issue186

dreamflyerUID: 21967

"Practicality is now our great idol, which all powers and talents must serve. Anything that is not obviously practical has little value in today's world."


The author claims that practicality plays a paramount role in today's world, for anything without the practical value has little value altogether. I agree with this claim insofar that in industry and business, practicality is the most important factor to consider about. Nevertheless, in academic areas, such a conclusion seems too rash and too sweeping.

When it comes to the fields of industry and business, practicality is the most important, if not the unique one, factor to determine anything valuable or not. As we all know, in industry and business, profit is the key of a company to survive and then to thrive. If a product of great advantages to customers fails to put into practice, or a promoting plan looking like to be perfect is unable to perform, then both of them are proven to be useless. Hundreds of years ago, scientists wished to invent a machine that never stops operating without forces from outside. Even Newton had fell into the dream in his last few years. They designed numerous ostensibly reasonable methods on paper, but once taking into practice, the designs turned out to be unfeasible altogether. Empirical evidences indicate that all scientific studies serving industry and business focus on the only target that is to be practical. For both of the areas, studies should be reassured to bring about profit within at most a long-term period of the company, which, however, is hardly beyond 30 years in my observation. And this trend is prevalent all over the world that perhaps in every domain the case is just like this, which may be the cause resulting in the conclusion of the speaker.

However, in academic areas, practicality is not considered as that significant as in industry and business. For one thing, there are a lot of studies which cannot turn out to be practical at the current extent of knowledge and equipments nowadays, but it does not mean they have little use in the future. From unfeasible to feasible, this is a necessary process for almost every discovery and invention in the world. People did not believe one day they can fly in the skies although they cherished such a dream for thousands of years. Neither did people conceive the inherit deceases would be cured before one was born by the genetic technologies one day. Without continuous endeavors of scientists, the eccentric dreams will never come true after all. And such endeavors cost generations of scientists through hundreds of years' time, which is far beyond the tolerance of modern utilitarian industry and business.

For another thing, some theoretical studies may never be practical, but they are still of much value for they either are the basic of other practical studies, or are the delving of the truth of the world we lived in which will never cease. Nobel Prices, for example, had not built a price for mathematics, because Nobel believed mathematics to be useless because it's too abstract to put into practice. However, without calculus, Einstein would never prove his relativism to be reasonable, because the evidence is built on the mathematical equations. And the "big-bang" theory, which seems never to be proven and hardly to put into practice, becomes the most popular domain in astrophysics because it will expose the truth of where and how we are from.

Finally, the speaker's claim has some merit especially in industry and business areas where the most important thing is profit, which needs a quick exposure of utility. However, in the academic areas, we should not judge studies to be valuable or not simply on the visual practicality, because perhaps something we conceived unpractical will come true in future, and pure theory that can never put into practice has its own significance in the system of sciences.（45 min 628 words）