How Scientists Know An Idea Is a Good One

Physicist Chris Lee explains one of the toughest judgment calls scientists have to make: figuring out if their crazy ideas are worth pursuing. He says: "Research takes resources. I don't mean money—all right, I do mean money—but it also requires time and people and lab space and support. There is a human and physical infrastructure that I have to make use of. I may be part of a research organization, but I have no automatic right of access to any of this infrastructure. ... This also has implications for scale. A PhD student has the right to expect a project that generates a decent body of work within those four years. A project that is going to take eight years of construction work before it produces any scientific results cannot and should not be built by a PhD student. On the other hand, a project that dries up in two years is equally bad. ... the core idea also needs to be structured so, should certain experiments not work, they still build something that can lead to experiments which do work. Or, if the cool new instrument we want to build can't measure exactly what I intended, there are other things it can measure. One of those other things must be fairly certain of success. To put it bluntly: all paths must lead to results of some form."

Comments

Good ideas are discovered after the fact!

[SirAstral]

Good ideas are hard to determine, and sometimes you find out something was actually a really bad idea only after several years like trans fats, or saccharin.

The results of scientific discovery are diminished by classifying them as success/failure. The only 2 classifications should be "A Truth Discovered" or "Pseudo Science".

Any lab experiment which is conducted to seek the truth even if it does not yield a commercially viable result is still a truth discovered. A so-called failed experiment still is a success at discovering a method which does not work to achieve desired results, and discovering what does not work in some cases can be more important then finding out what does and is an actual truth discovered.

Any experiment performed to skew results in a particular direction, or where evidence is tossed that does not agree with your idea's is nothing but pure Pseudo Science. Unfortunately we have so much of this it has made people distrust scientists because they have proven that they are just as opportunistic as normal people and will do just about any dishonest thing for a buck! True Science be damned!

Basically they don't. At least they shouldn't

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

If you know `a priori whether an idea is "good" or "bad" it will bring prejudice that will taint the results. One of the famous example is a naive Indian astrophysicist on his first trip outside India met Eddington on eve of his big presentation, in 1929. That guy explained in great detail his idea and Eddington not only dismissed it, he was scheduled to present just before this paper from that young man. He trashed the idea so much that the young man abandoned that field altogether and chose to pursue a different field [*]. Most others dismissed that paper too. It eventually garnered that young man a Nobel Prize in physics, and is the foundation of what is known as Chandrashekar Limit that tells you if a star is big enough to go supernova. That paper was discovered about 15 years later, after WW II. So in theory they should not know if an idea is good or bad.

But that is theory. In practice, having some realistic goals based on available resources of money and time is common to all fields, not just science.

[*] Chandrashekar was not bitter about Eddington, he credits being forced to change fields in his late 20s, taught him how to learn and he deliberately abandoned his field of study about every ten years, he continued to be productive into his late 70s. If you find the spoof paper written in his style The Imperturbability of Elevator Operators, by S Candlestickmaker, by one of his grad students, it makes hilarious reading for the geeks. ]

Re:Luck...

[ColdWetDog]

But seriously, if you work with old-school biologists, do the world a favour, and teach them that a Gaussian error on a number of cells is dumb and wrong.

I think that entry into either medicine or the biological sciences should require a passing grade on a graduate level statistics course. Only then do you stand a chance in hell to start moving away from a century of misconstrued numbers. In medicine, it's still painfully obvious that most researchers couldn't get past Stats 101. And that is even after they have the manuscript reviewed by a biostatistician (who is probably shivering in a basement closet hoping that the next group of researchers gives up looking for him and goes to a bar.)

Of course, I'd still be fixing cars for a living, but that might have been a better outcome for myself and society....