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On Craziness

MAny people in science


On discovery

One of the problems with science is that we have a large number of people entering the discipline who dream of one day making some great scientific discovery, but who emerge from unviersity with their degrees, but no training whatsoever in the discovery process.


The good news

Although discover can often be down to somple dumb luck – being in the right place, at the right time, with the right equipment – discovery is a skill, and just like other skills (like drawing, or playing the piano), our aptitude for discovery improves with practice. The difficulty here is that the opportunities for discovery inside conventional education are somewhat limited. We are taught. Instead of beign allowed th eluxury of deriving things ourselves from first principles without knowing the correct answer beforehand, we are told what the oputcome is supposed ot be and then told to derive that particualr result ... or maybe even given the derivation ready-made. this creates limited opportunities for building up one's discovery muscles.

Practicing discovery pretty much requires a certain level of ignorance.

The process goes somethign like this: First you derive and discover basic things that you've dimly heard of - perhaps Pythagoras' theorem. Admittedly, you've discovered your derivation a few thousand years too late, but no matter – once you have two or three of these old results under your belt, you can go on, and discover more and more things. Cros-referencing against real scientific history, you might be dejected to find that what you have just found out was already known a thousand years ago, or five hundred. But you continue – with the unfair advantage of considerable hindsight and a Twenty-First Century conceptual vocabulary that researcher in the C19th woudl have killed for – you already know about ideas like fields and spacetime curvature – you gop on and start discovering things that were found out in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Evetually, you reach the heady state of "discoving" things that you don;t actually already know - hitting the library reveals that you've "missed the boat" by half a century. But then, as you allow yourself more exposure to existing knowledge, you find yourself discoverign things that didn;t actually arrive in the peer-reviewed journals until maybe thirty years ago, or twenty, or ten ... and then, one day, you go to check the latest thing that you've dsicovered in the textboosk and journals, and find that ... it isn't there.

Now you're in the zone. You know how this stuff works. You've seen first-hand how knowledge accumulates and progresses. You've felt it. It's second nature. You have momentum – moving forward at an accelerated pace is now natural to you. By simply repeating what you've done before, the results that you start popping out are maybe a year or two ahead of their "official" discoveries, and then maybe ten years, or twenty ...

And you're there.

The bad news

Unfortunately, if you've been fed Twentieth-Century science "ready-made", like a seabird regurgitating fish to its young, you may have never have developed the habit. Looking at the crazy rate of discovery in the early C20th, a lot of the progress seemed to be down to the participants not really knowign what the hell they were doing. There was an element fo "folls rush in where angels fear to tread. "Discovery" was the goal and "being taught" was the enemy. Einstein had kept his wits sharp through his university years, and avoided blunting his intellect with othe rpeople's thoughts by the simple process of not attending lectures (which contributed to his lecturers regardign hs as insolent and disrespectful, and beign soemone who had no place in science). Once quantum theory became a more established feidl fo study, Pauli complained that he'd never be able to discover anythign else for the rest of his life, because now he "knew too much". Too many preconceptions about the way that phsics ought to work. It's easier to strike a radical route away from the beaten path, if there is no path, or if you don't actually know where the path is.

If you're in your mid-twenties, and you've never discovered anything in your life before, and nobody's ever led you through the process, then why would you expect to suddenly be able to do it now? You might be able to do it, but it's more likely that you'll be dependent on circumstance and on othe rpeople - you'll be lookign for "new" areas and the accepted cutting edge, where new discoveries seem to be beign made ... but thousands of othe rpeople will be chasign the same frontier, and have the same toolsets as you, and maybe have gotte there a year or two ealier. Unless you can be in on a breakign subject, or new experimental hardware, your opportunities ar elimited .

On the plus side, you'll probably have a career.