Surfers, Gold Miners, Sheep, or Shepherd?

We all have experienced waves and fashions in science, and often these waves broke up due to expectations that were not met. Wiley has launched a new journal, expecting that interfaces will remain a challenging topic for many years to come. This is the expectation of many colleagues, but we should also ask the question, if these expectations have a solid base or if we are just following trends? I remember 50 years ago a paper postulating a new mechanism to achieve a transition to an organic superconductor at about 2000 K,1 but superconduction even above room temperature remained a dream. It stimulated much work with low-dimensional organic solids, but soon decayed and was quickly replaced by work following a patent on an organic rectifier.2 This rectifier has been verified 30 years later,3 but not many people maintain that, as expected 40 years ago, we are now developing molecular electronics to replace good old silicon.4 Likewise Langmuir-Blodgett films, later so-called self-assembly films, were postulated to be important tools to place molecules at surfaces with 0.1 nm precision.5 This may be possible for some molecules, but not feasible in a practical world with huge entities. In all these cases I have experienced many promises in terms of future applications, followed by frustration of many people and drastic decay of activities after the wave was broken. On the other hand these activities have laid the ground for many modern applications. I also remember the work of Helfrich and Schneider 50 years ago on recombination luminescence in anthracene crystals which I consider the first organic light emitting diode (OLED).6 But this work appears to be forgotten by most people now riding the wave of organic electronics. How about the broken waves in interfacial science? It is obvious, that the interface gains importance with miniaturization of materials, and therefore control of the properties requires understanding and control of interfaces. But is this sufficient to attract scientific talents? I believe the real motivation is, that we are now in a position to direct individual molecules or atoms with nm precision to study their properties, and this fascinating perspective will remain for times to come. But we should not claim immediate applications. Typical for our field is multidisciplinarity, and one obviously has to learn from other disciplines to cooperate. Hence scientists interdepend, and this is a chance as well as a challenge. Typical for scientists is also the tendency to behave like gold miners, following the trend set by a few. Hearing that there is gold in California, many go there. Getting then told, there is silver in Arizona, they will follow. But from this activity more people died than became rich, and after all the excitement many ghost towns and some touristic places remain along highway 49 in the Sierra Nevada and in Tombstone in Arizona. The tendency to follow the traditional funding schemes pushing for applications also raises the question, if these are dominated by a few shepherds, and most scientists follow them like sheep. As no one wants to be the sheep and not all can be shepherds, how to escape this dilemma? We will have to demonstrate not only how to solve problems, but that there are even more problems waiting to be solved. High energy physicists and astrophysicists frequently demonstrate, how to achieve this. Every “big” discovery is accompanied by the notion that this raises even more questions, and more money is needed. We do not have to copy this, but return to serious estimates on remaining questions to be solved. My optimism in this respect results from the fact, that most scientists have started their careers, sacrificing some salary but gaining in freedom, thinking and lifestyle. Therefore they are less amenable to issues like salary, h-index and impact factors. Consequently they do not like to be shepherd or sheep, but go their individual way. Yet excitement is necessary, and so we all hope to find a gold mine, even if these mines are rare. Fortunately interfacial science is not driven by a single application or question, and it touches also many disciplines in bio- and materials sciences as well as physics, chemistry and biology. Therefore it relies on many waves, and even if some break, there are others carrying us on. And even if many ways lead to nowhere, we can also learn from failures, as the above examples have shown. This is a very personal editorial from a scientist, who has been 40 years in basic science and 5 years in industry. So I claim to have some insight into both worlds with some bias. I am optimistic, that most scientists will not follow the call to be sheep or shepherd, but follow their individual agenda with the enthusiasm of a gold miner and her/his individual mine. This will be most rewarding for him/her as well as for society.