This episode of Inside EOSC features Robbert Dijkgraaf, president-elect of the International Science Council, distinguished university professor at the University of Amsterdam, and former Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science. A theoretical physicist who spent the best part of a decade directing the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he spoke with us at the EOSC Symposium in Brussels.
Dijkgraaf describes the twentieth century as the age that found the building blocks of matter, life and information, and the twenty-first as the age that learns to build with them. He calls this a new Renaissance, in which science shifts from discovering what exists to designing what might be, and argues that its future will look more like the arts: exploratory, imaginative, and steered by a sense of where you want to arrive. We explore why curiosity-driven research, the usefulness of useless knowledge, so often yields the largest breakthroughs, and why asking science for narrow, predetermined solutions can leave us with more equations than variables.
The conversation turns to EOSC as a central nervous system for European research, through which data flows and, just as importantly, flows back out to society. Dijkgraaf reflects on why data is never simply interchangeable, why Europe is well placed to set the standards for responsible innovation, and why the post-war compact between science and society now needs to be redesigned. He also explains what his own surname, the name of the medieval, democratically elected keeper of the dikes and the commons, might still teach us about shared responsibility.
","author_name":"Andrew Dubber"}