronomy, geography, literature, the lot, but he needs a few more years of research before he takes on administrative chores. Oh yes - and I have another young student (Sostratus) whose a bit of a crank, but marvellous with his hands. His ambition is to build a giant lighthouse, but he can’t get any funds. But in a government research establishment this would be well worth the cost, just from the prestige point of view alone, besides being actually quite a useful piece of equipment.’
‘I suppose you’ll have to have a philosophy department, although to tell the truth the subject is a bit played out after Plato and myself, and most of my current students are rather second rate. On the other hand biology, psychology and medicine are really up and coming new subjects, and I have a splendid young man (Erasistratus) who has done some fascinating work on the psychology of sex and nervous breakdowns, who would be ideal to head a research group.’
‘And let me see - you’ll need a mathematician of course - and although I don’t have any suitable students of my own available just at this moment, there is a young man (Euclid) in Plato’s academy. Not that he’s very good at research, in fact I doubt he’ll ever make his Ph.D., but he’s quite a good scholar, and quite good at editing things. And although he’s a bit humourless, he would make an excellent administrator, and so I’d recommend hiring him to set up the mathematics department.’
‘Oh - and another point - if I were you I would choose somewhere on the Mediterranean coast, with a nice climate and a sandy beach with good bathing facilities, and not too far from the main shipping lanes. As a matter of fact I had a vacation last year at just such a place, a little island called Ras-el-Tin. For that way you’ll not only be able to attract some decent academics onto the staff, but you’ll also guarantee a good flow of visitors each summer to keep the place academically alive. In fact it might even last a few centuries.’
And that’s exactly what Alexander did, in every detail, when he was 23.
‘Research Ancient and Modern’ I.M.A. Conference on Research in Mathematics,
2 comments:
Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, as far as one can see, rather naive, probably wrong. (Richard Feynman)
Fascinating man. Lovely book about Feynman and Gell-Man called Feynman's rainbow that it well worth reading. He call's Feynman a Babylonian and Gell-Man a Greek.
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