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Battle Cry for the Mad Scientist, the Morally Ambiguous Doctorate, and even good aligned Gadgeteer Genius and Science Hero. This is one of the classic motivations for many a Science Is Bad movie, the researcher will seek knowledge for its own sake rather than to better the world; usually this simple curiosity will evolve into " ambition" and " hubris" before long, as caution and restraint are thrown out the steel-barred window. Or used as raw materials.
When a scientist says he does something For Science!, what this usually means is they simply don't care about the answers to several important questions regarding their research, like:
- How will I fund my research, and how can I make money off of it? (What? These are legitimate questions!)
- Does it have any potential applications — that are not immediately lethal, full of side effects, potentially genocidal or ecocidal?
- Is there any way of gaining any replicable data or results?
- Where will I get
willing test subjects?
- Are these experiments ethical?
- Will it rise up against humanity and/or eat me?
Usually, this nonchalance leads to Reed Richards Is Useless as they file away their inventions under " Forgotten Phlebotinum" rather than seek to commercialize them or expanding the body of knowledge available to science (not humanity). And that's with normal research. Contrary to Fridge Logic, For Science rarely provides additional insight in its field; after the Nuclear Roboclone is created, most Mad Scientists lose interest in documenting how they actually did it and what else can be done with those methods. Where test subjects are concerned, at their most benign they'll only threaten to do minor experiments on friends; if they get volunteers or luckily capture one, the effects will be quirky and temporary rather than deforming Biological Mashups.
These benign inventors may end up in service of the Corrupt Corporate Executive, and will be so happy to have funding they don't ask where the money comes from — or what their discoveries are being used for. Expect them to go "you promised you would use my discoveries for good!" to his "Oh, but I am!"
It can also lead to Jumping Off The Slippery Slope as an inventor slips into full blown, cackling mad science as sanity and ethics are deemed "irrelevant" or hindrances to their work. Other times, the answers they come up with to the above questions will lead them to a life of supervillainy as they get research funds by robbing banks, get test subjects by kidnapping, and out-and-out make things solely for destructive purposes... or because they can.
There is some truth to this — many scientists and especially mathematicians do what they do for the fun of it rather than more practical concerns — but that's little different from the rest of academia.
There is also some significant falsehood to this in that basic research, research done with no application in mind, is what actually advances science and makes the world a better place. The applied science may as well be done by an engineer. In addition scientists usually have a pretty good idea what will take place and are only seeking to test it.
Remember, Science Is Bad. Contrast For The Liberal Arts!
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Durstan, Stan Lee's Author Avatar, in the manga Ultimo, created two highly-destructive robotic embodiments of good and evil, with weaponry capable of annihilating cities if not nations, all because he was curious which force was stronger. To further salt the wound, he admits that their fights could last indefinitely and ultimately end the world.
- Mayuri Fucking Kurotsuchi.
- What, no mention of Szayel Aporro Granz?
- Shou Tucker, the "Sewing Life Alchemist" in the Anime of Fullmetal Alchemist made a chimera out of his daughter and his dog because he could and he was under pressure by the military to do something awe-inspring with his alchemy or else his funding and favor would be cut. In the manga, it's hard to say whether or not there was any curiosity involved. Either way, he's a Complete Monster.
- Dr. Jail Scaglietti from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, who has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge related to Lost Technology which was imbued into him by his creators so he can be their pet Mad Scientist.
- Mahou Sensei Negima's resident Mad Scientist Satomi Hakase, in order to discover the secret behind robot love at the expense of her very-much-in-love creation Chachamaru, tried to hack the Robot Girl's memories to find out exactly who she was in love with. This resulted in a Tears From A Stone moment for the ridiculously human robot and a Rocket Punch for her creator.
- Dantalion from Shakugan No Shana is a typical Mad Scientist who doesn't care if any of his experiments succeed or fail or even destroy existence (likely a fail), so long as something interesting happens. Generally disliked by his fellow Demonic Invaders for his reckless and unpredictable experiments, some on his own kind, some resulting in powerful artifacts turned against them and Flame Haze. But he's such a fun character...
- Major motivation of the Big Bad in Steam Boy. The movie leaves some ambiguity over whether he's right.
- Washu from Tenchi Muyo! is just eccentric enough to pull off wanting to experiment on Tenchi without crossing into villainous water. Plus she's so darn cute! In the original script she was the villain, and Kagato was just an illusion created by her. But then the creative team decided she was far too fun a character to kill off, so the anime world got its greatest scientific genius, and got to keep her. It's also played for laughs considering what she wants from him and her Hello Nurse outfit just makes it even funnier.
- And let's face it, all the things she says when she getting her tissue and *ahem* fluid samples... "You want me to use my mouth?"
- How much does Huey Laforet love this trope? So much so that he not only considers his own daughters (as well as everyone in the world sans Elmer) guinea pigs, he's also sired them purely For Science.
- Doc from Hellsing explicitly states in the final volume that his whole motive was to push the boundaries of science. In the name of science, he created ghouls, Nazi vampires, cyborgs, weapons, a catboy, and assisted in the near total destruction of London. All For Science.
- Doctor Stein from Soul Eater has the battle cry of "I am going to dissect you!" before he starts to fight. It's not just based for his fights alone, though he has said it to Crona and Medusa (who he might want to do even more with...or not. Either way, she'd probably like it.), and in the anime, let's not forget Marie, he has also dissected his best friend repeatedly for years without him noticing, and wants to dissect the boss's son. He also dissected an endangered bird in his homeroom class. For his own amusement. All of this seems to have even caused a Running Gag amongst the fans.
- Lloyd in Code Geass, so much. When he gets the chance, he even asks "I wonder if you'd let me analyze that Geass... For Science, of course."
- Partially subverted. In an earlier episode it is explained that he uses the "For Science" mentality to avoid the emotional stress of losing friends.
Comics
- An issue of the Postboot Legion Of Super Heroes features a group of (faux-)suicide-bombing space scientists, the Objective Order, on a rampage against mystical forces, "For science!!" (Yeah, they quote the trope name.)
- In X Men 41, there's a scientist who invents a nuclear-powered machine that both creates earthquakes and irradiates the ground. His colleagues think he's nuts for inventing such a dangerous weapon, but he assures them it will only be used for the benefit of mankind.
Fan Works
Film
- In Bats, Obviously Evil Mad Scientist Dr. McCabe initially justifies creating the titular (killer and super-intelligent) bats with the words "I'm a scientist. That's what we do. Make everything a little bit better." It's later hinted that it was a secret government project, but still you have to wonder why the protagonists accepted that justification so well...
- So Bad Its Good MST 3 K classic The Beast of Yucca Flats involves Tor Johnson killing people in the name of "progress". Exactly what kind of progress you get from strangling people and not looking at the camera is never made clear, but nobody ever accused The Beast of Yucca Flats of being a good movie.
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there? Progress."
- As I understood it, the murders are linked to "Progress" because the Beast was created by an atom bomb explosion. It makes more sense with Godzilla, I guess.
- Danger!! Death Ray (Spoofed by Mystery Science Theater 3000) featured the inventor of the titular Death Ray insisting that he'd built it only for peaceful purposes. It's a death ray. What sort of "peaceful purposes" you could find for a device which has absolutely no use other than blowing stuff up is left as an exercise to the reader.
- Real Life example: Inventor Nikola Tesla claimed to have invented an energy weapon for "peaceful purposes", predating the concept of "Mutually Assured Destruction" by decades. Tesla, however, had at least the sense to market the thing not as a "death" ray but as a "peace ray". But then, Tesla was insane.
- To be fair, Alfred Nobel originally invented dynamite so that it would be safer to handle and for construction purposes such as blowing out tunnels and clearing debris. However, once people started figuring out how to use it as a weapon, Nobel created the Nobel Prizes out of regret.
- To be less fair, he also turned the Bofors company from mainly producing iron to making cannons and chemicals for firing them.
- Day of the Dead has Doctor Logan, who becomes so obsessed with teaching the zombies good manners, he kills the soldiers guarding them to gather food with which to use positive reinforcement training on the zombies.
- He didn't kill them — at least that wasn't directly stated. He just put their corpses into good use. Naturally, the soldiers weren't very happy when they found out.
- Subverted with Dr. Serizawa in the original Godzilla. He states that his discovery of how to create the "oxygen destroyer" was purely for research and believes it can be used to benefit humanity... but ONLY if it's used for something other than a weapon, since he fears that exposing his discoveries to the world may lead to another war. It's a subversion because he eventually does use his scientific discoveries for the good of mankind by using the Oxygen Destroyer to kill Godzilla.
- This quote from Jurassic Park's Ian Malcolm, a paraphrase from a much longer diatribe from the original novel, sums it up quite well:
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
- The Three Stooges short "We want our Mummy" has the trio as detectives hunting for a missing archeologist and the lost Tomb of King Rutentuten, and will be paid $5,000 dollars for their commitment to science.
Moe: For Science!
Larry: For Science!
Curly: For 5,000 Bucks!
- The director of The Truman Show does a lot of ethically questionable stuff FOR ART! (Whereas the rest of the production crew is more interested in good ratings.)
Literature
- Tanya Huff's novel Blood Pact has a villainous Department head (female) who is testing bacterian reanimation of corpses (to rebuild organs) and to get a subject for her experiments murders Vicki Nelson's mother and takes the body away. She is assisted by a genuine Mad Scientist for whom the death of the other assistant means only a disturbance in the data.
- Greg Egan's novel Schild's Ladder. The freak lab accident that gives birth to a galaxy-shattering kaboom occurs because the scientist wanted to test an obscure physics theory. This being Greg Egan, it's completely subverted by making the resulting Negative Space Wedgie a good thing.
- Dr. Qwi Xux in the Star Wars Expanded Universe embodies this trope: she's the genius scientist behind the Death Star, the Sun Crusher, and the World Devastators... but she has no idea that they're weapons, and simply takes joy at the creation of works of scientific genius. This is lampshaded when Han points out that the names probably should have been a clue.
- Qwi did actually have peaceful uses for her inventions in mind: the Death Star could be used on uninhabited planets and thus their ores mined much more easily, inexpensively, and safely, the Sun Crusher could be used for planned detonations of unstable old stars that might otherwise supernova unexpectedly and be a hazard to navigation, and so on. She's still a bit flummoxed at trying to explain the names, with the best she can do being "Well, they were just code names!" It was less that she was just doing science for science's sake, and more that she was so in love with science and so massively naive that she didn't pick up on what she was actually doing.
- The big problem with Qwi Xux was that she was a Kevin "Wall Banger" Anderson character. As any fan of Dune or Star Wars could tell you, Anderson couldn't find a good plot on a brightly lit piece of graph paper with two rulers and a magnifying glass.
- The Academy of Lagado, from Gullivers Travels, seems to mainly be staffed by hopeless incompetents regularly reciting this to themselves as justification for their nonsensical and meaningless experiments. There is no possible reason to breed naked sheep, but apparently, science demands that they make the effort.
Live Action TV
- Daedalus in Hercules The Legendary Journeys, somewhat embittered after Icarus' death, builds Bamboo Technology Humongous Mecha because he can, without wondering why his patron wants them. He learns better, and goes back to inventing peaceful things, like Silly Putty. (Really.)
- Used with massive amounts of Genre Savvy on Myth Busters, usually by Adam. "We're about to shoot an M-16 into a swimming pool! For Science!" One of their commercials even features Adam saying, "I'm going to jump into shark-infested waters For Science!"
- A promo for the MacGyver special has Adam claiming "This is for love, money, and science!"
- When the normally emotionless Jamie finally admits that the little marching robots he has built are "kinda cute", Adam agrees: "Cute... For SCIENCE!"
- Star Trek Voyager features an episode ("Scientific methods") where some aliens experiment on the crew... by randomly changing their genes. There are even lethal cases.
- They make B'Elanna and Paris horny too. I'd hate to think what that was in aid of...
- In the episode "Jetrel", Neelix encounters the scientist who developed the weapon of mass destruction that destroyed
Hiroshima his homeworld.
Jetrel: If I had not discovered the Cascade it would have been someone else, don't you see? It was a scientific inevitability, one discovery flowing naturally to the next. Something so enormous as science will not stop for something as small as man, Mister Neelix. Neelix: So you did it For Science. Jetrel: For my planet, and yes, For Science. To know whether or not it could be done. It's good to know how the world works. It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that all the knowledge of the universe and all the power it bestows is of intrinsic value to everyone and one must share that knowledge and allow it to be applied, and then be willing to live with the consequences.
Music
- There's a They Might Be Giants song called "For Science", about a man who agrees to become the loveslave of The Girl From Venus, citing this reason. "I'm so brave," indeed.
- "She Blinded Me With Science" by Thomas Dolby. Okay, it was just shouting "SCIENCE!" But close enough.
- Why do the Consortium Of Genius do it? Because they're scientists!
- No one has mentioned Oingo Boingo's Weird Science?
Tabletop Games
- Gond the Wondermaker, the deity of invention in Dungeons & Dragons, is the one the Forgotten Realms have to thank for gunpowder, primitive firearms, grenades, and all the other joys of scientific progress. Somewhat unsurprisingly, most players choose to ignore the existence of his creations, if not the deity himself. Given alignment is True Neutral.
- Sort of a motto for the Sons of Ether in Mage: the Ascension, particularly for the ones branded Mad Scientists by their peers.
- The fan-made "expansion" Genius: The Transgression does more-or-less the same thing for Wo D 2.0, as the Sons of Ether apparently didn't fit into the Darker And Edgier version of the World of Darkness.
- Although the nWoD's Free Council has its moments, being a cross between the Sons of Ether and Virtual Adepts.
- The Adeptus Mechanicus of Warhammer 40000 has set loose more than one Eldritch Abomination in their pursuit of even a fragment of a Standard Template Construct. They have a particularly poor track record regarding Necrons — the minute they find a tomb full of the slumbering constructs, they inevitably start poking the things until they wake up.
- And if they aren't allowed to do this, they sulk.
- Jus to add promethium to the fire, they also caused an entire Space Marine chapter to go renegade by stealing its holiest relic for back-engineering and threatening them with orbital artillery in the hope of getting them to back down. And then yet another Eldritch Abomination turned up to take it off them before they were able to figure out how it worked.
Video Games
- In Apollo Justice Ace Attorney Wesley Stickler uses this as his justification for underwear theft, of all things.
- Said panties happen to be a part of one character's magic show.
- This is the motivation — or at least the excuse — of Caulder/Stolos from Advance Wars: Days of Ruin; indeed, until the last chapter it's his only real characteristic.
- Vernon Von Grun from City Of Villains.
- "Laugh with me! MHUA HA HA HA HA *COUGH* HAHA HA!"
- Then there is his mentor, Doctor Creed, and his boss, Doctor Aeon.
- His name is a pun on Wernher von Braun, see Real Life Examples.
- This is the raison d'être of Dr. Odine in Final Fantasy VIII, who doesn't care who he works for or what his inventions are used for as long as he gets to keep researching and inventing things. When he discovers that his research will eventually be developed into a working machine, which in turn is what's allowing the Big Bad to project her consciousness back in time and wage war in the present, his reaction is to be thrilled that his ideas will be put to use.
- In Impossible Creatures, "For science!" is one of Dr. Lucy Willing's unit acknowledgment quotes. She's more of a Wrench Wench than a mad scientist, but it does take most of the campaign to convince her that the Mix And Match Critters technology is too dangerous to exist.
- The Half Life mod Science & Industry added a suicide-bomb weapon in one update, and it didn't take long for the customary cry before detonating one to become "FOR SCIENCE!", giving it pseudoreligious overtones.
- To be clear, it's the security guards who do the suicide-exploding, rather than the scientists. Still, they would have to be pretty dedicated to science to happily die for their company, even if they do get cloned back to life.
- In Metal Gear Solid, Otacon wanted to design giant robots because it would be cool, basically. Why the US military wanted to make the robot capable of launching nuclear weapons untraceably is anyone's guess.
- There's some bit of Truth In Television to this, as various arms developers have indeed been experimenting with tanks with legs, on the principle that they can move on certain terrains other heavy vehicles can't, often leave less impact on said terrain (and thus would be harder to trace), and can be positioned for firing more easily. Having your nuclear option small, mobile, and relatively unrestricted by terrain is a pretty big tactical advantage. (Oddly enough, one of this troper's friends, who is very big into military robot shows, continues to blanket-dismiss the Metal Gear mechs as "ridiculous". This may have something to do with Nuclear Subs serving the same role as Metal Gears, except better.)
- Aperture Science — "We do what we must because we can." (Most of their projects turn out to be comedic scientific overkill, such as creating a fuel system de-icer that is also an artificially intelligent supercomputer and inventing a device that bends the laws of space-time for "potential shower curtain applications.") The founder of Aperture Science was pretty much insane from mercury poisoning when he started the company.
- Black Mesa aren't exactly that different either. Pretty much everything that goes on there isn't so much for the benefit of mankind as a whole but for the sole purpose of tearing physics a new one. Give me one good reason why they gave their theoretical physicists fairly comprehensive firearms training if the result of their insane meddling was going to be naught but sunshine, puppies, and candy.
- This is the defining characteristic of the University of Planet in Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri. Upside: incredibly fast progress up the Tech Tree. Downside: unethical experiments inspire the lower classes into mob riots. They're portrayed as Neutral Neutral, though, considering there are even meaner people in Planet.
- The witch Deneb from Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen. She created the creatures that have later been re-used, one way or another, in (as far as this Troper knows) every other Ogre Battle game: the Pumpkin Head. Which is a man who's head has been replaced with a Jack-O-Lantern. By the time you get there she has stopped experimenting on humans and is apparently doing large-scale experiments on the lands around her castle instead. (With large areas on the map being purple instead of the normal brown for hills/mountains.) And the only reason given for why she did any of the things she did is that she was "researching some new magic" and "you know how important research is to Deneb". In short, she did it FOR
SCIENCE MAGIC!
- This is all the motivation Ratchet has for his little tinkerings, including, but not limmited to, electrified underwear — "thunderpants".
- If Fallout 3's resident Mad Scientist Dr. Lesko is attacked, he shouts a number of phrases like "science always triumphs!" and "I strike this blow for science!" while fighting.
- While she never actually comes out and says it, Moira Brown's motivation is basically For Science, never once losing her veneer of optimism while asking you to perform increasingly perilous tasks all for the sake of gathering information for her Wasteland Survival Guide.
Web Comics
- Any and every spark in Girl Genius will have at least some amount of "For Science!" in the nature. While their morality will vary all over the spectrum, this is a unifying characteristic; it even helped hook up one of the Heterodyne boys with the Mad Scientist's Beautiful Mad Scientist Daughter.
"Don't tell me you fear the experiment?"
"I fear the result - but the experiment, why, that is Science!"
- A flashback in Dresden Codak demonstrates Kimiko's Gadgeteer Genius potential:
Young Kimiko: I must find a thing called "biscuits".... I will do science to it.
- This strip from The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, guest-starring Washu Chan, Oliver Wendell Jones, and Dr. Thaddeus Bodog Sivana.
- Irregular Webcomic sends up Myth Busters For Science tendencies on a fairly regular basis. Examples here and with "for science" used literally here, here, replete with a footnote reference to this very page and here, with the same link. But one has to keep in mind that Nazi science is one step further and Nazi science sneers at TV Tropes.
- Mezzacotta also features many scientists, such as here.
- Skewered expertly-or something-in Real Life Comics, when Tony tries to help Greg move.
- Riff in Sluggy Freelance, is a mad scientist with awesome inventions who still lives with roommates in on-again off-again lower middle class poverty, all from not being able to make inventions that aren't destructive or useful in day to day life. This is parodied in the strip to the point his "Nice Earth" counterpart has won the Nobel Prize for focusing his inventions on peaceful and productive uses. Of course, why he doesn't sell any of his various ray gun designs to the army...
- This strip from VG Cats. If you like Winnie The Pooh, don't read it.
- The Elegant Nova of Progession of Keychain of Creation is the embodiment of this trope. She preformed experiments in a high-fantasy world to make cyborgs, developed a way to SCIENCE!!! herself into a giant cat; and owns a Friction Beam. Her catch phrase is "Science!"
- A related battle cry from xkcd: "Stand back! I'm going to try Science!"
- Another example from xkcd in this strip.
Web Original
- Dr. Insano uses "With SCIENCE, of course!" as his Catch Phrase, and tends to lean towards the destructive side of scientific research if his orbital death ray and his taking control of Neutro are any indication. Some of his inventions, however, such as the raritanium-powered anti-magic field generator, might have peaceful applications. Not that he acknowledges this, as he's quite open about wishing to use them for death, destruction and world conquest.
- Homestar seems to think that "saying something smart" involves dressing in a lab coat, holding up a beaker, and shouting, "Science! Science again! I said science again!"
Western Animation
- On The Venture Brothers, Professor Richard Impossible conducted an experiment that blew up in his face. It granted him incredible stretching powers, but left his family with painful and hideous mutations. Not only is he completely unsympathetic of their plight, but he grossly neglects his wife and son and treats them like prisoners most of the time. He has flatly admitted that he believes science to be much more important than his family.
- Impossible is a thinly-veiled parody of The Fantastic Four's Reed Richards, who has slipped into this trope from Reed Richards Is Useless more than once (most recently during Civil War).
- Parodying an evil Reed Richards also occurred in the "Heroes" episode of Batman Beyond. This Troper figures it's his resemblance to J.R. "Bob" Dobbs."
- Doctor Venture himself does highly unethical science either for profit, or just because he can. One season two episode shows his to do list includes such things as "Spit in God's face". The page pic itself is from the pilot episode, where he believes the "Ooh-Ray" has nothing but peaceful applications, much like Tesla's "Peace Ray" (you should he keep in mind his character was different in the pilot). And then there's his "Joy Can"...
Dr. Venture: I might have used a few unorthodox parts.
Dr. Orpheus: Just tell me one.
Dr. Venture: (mumble)
Dr. Orpheus: What?
Dr. Venture: *ahem* ... an orphan?
Dr. Orpheus: Did you just say... AN ORPHAN?!
Dr. Venture: Yeah, a little... orphan boy.
Dr. Orpheus: It's powered by a forsaken chiiiiiiild!?
Dr. Venture: Might be, kind of, I mean, I didn't use the whole thing!
- Lampshaded in an episode of Danny Phantom, when Danny asked his dad how much he would get paid for helping out in the lab. "I pay you to mow the lawn. This you'll do for the love of science!"
- Self-proclaimed Evil Genius Jumba Jookiba from Lilo And Stitch seems to have created his genetic experiments just for the heck of it. Although he delights in describing the evil applications of his creations, he seems to have no grand plans for them. In the original movie, he notes that he never gave Experiment 626 (Stitch) a higher purpose.
- In Disney's Gargoyles, there may have been commercial applications for the Gargoyle genome, the procedure to create Mutates, or cloning, but Dr. Anton Sevarius only seemed interested in research and experimentation for its own sake.
- In the pilot episode of Time Squad, the titular squad has to deal with a horde of flesh eating robots created by Eli Whitney (seriously). When Otto asks Whitney why he did this, he replies "I wanted to do something to help mankind". How rampaging flesh eating robots could accomplish that is a question not even Whitney himself could answer...
- What a fine day... FOR SCIENCE!
- An episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has an unknown villain break into a lab and steal genetically-engineered termites that also eat metal, concrete, and plastic. When April interviews the scientist who made them, she asks just what purpose the termites were supposed to serve besides the obvious destruction, and gets a blank look in response.
- This seems to be the motivation behind half of Professor Frink's inventions in The Simpsons.
Grampa Simpson: What the hell is that?
Professor Frink: Why, it's a death ray my good man, behold.
Grampa: Hey, feels warm, kinda nice.
Frink: Well it's just a prototype, with proper funding I'm confident this little baby could destroy an area the size of New York City.
Grampa: But I want to help people, not kill them!
Frink: Oh, well to be honest, the ray only has evil applications. You know my wife will be happy, she's hated this whole "death ray" thing from day one.
- Frylock falls into this trope on occasion — the toilet that ripped off all Carl's skin springs to mind.
- Whatever motivates Dr. Weird is up for grabs — this one might explain it. Some of it. The saner ones, anyway.
Real Life
- Paraphrasing from badly remembered, possibly apocryphal, sources: When JFK was asked why America was going to the Moon, he answered "Why not".
- "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
- Wernher von Braun, the scientist who worked on JFK's Apollo project had in the past made the V2 missile for the Nazis. Why? For Rocketry!
- One of the most horrifying examples in real life of this is Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi scientist who performed "experiments" at Auschwitz, and had a particular fascination with twins and other "abnormals", who he researched in order to find scientific proof of racial inferiority. He was known to perform amputations and major surgeries without anesthesia, and once sewed two twins together to make artificial Siamese twins. Said one prisoner of him, "Nobody ever questioned him — why did this one die? Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part."
- There's a sort of counterpart to Mengele: a group of Jewish scientists, who after being locked in ghetto, wrote a paper on effects of malnutrition on human body. They hid it in a milk can, so it survived the war.
- It's rather insulting to write they are a "counterpart" to Mengele. It was more of that since they couldn't do anything about it, they would document their starvation so perhaps something good could come from it, knowledge.
- Playing Devils Advocate: They came from the same place: Specimen that were going to die no matter what. This Troper once read a extremelly chilling blog from a somewhat insane blogger that claimed that the true tradgedy in the Holocaust was that it was Sciences's Missed Opportunity: Millions of healthy human test subjects that were going to die either way. For Science to its logical extreme or just batshit insane?
- For the time being, the experiments using the Large Hadron Collider will mostly be for satisfying scientific curiosity (namely searching for the hypothetical Higgs boson). Whether any practical use can be made from such a discovery (which would provide insight to the quantum nature of mass) remains to be seen. There are also those who claim that the experiments are unethical, due to the potential for creating miniature black holes which could destroy the planet, but these fears are mostly groundless (REALLY!).
- The idea that a miniature black hole could destroy the world is quite absurd, really — the whole reason why the black holes are so dangerous is that they are supermassive. That is, that they have at least the mass of one star collapsed in a superdense package. The entire mass of Earth couldn't produce a black hole worth mention (about the size of a marble); unless the science manages to get the mass of a star out of nothing, the idea of planet-destroying black hole coming out of nowhere is quite ludicrous. Black hole isn't a cosmic vacuum cleaner — the only thing that "sucks" is the enormous gravity, impossible to produce in Earth conditions.
- No, what makes black hole so dangerous is that they eat everything that crosses their event horizon. Black holes can theoretically come in any size, its just that the death throes over supermassive stars are the only force known powerful enough to collapse something to sufficient density. Any black hole that could suck down matter fast enough to overcome evaporation by Hawking radiation (assuming current models are correct) would devour the Earth if the two intersected. If the LHC did make a micro black hole it would be too small to eat a significant amount of mass before it evaporated in a puff of Hawking radiation.
- That's bull. The mass of a microscopic black hole wouldn't be enough to "suck in" air molecules, rather less a whole planet. This whole idea is nothing but a way for cranks to profile themselves in the media.
- "Let's turn them on and find out!" See page quote above. Unlike what science is supposed to be, which is gathering needed data to test an idea, Hawking radiation has never been observed, only predicted. It is supposedly very out of character for scientists to take the survival of the world on faith, which in this case is extrapolating way beyond the range of validity of any current data. To quote the source for an above page quote, "Supposedly, according to everything that we know about science, these experiments are safe. But these experiments will change everything that we know about science."
- Again, micro-black holes are small enough to glide between atoms without hitting any of them. The whole matter about black hole's "suck" factor is gravity — these things don't have enough gravity or size to pull in a single atom. No respectable scientist in the field of physics has made complaints about the safety of the LHC, mainly because the phenomenons which it produces constantly happen naturally in the universe, and there hasn't been a single hint to black holes being born spontaneously without a supermassive collapsing star to provide the mass.
- Per this article, CERN scientists have pointed out that Earth is bathed with cosmic rays powerful enough to create black holes and the planet hasn't been destroyed yet.
- "yet" being the key word...
- Good point. I'll just start construction of a giant laser to turn off that pesky Sun for good. For Science!
- A lot of theoretical research tend to suit this trope, at least at first. When one asks why special relativity was useful in 1905, or Democritus' concept of atomism in classical Greece, one finds that the greatest practical results came decades or even centuries later. A particular meta-example would be Bacon, whose most noted practical accomplishment was how to create practical accomplishments in research. Or immortality.
- There is no such thing as good knowledge or bad knowledge. There is only knowledge. Morality is when you decide not to use it. — anonymous
- Cracked's list of 7 Kickass Sci-Fi Cancer Cures starts with drilling holes in a man's head and firing fiber-optic anti-tumor lasers into his brain. While he's *conscious*.
- There was a concern that the first A-Bomb tests would trigger nitrogen fusion and ignite the entire atmosphere, wiping out all life on Earth. Teller first brought it up. "In Serber's account, Oppenheimer mentioned it to Arthur Compton, who 'didn't have enough sense to shut up about it. It somehow got into a document that went to Washington' which led to the question being 'never laid to rest'." By the time the test was done, this outcome seemed vanishingly unlikely (nitrogen does not fuse easily). Further discussion here.
Besides, the big worry was that if the Allies didn't get nuclear fission working soon then the Germans would beat them to it. Given the chance between our blowing up the world and the enemy blowing up the world, it was obvious what to do.
That is, on reflection, not a happy sentence.
- One of the pioneers of head transplants, Robert J. White, appears to have fit this mold perfectly. Even a completely successful transplant would leave someone as a head grotesquely stitched onto someone else's shoulder, with no motor control, severely limiting its practical use.
- Certainly the case when it was pioneered - but nerve grafts are starting to take place with people recovering at least partial motor control of reattached and transplanted limbs.
- Pseudo-real-life example: A bunch of scientists held a conference in World Of Warcraft. Naturally, their battlecry was "For Science!"
- Parodied in this Onion News clip.
- Lasers. Between the laying of the theoretical groundwork after World War One and the first practical uses in the mid to late sixties, lasers were described as "a brilliant solution awaiting a problem". Everyone agreed that stimulated emission of coherent light was fascinating and clever, but no-one had much of an idea of what to do with it in practical terms.
- The Kola Superdeep Borehole, Siberia. The Soviet government wanted to know what was beneath the surface of the Earth. So they dug a really big hole...
- Carl Sagan harshly criticized Edward Teller for his relentless push to develop the hydrogen bomb. While nuclear fission bombs, such as the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are certainly nothing to be taken lightly, the whole "destroy all life on Earth N times over" model of the modern nuclear arsenal would not have been possible without the hydrogen bomb.
- Nerve.com has a I did it for Science regular section.
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