The International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS) exemplifies the unity in science community despite political and economical divisions and the important role the basic science has played in promoting technological advancement, said Eric Maskin, a Nobel laureate in economics, in an exclusive interview which was aired on Friday.
The ICBS was inaugurated in Beijing on July 14, bringing together more than 800 scientists and scholars from home and abroad, including Fields Medal winners, Turing Award winners and one Nobel laureate.
Speaking with China Media Group (CMG) on the sidelines of the event, Eric Maskin listed two reasons why the conference was of significance.
"To begin with, I think one of the values of this particular conference is the fact that it's international. At a time when in the political area, economic area there is increasing fragmentation around the world, increasing tension, I think science is something that can bring us all together. Science is, by its nature, a collaborative enterprise, and taking advantage of the fact that there are excellent scientists all over the world, in China, in the U.S., in Europe. And bringing them all to one place at one time has great value in itself," Maskin said.
"But the other reason why I think this conference is so important is that it reminds us that basic science has a critically important side benefits. We know from the work of the economist Robert Solow, back in the 1950s, that most economic growth can be attributed to new ideas. New ideas are essential when it comes to growth. And new ideas ultimately get traced back to basic science. You can certainly predict on the basis of history that all great technological advances will be based ultimately on basic science," he continued.
Basic science lays foundation for technological advances: Nobel laureate
Shanghai, a leading force for Chinese modernization, is accelerating the pace of building itself into a science and technology innovation center with global influence.
The tech-savvy metropolis is now speeding up the transition from structure building to function strengthening. Taking strengthening the capability of fostering original sci-tech innovations as the main task, it is pursuing both sci-tech innovation and institutional innovation to significantly improve its comprehensive strength in science and technology as well as the overall effects of innovations.
Over the past 10 years since Shanghai began building itself into an international science and technology innovation center, it has reaped fruitful results in sci-tech innovation, which has pushed the metropolis' GDP across the 4-trillion-yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) mark.
In 2023, Shanghai's total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its GDP, and the city's fiscal expenditure on science and technology rose by 36.7 percent to 52.8 billion yuan (about 7.47 billion U.S. dollars).
Driven by science and technology advances, Shanghai's industrial transformation has sped up. The combined scale of the three leading industries of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, and biomedicine in the city has reached 1.6 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars).
At the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Science City, Qinglong, an open-source general-purpose humanoid robot with a height of 182 centimeters and up to 43 active degrees of freedom, is being trained to pick up oranges.
"After some training, the robot will be able to complete this move by itself when it encounters a similar scenario in the future," said Shi Zhihua, trainer of robot Qinglong.
Thanks to an advanced control software, Qinglong can skillfully perform fast walking, avoid obstacles, go uphill and downhill, and resist impact.
"We plan to build a venue that can simultaneously train 1,000 robots by 2027," Shi said.
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation medium-energy synchrotron light source facility with 46 laboratories, has been operating around the clock to serve researchers from around the country, whose experiments cover a wide range of fields such as life sciences, materials science and chemical catalysis.
"We are using the SSRF's light to observe the phase change process of this material when it's heated to 1,100 degrees Celsius," said Song Shuang, a PhD candidate of Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"Our team is developing materials for the energy sector," said Miao Zhikai, a researcher of Tianjin University.
"We are developing cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries," said Li Guodong, a researcher of Fudan University.
Though the laboratories at the SSRF have been running at full capacity, researchers still have to apply for them months in advance, reflecting the vibrancy of innovation in Shanghai.
Shanghai blazes sci-tech frontiers to boost innovation-driven modernization
