Naeem 1 Muhammad Naeem 31 March, 2011 There is no Hope of Doing Perfect Research According to OxfordDictionaries.

com, research is the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. If we combine the word perfect with research then it would mean that the research that is ultimate using tools and methods that need no further development. Before making a conclusion whether research can be perfect or not, we should first look into the factors that affect the quality or perfection of research. Among all the factors that affect the research quality, the most dominant ones are research methods, tools, and psychological, emotional, academic and social development of human mind. Two other important factors are time and space. All these constraints are interrelated and are dependent primarily on time. As time progresses, these variables change. Research is dependent on resultant effect of these factors and changes like a random variable for which there exists no linear relationship with the factors affecting it. So we cannot predict the path sketched by the research and these factors. Therefore, these processes possess a built-in uncertainty associated with them. Now the most logical follow up to these assertions would be to support them with some logical reasoning. The reason why I deem these factors to be the most pronounced ones is that if we follow the track of the known history, we would immediately notice one fact that the human mind developed with the passage of time. It was not an abrupt process. New inventions and discoveries were made as the mind developed and new facts became known. The most important example of my age that tells it all is computer. According to ThinkQuest.org, first computer that was a simple calculator which was capable of addition and subtraction only was made up of multiple-staged assembly of wheels and gears and was developed by Blaise Pascal in 1642. Then through research and logic, human mind came up with a binary digits system which made further development of computers easier. By now we have greatly reduced the price and size of the computers with an increase in its processing speed.

Naeem 2 Todays fastest supercomputer is capable of 2.566 quadrillion (thousand million million) floating point operations per second, or FLOPS (or petaFLOPS). It was made possible through a span of around 400 years and wont meet its perfection because human thirst for more wont satiate. Another example that pertains to my published work about quantization of distortion in a transmission line is worth mentioning here. Development of initial draft took us around 6 months. We were bringing in ideas to find the best possible way to approach the problem. All of us proposed solutions that were best to our minds but many of them were turned down on the basis of feasibility and other reasons. After picking up the best possible solution, constrained by different trade-offs, we had to simulate the idea. Different software tools were available and we had to pick the best possible. We picked up the tool, simulated the idea and sent our work over for analysis. It got accepted and published in renowned IEEE magazine. If that research work would have been perfect, we would have stopped working on it but recently we are working on the hardware realization of the concept. We are again in that phase of generating and scrutinizing ideas. Research begets ideas and ideas beget research. Ideas are dependent on the same factors as those affecting the research quality. With time, human ideas refined and progressed more towards betterment but they are still not perfect. Moreover, perfect is not an absolute word as something that is perfect to me is not necessarily perfect for others. Its definition varies from person to person because of the personal likings, standards, needs, etc. We are talking about research in a collective sense here, but these are individual contributions that bring about a change in research quality. People in small groups or individually contribute to the research processes and tools associated with them. Every now and then there is some new invention or discovery and this process wont stop because we wont be able to invent the ultimate that can serve the needs, likings and standards of every human being. In short, human research will reach its pinnacle but will not get to the perfection because our needs change as the time changes and there will always remain some room for improvement.

Naeem 3 Works Cited "research". OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford University Press. April 2011. Web. 31 Mar. 2011. The Development of the Computer. ThinkQuest.org. ThinkQuest Team 28787, 30 Jul. 1999. Web. 31 Mar. 2011.