michael_nielsen

Obviously, the distinction isn't black & white. Eg in Turing's case you can argue that the problem of developing a notion of effective computation was implicit in earlier work (eg Hilbert). But Turing understood the big picture problem superbly, & made it obvious this was a field

I've seen and heard lots of discussion of field founding, usually in a Sanger-like context: figuring out how to make progress on big problems that are more or less obvious to everyone.

But I've heard very, very little about field finding. And I believe field finders are (a) incredibly valuable for science; and (b) dramatically undervalued by existing institutions.

It's surprisingly hard to think of a field finding paper that was supported by a grant. It's a case where you by definition _can't_ make a strong prior argument for the work; in fact, the whole job is to figure out the basic concepts that will make such an argument even possible

Eg you can't motivate the founding paper of computer science by referring to some prior notion of how important computers are; you're actually trying to invent the notion of computers, & argue for its importance.

When such papers were supported by a grant, it was always for something very different, AFAIK.

It's striking that very, very few later papers on quantum computing take these questions seriously. They instead take the notion of quantum computing as given, and ask questions about that notion. But that wasn't possible in the early 1980s.