China News Service, Shanghai, November 7 (Reporter Xu Jing) Nobel Prize winner in physics and famous physicist Horst Ludwig Störmer came to Tongji University on the 6th and had nearly 2 hours of face-to-face communication with young teacher and student representatives. He combined his own scientific research stories to share his research process and encouraged the students present: Doing basic research relies on persistence, love and responsibility.
Stemmer was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1949. His path to scientific research and education was not smooth sailing. After graduating with a Ph.D., he entered Bell Laboratories in the United States, where he has been engaged in scientific research for many years.
"In the first year after I entered the laboratory, I once doubted whether I had chosen the wrong direction." Stemer said frankly at the scene. After repeated observations and explorations, he slowly found a research rhythm. "Only the harder you work, the more opportunities you will seize." He encouraged young people not to be afraid of trial and error, to extensively dabble in knowledge from different disciplines, to continue to expand their comprehensive abilities, and to more easily find research directions worthy of long-term investment.
In 1982, Sturmer collaborated with Cui Qi and observed for the first time a fractional step in Hall resistance. This phenomenon was the fractional quantum Hall effect that profoundly expanded the research boundaries of condensed matter physics. In 1998, Sturmer, Cui Qi, and Robert Laughlin jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this breakthrough discovery.
"This discovery was completely accidental. We didn't deliberately look for it, we just happened to stumble upon it." Stermer recalled this experience with a smile, and then emphasized that luck certainly plays a role in scientific research, but only by accumulating it over a long period of time can we identify the value of the discovery at the first time and find the right path for follow-up research. This is the key. "Without years of scientific research accumulation and experience, even if good luck is in front of you, it is easy to turn a blind eye, and the opportunity will disappear in an instant."
Scientific research is a long and often confusing road. How can we maintain our original aspirations for a long time? Stemer believes that researchers should keep their thinking flexible and continue to track cutting-edge developments in the field. Research should not be limited to a single subject. You should broaden your horizons and maintain a spirit of critical thinking and reasonable skepticism. This is a precious quality for scientific researchers. In order to promote basic research, he also actively collaborates with scholars in different fields to gain new inspiration from interdisciplinary collisions.
Throughout the exchange, Stemmer repeatedly mentioned the word "excited." “You must be genuinely excited about what you are doing.” He said that those seemingly flashes of ideas are essentially the result of researchers’ passion and continuous exploration day after day.
Stemer first came to China in the 1980s and was deeply impressed by China's development over the years, especially its breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Faced with the trend of AI being deeply integrated into scientific research, he gave his own opinion: AI can bring great assistance to scientific research, but it cannot replace face-to-face communication between people. Many of the best ideas at Bell Labs were born from impromptu discussions in the corridors. He suggested that young people should actively embrace and make good use of AI, but should not blindly rely on it and always maintain the dominant position of humans in scientific research.
“Experiments are the ultimate standard for testing the authenticity of theories.” He specifically emphasized that basic research is inseparable from solid experimental observations, and problems are discovered, analyzed, and solved through trial and error. The process of trial and error in scientific research is the key to cultivating scientific intuition and judgment, and this part cannot be left to AI.
