Exploring connections in science and poetry

The Royal Irish Academy's highest research award, the Cunningham Medal, goes to Denis Weaire of TCD, writes Dick Ahlstrom

Scientific research is a lot like writing poetry. Both are highly creative endeavours, both demand the application of exacting technique and both are frequently misunderstood by the general public.

In his acceptance address as winner of the 2005 Royal Irish Academy Cunningham Medal, due to be presented last night in Dublin, Prof Denis Weaire explores the links between poetry and research. "What people like me are trying to do is like writing poetry," says Weaire.

The medal is considered the academy's premier award. Weaire has built a long and distinguished career in physics research. He is the Erasmus Smith Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, a chair instituted in 1724 by the philanthropist after whom it is named. Its first holder was Richard Helsham, physician to Jonathan Swift.

The sense of history associated with the medal has a strong impact on the scientist, he agrees. "I prize it very highly precisely because I have a historical view of things. That makes it meaningful for me to receive something that makes a connection with history." Previous winners have included Ireland's greatest scientist, William Rowan Hamilton and Sir William Wilde, the famous father of the famous son, Oscar.

Weaire is known internationally for work completed in 1994 with his research student, Robert Phelan. They startled colleagues around the world with their publication of research establishing a new, more efficient packing density for same-size objects.

The challenge is to pack the maximum number of objects in a given volume with the minimum of wasted space. The previous best was established more than a century ago with a conjecture from no less than the great Lord Kelvin, with whom Weaire shares an early Belfast background.

The new Weaire/Phelan conjecture improved on Kelvin's, establishing the new conjecture as the current world-record holder.

They proved their conjecture by creating a foam structure, which might seem a pointless exercise in pedantry given the transient nature of soap bubbles. Yet their design has useful applications. The Weaire/Phelan structure is being used as a construction technique in the massive aquatic centre, the Water Cube, being readied for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

TCD has also unveiled a sculpture representing the foam structure to honour the two scientists who discovered it and in particular to celebrate Denis Weaire's wider accomplishments, not least his induction as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Weaire is also a thinker in a broader sense and finds himself alarmed by the drift evident in the way universities do business. Is their primary goal to educate and create knowledge or to create wealth? "I am a devoted advocate of evolutionary change in the universities," he says.

"We have come to terms with the dominant values of our age, which come from the corporate world. They are systematic, realistic, ruthless. The present expectations of Government are founded on them."

It works through the system in unusual ways, he believes, not least when scientists bid for research funding.

"We have to predict exactly what we are going to do, how we are going to do it and what we will find," he says, despite the obvious unpredictability of creative effort.

"There is pressure on us all the time to conform to stated goals. The idea that you can plan research is of limited value."

Working scientists in Ireland have come to terms with these new commercial values, he believes. "This does not mean that we allow ourselves to be entirely taken over by those values. We can combine the best of both worlds and not allow a chasm to develop between them."

He also believes that it is not a contradiction to suggest that the universities should have much more independence than they do today. "There is a European trend in that direction, particularly in Austria and Germany, but as yet it is little recognised here," he says. "We spend far too much time trying to interpret the instructions and read the minds of the ministers."

He believes that the third-level sector has earned the right to expect more. "The universities deserve more credit than they are getting for what they have achieved," he argues. The record of the Irish universities over the past 30 years "has been magnificent, given their resources".

This is why he resists too strong a push towards economic justifications for conducting research. "Their [ the universities] role in our economic success story is now widely recognised and we are being encouraged to lay more golden eggs. So why pluck the goose? Too many concludes.>ends