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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."
That there is a little math that should be done when faced with the old " It can be done, but , should it be done?" question
$= (time + obtanium) / desire * beer
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
That's not a description of a good idea. That's a description of an idea that fits into an arbitrary 4-year timescale that fits with a PhD program's average length.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The triangle of supply and demand works in this case as well.
Good/ Fast/ Cheap
Pick any two. Then use the profit algorithmic function to determine if the time utilized is an asset or boat anchor.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Science as a process is like Natural selection and just as in Natural selection, one may come with the dead end. This is not necessarily bad.
To quote Thomas A. Edison, "If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward".
A PhD student has the right to expect a project that generates a decent body of work within those four years.
Four years? Ha! That's a good one!
A big part of the problem is that there are few negative results in scientific literature. Ever found a paper with a clear negative outcome? I didn't. This "positive bias" in scientific publications is probably causing a major blow to the efficiency of scientific research.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The good ones need ink as well.
It is obvious that you're a mathematician. Your equation is dimensionally wrong.
...and the ability to think on your feet.
It is not possible to plan 4 years ahead to ensure success. What you get instead is a PhD project plan that's wrapped in a set of general concepts (AKA escape routes) in case you hit a dead end. I'm currently doing a life science PhD and have changed tack at the half way point. A number of my colleagues have also, often quite drastically, whether for reasons of practical feasibility or time constraints.
If we know accurately what we were going to work on that far in advance, it has probably already been done.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
Chris Lee may be a physicist when he dons that hat, but in TFA he speaks as a people/resource manager, not as a physicist. In the science of physics, the only thing that determines whether an idea has merit is the scientific method, and that's very well documented.
Resource management is much more about cost and "return on investment" than about physics, even in the hard sciences, He wasn't speaking as a physicist in any way that's relevant to the science of his field.
Ancient Persians would debate ideas twice - once sober and once drunk. It had to sound feasible in both states to be a good idea.
I'm afraid the title of your note is misleading. Good science, much more than good engineering, involves testing new or old theories, to find how they work in previously untested ways, or to make sure that the previous test was really valid and caught all the important factors. A good graduate school project, involves a constrained project that can be reasonably tested in a few years, that does involve something of interest to the adviser, and that with good luck can be turned into a career of related questions.
The key is to make the initial question relatively simple, so that the concept can be expanded into tests or other related fields as time and funding permits. This isn't asking the "right size" of question, it's asking a question with enough related, interesting implications but that still has relevance if only the simplest parts can be addressed. Let me take an example of something I'd love to find a good thesis for: the cost of using different sorting algorithms.
The maximum computational costs of complex sorting algorithms is well understood (and well described at Wikipedia). But the additional computational cost of maintaining registers is not factored in, especially for small or modest data sets, and the cost of comparison _itself_ between different formats, or between positive and negative numbers, is not factored in to those computational costs. Neither is the cost of a partial sort that has to be started over from scratch or the benefit of algorithms that can be used when it is partially sorted. There is _wonderful_ material for a thesis in that kind of question, and even material for almost immediate application to industry. The preliminary survey and testing work with computational models can be done within a year by someone competent, but testing it against different CPU or software environments would be even more valuable and could easily fill out the rest of a graduate program, even leading to a creer in optimization of computational algorithms.
and is always an option
See how Nikola Tesla did it, but do the same without the likes of Edison, big money, banksters, corrupt politicians, in other words, you're doomed!
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
It is obvious that you're a mathematician. Your equation is dimensionally wrong.
No, it's correct. Let's do the analysis: $= (time + obtanium) / desire * beer
time is in seconds
obtanium is in seconds (how long to obtain it)
desire is in seconds/liter (the longer you wait, the more you want)
beer is in dollars/liter
so we have (seconds + seconds)/(seconds/liter) * (dollars/liter) = dollars
Q.E.D.
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
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!
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. ]
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
To continue the CKXD comic,
Math is applied Logic
Logic is applied Philosophy
Philosophy is applied Sociology
and "the circle is now complete."
...that he has no clue about particle physics. Building the ATLAS detector took well over 8 years and PhD students were involved. They worked on detector R&D, performance studies etc. as well as simulation of the physics the detector would eventually be able to detect. Not everyone can do their physics in their own lab with their own group of students and postdocs. Some physics requires huge machines and detectors and that necessitates long construction times...and if this guy poked his head outside his lab once or twice he would know that!
"Good/ Fast/ Cheap
Pick any two. Then use the profit algorithmic function to determine if the time utilized is an asset or boat anchor.
--"
Fast and cheap may be easy to measure, good on the other hand is not so easy.
For example, during the early years of the cold war it was thought that nukes would be a fast and cheap way to deal with a Russian invasion of Europe.
(and it would kill plrnty of commies, so it was obviously good as well, however the radiation and nuclear winter effects would have killed most of the rest of us, but they didn't know that at the time.
Four years? Not in Canada - and presumably not in the US either. The department average in my program was more like 6 (I took about 6.5), and I've known people who have taken as long as 10 to complete their PhD.
From some document I found on startpage: http://careerchem.com/CAREER-INFO-ACADEMIC/Frank-Elgar.pdf
"Median time-to-completion of the PhD has nearly doubled during the last three 2 decades (from 6.5 to 11 years). "
This is why it's so important in biology to know people, or to have a PI who does. Friends tell friends their negative results, and that's how word gets around.
The only way to know if an idea was good, is after you've already done it. Future prediction is always a crapshoot. People who claim to be good at it were typically just lucky, and are deluding themselves into thinking it was all skill.
Or, a series of small interrelated projects.
That is the customary approach I've seen the last decade.
"A PhD student has the right to expect a project that generates a decent body of work within those four years."
For a Masters degree, this is acceptable. For a PhD, they had better be coming up with their own idea, a plan, funding, and then have their advisor and committee evaluate during the prospectus defense. Having their topic/project dropped in their lap so they can turn the crank is not what a PhD is all about.
Funding?
There are areas of physics where the cycle time for proposals is 2 years (from announcement to release of funds) with a success rate of less than 10% for even senior people (NIH has an even lower funding rate, and an expectation that most things get proposed a couple times before being funded). Many, if not most, graduate students in science can easily get funding to cover their salary through fellowships/RA positions/TA positions, etc, but the chances of a grad student writing their own grant proposal in most subfields is pretty small. Sure, there are areas where you can do good science with dimestore materials (and a few places that specialize in that), but that's a pretty narrow slice of science in almost any field. Some of the most successful faculty I've known at one of the top science/engineering universities in the world are successful because they let their post-docs be PI on proposals (which is relatively uncommon). Then if the project is awarded the post-doc starts the work as a post-doc and manages to spin it into a faculty job.
More akin to quantum mechanics. ,it's outcome is tied to the mandelbrot set dependent on the researcher involved and the brand / volume of beer consumed.
If it's fast and cheap, it won't be good
If it's good and fast it won't be cheap
If it's good and cheap, it won't be fast.
Motivational modifiers from the other equation can then be applied.
Is the profit $ equal to or greater than, the time and raw material, divided by your personal interest and the amount of beer you can expend for the project?
Utilizing these mathematics we can proceed with a quantum magnet that reduces the chance answer from a Schrödinger's magic 8 ball to either "Chances are good" or " Options look bleak".
To explore abstracts like ideas with statistically derived methods to define the problem is folly, in that, a bigger picture is needed rather than a detail and will result with the equivalent of urinating into a north wind on a cold day.
Relativistically
Nothing hard about decisions to proceed, with some simple math first.
It came from the same classes you and I had in Gravitational Yoga and Round Earth Theory.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
It's more like the square of supply and demand:
Price, Performance, Product & Delivery.
Pick two.
-- L8R, guitardood
That's why everything is fast and cheap.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
For example, during the early years of the cold war it was thought that nukes would be a fast and cheap way to deal with a Russian invasion of Europe.
And they were correct. It's worth noting that the USSR after the Second World War was far less aggressive militarily than the one previous to the war. They didn't invade another country directly until Hungary in 1956 while they had invaded a quite a number prior to the war (and were a huge contributor to starting the Second World War).
"Scientists" isn't some coherent group that "knows" something. Some take guesses, some succeed, some fail. Many get it wrong too, and quite frequently.
Scientists tell if an idea is a good one by trying to prove it wrong, over-and-over-again and in as logical a thought-out way as possible, til they give up. This is known as "science", and the fact that they do it this way is why we call them "scientists".
Once again we see that one can determine with decent success value of a scientific effort in the near future, not just centuries down the road. This is quite relevant to the funding of science. If the scientists themselves are trying to figure out what activities will be more fruitful, then that's a strong indication that society ought to be doing this as well.
goodness = (1 - p(random explosion))
If you think that "scientists" are mostly after money, then you don't know anything about how science works or where funding for science is actually spent.
Usually a PhD program is about seeing if the student is capable of doing their own research, and communicating results in a clear and complete way. It is not a complete training for going into academia (maybe it varies with field, but my experience is with physics). As such, you rarely see any effort for the student to get their own funding. Although getting funding yourself looks good for your resume (it might not really help with a postdoc position, but after that it would), but sometimes that comes down to doing things like putting travel grants and other small funding awards on the CV to show you did something along those lines. Even at the postdoc level, it seems rare to see researchers doing their own, complete grant proposals. At that point you would need to be hired by a group anyways, because I don't think I've seen a school hire a generic postdoc and let them get funding for their own project. You can still try to get funding for a side project, and it would look good. But typically, it is not until you are a beginning researcher in a tenure track position that you begin the funding grind.
As far as what to work on, it often is somewhere in between being told exactly what to do and having to come up with your own complete project. There is a reason they have advisors, who are their to advise on feasibility, potential directions of research, potential problems and questions that need to be answered, and to keep things on a decent time track. It is not just supposed to be a sink-or-swim process, it is supposed to be educational so the students build up experience, much of which they lack at that point (e.g. it is easy to get over-optimistic when younger about how long some things can take to do). Additionally, the group and their grants have usually some bigger picture issue they are working toward, and there may be limits to what they can use their resources for, and they additionally have a good idea of what would be most helpful to add to the team's effort.
The process I've seen for such students is usually more of a gradient in self design. An incoming grad student may be given at first a simple, cookbook project that is supposed to take a month or little more, with the point of giving them a chance to learn the code base, or the lab layout, or the general work going on around the experiment. Then the advisor will let them know several of the big questions they have and some of the work that could contribute to that. The student usually has a fair bit of choice in which direction they want to go, and then they start off with some basic work. From there, and the results, and from talking to the advisor, the thesis project evolves, with the student having quite a bit of say, and the role of the advisor becoming more about pointing out gaps that need to be filled in, or keeping projects from getting over ambitious if time starts running short. A more concrete example would be what I've seen done on various plasma physics experiments, where you have a single large machine, and then a multitude of diagnostics run by different people and subgroups. A student, after some introduction to the experiment, would be given options like: no one currently is running magnetic diagnostics and we need a person there, here are some unresolved questions that could work toward, we also have several people working on spectroscopy at the moment, but there are some other questions and a lot of data there that could still support another person or two, the x-ray diagnostic just go a new person and we're not sure if much could be added by adding a second person to that subproject, so we don't think that would be a productive area for you, although it might still be an option for using the data in combination with another diagnostic...
I see you're not familiar with the curriculum of the Subgenius Foundation.
All Slack flows from Bob to those who've paid their dues.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I like that. It applies more to the luthiery division of my company.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
A PhD is a several year apprenticeship in some area where you learn to do right-size research projects. The largest error of many new graduate students is to choose a project that has already been done, one that is too trivial to get publications out of, or one that is too large to finish in 3 years of work. There are fields outside of my PhD where i think I know pretty much the basic knowledge,e.g. computer science. But I would not be able to choose a "right size" R&D project without help.
The triangle of supply and demand, where one of the sides isn't supply and neither of the others is demand?
Don't repeat stuff you've misheard while listening to the grownups. It makes you look stupid.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is beer in the denominator, because then the limit of $ as beer approaches infinity is zero, which is contradicted by reality.
... it gets even worse: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
University of Chicago used to have at least a few people doing it-- granular media experiments can be done pretty cheaply, and there was someone there doing theory and experiments on migration of suspensions in droplets as they evaporate that started out with a bunch of experiments using coffee droplets. Poke around 4 year colleges that have good physics departments and there's probably someone doing good physics on the cheap.
If I had a dollar for every time some moron with a really stupid idea was able to get other people to part with their money for it, I'd be a rich man. George Carlin sums it up nicely when he said "You nail two pieces of wood together that have never been nailed together before and some schmuck will buy it from you." I would extend that further by saying "If you have charisma, you are able to convince people that the words coming out of your mouth are pure gold." In my experience, as with role-playing games, if someone with high charisma, chances is also a moron but people won't see it until it's too late. Chances are also high that such a person has the ability to blame their miserable failures on something or someone else, often a smart person with low charisma.
"A PhD student has the right to expect a project that generates a decent body of work within those four years."
For a Masters degree, this is acceptable. For a PhD, they had better be coming up with their own idea, a plan, funding, and then have their advisor and committee evaluate during the prospectus defense. Having their topic/project dropped in their lap so they can turn the crank is not what a PhD is all about.
Funding?
There are areas of physics where the cycle time for proposals is 2 years (from announcement to release of funds) with a success rate of less than 10% for even senior people (NIH has an even lower funding rate, and an expectation that most things get proposed a couple times before being funded). Many, if not most, graduate students in science can easily get funding to cover their salary through fellowships/RA positions/TA positions, etc, but the chances of a grad student writing their own grant proposal in most subfields is pretty small. Sure, there are areas where you can do good science with dimestore materials (and a few places that specialize in that), but that's a pretty narrow slice of science in almost any field. Some of the most successful faculty I've known at one of the top science/engineering universities in the world are successful because they let their post-docs be PI on proposals (which is relatively uncommon). Then if the project is awarded the post-doc starts the work as a post-doc and manages to spin it into a faculty job.
Given the recent surge in "professional grant writing consultants" you'd have to be insane to let someone write a proposal for their own PhD research (in the US that means a bachelors student!). With funding rates around 10% excellent, well-written proposals are already routinely rejected. Being able to ask postdocs to write proposals is a luxury of being a professor at a top school where you can attract postdocs that are that competent.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Nope.
After the revolutionary period (including the Russo-Polish War), until WWII, the Soviet Union was not at all adventurous militarily. This changed in 1939, when Germany presented a real danger to the Soviets. Stalin's first idea was to ally with France and Britain, but this attempt was not doing well when Stalin allied with Hitler instead, intending to use that alliance as time to re-equip (and doing a bad job of it). This started some Soviet aggression, largely to gain physical buffer areas.
After the German invasion and its failure, the Soviets wound up marching through Eastern Europe, not really by choice, and setting up Communist governments. The border of Soviet vs. Western influence was decided months before the first atomic bomb was ready. (It's worth noting that Communism gained legitimacy by being involved in most effective resistance operations; in fact, the most important legitimizing events were caused by German aggression rather than anything smart the Communists did.) Similarly, the Soviets launched offensives against Japan that were settled by negotiations with the West, attacking the Japanese in Manchuria on the exact date agreed on.
After the first two cities were nuked, the Soviets increased their levels of peacetime aggression, including intervention in Eastern Europe and more or less proxy fighting in various areas.
What the nukes did was make wars like WWII impossible, which I suppose counts as dealing with a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. They allowed a lot more minor aggression on the part of superpowers, since they eliminated the threat of it escalating into full-scale warfare.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
After the revolutionary period (including the Russo-Polish War), until WWII, the Soviet Union was not at all adventurous militarily.
First, you're speaking of a rather short 12 year period between the first conquest of territory in (1920-1924) and the second bout starting in 1936. That period was dominated by a long and bitter power struggle after Lenin's death. Even after Stalin's rise to power, he still spent several years clearing the government (and society in general) of those who might oppose him (or perhaps just because he could). This also was the period of the Homodor, the deliberate starvation of millions of rebellious Ukrainians.
But in 1936, Stalin was secure in power and the USSR absorbed considerable territory in the Middle East, creating 5 more soviet republics. He also dabbled in the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) on the Republican side. Then the USSR partitioned Poland with Germany in 1939, absorbed the Baltic states, and declared war on Finland as well. After the Second World War, the USSR kept most of the territory it had conquered as the "Eastern Bloc".
So before the Second World War, we have the only pause in the USSR's conquests being a horrific period when it was killing many millions of its own citizens. You can continue to make excuses for this brutal and aggressive regime, but I see nuclear weapons as being the only thing that prevented a third world war between the USSR, and western Europe and the US.
I'm speaking of about the end of Russian Civil War and associated wars to 1939, not 1936. I went out and looked for evidence that the Soviet Union went for territorial aggrandizement in 1936-39, and found nothing. All I found was a reorganization of already controlled territory in 1936. So, we're talking about a period in which the Soviet Union had by far the biggest tank forces on the planet and did nothing with it.
I find it hard to understand what's so aggressive about supporting the legitimate government of Spain in its civil war. I don't think Spain would have become an SSR no matter what happened there.
Now, look at 1939. Stalin was primarily looking at security from an obviously aggressive Germany. His first idea was an alliance with France and Britain, although he was justifiably afraid of their possible game of "Let's You And Him FIght". It's unclear whether this alliance ever would have worked, but the British in particular showed no enthusiasm, and Molotov-RIbbentrop was signed on the day the British envoy got authorization to say something on his own more than proposing a toilet break.
Stalin knew at this time that he was in a bad position, and set about to improve it. The Soviets occupied eastern Poland, the Baltic States, part of Romania, and fought a thoroughly inept war against Finland. This is aggression, but it isn't the same as going out and conquering or the sake of conquest. The later war naturally involved Soviet military control over much of eastern Europe and Manchuria. The Soviets wound up in military control of the places they'd agreed on with the Western Allies, no more.
At this point, the first nuclear weapons were used, and the Soviet aggression continued, although without the same question of ensuring safety. This includes several proxy wars, some of them quite large, and direct if not acknowledged participation. It looks to me like nukes did nothing to deter low-level Soviet aggression, and may well have encouraged it. (It's also possible that the Soviets took their new-found position and ran with it - WWII did quite a bit to legitimize Communism, after all.) It's very likely that the nukes prevented another large-scale war in Europe, but it's not certain. I know some of the Soviet reaction to WWII, but I don't know how it shaped high-level decision making. Were they determined to avoid anything like WWII again, as seems likely?
I have no idea why you think I'm making excuses for the Soviet Union, when I'm trying to put it into historical context. I see no reason to get into their iniquities (it would make this post much longer, for example), when the main point is whether nukes deter aggression.
Obviously, it's not possible to militarily conquer a country with nukes, or to conquer what a country considers its absolutely vital interests. That says nothing about lower-level aggression, including the conquest in Vietnam and attempted conquest in Afghanistan. In fact, having some sort of safety net encourages some forms of aggression. According to Luttwak, the Egyptian plan in 1973 was to advance into the Sinai as far as they safely could, and wait for the UN cease-fire that was sure to come. Without knowing that the UN would bail them out before things could get too bad, would they have attacked?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes