Slashdot Mirror
Getting Lost In the Scientific Woods Is Good For You
StartsWithABang writes: Wandering into the woods unprepared and without a plan sounds like a terrible idea. But if you're interested in scientific exploration at the frontiers, confronting the unknown with whatever you happen to have at your disposal, you have to take that risk. You have to be willing to take those steps. And you have to be okay with putting your best ideas out there — for all to see — knowing full well that you might get the entire thing wrong. Sometimes, that's indeed what happens. Some of the most revered and famous scientific minds in history confronted the great mysteries of nature, and came away having done nothing but set us back many years by leading the field down a blind alley. But other times, the greatest leaps forward in our understanding occur as a result. The article shares some notable examples, and explains why this is vital for scientific progress.
Fusion I tell you - fusion in a cup of coffee.
..is finding the paths untread.
That's pretty much the definition of what science is. I'm not even clear what they think the alternative might be that would still qualify as science.
And it works whether 'lost in the woods' is meant literally and metaphorically.
It takes confidence to tread into the unknown. I guess you want to be an idiot about things where as few people as possible know enough to see that you're an idiot.
"No blah blah blah!" -- James T. Kirk
don't just hang around trees!
You have to be willing to take the consequences of your risk, too, such as having your career derailed before it starts because your risk didn't produce anything useful.
So now I first check the poster before the summary. There's a couple that can be safely ignored. Either because they don't have anything to say, or because they insist on summarising other people's work on an unreadable hipster website. NEXT!
A bit cynically, you could say that real scientists admit having been on the wrong track and continue their work with the same level of enthusiasm, while politicians try to wriggle themselves out denying they ever believed in their own previous beliefs and continue working at their career with the same level of enthusiasm.
An example?
An ideal victim would be James Hansen (probably innocent, used here just because his foot has a shape that looks like it might fit the shoe). :)
Just suppose he once saw a career on the new ice age bandwagon, realized it was riding in the wrong direction, and turned his coat to "I never said that, I never believed that, I only wrote the computer program they used, and I wrote it for Venus anyway"
Not that I want to accuse him of anything like that, of course. ;)
It just sounds so credible that you have to be a politician, and not a scientist, to score high ranks in an organization like NASA.
And his name WAS linked to that ice age paper, he never denied that. He just started wriggling when it was brought up
And never forget about the gift of ignorance. It's encouraging to not know something won't work.
Maybe Slashdot can help me understand the woods that I'm currently lost in - electricity. I've been studying it my whole life and still don't think I really have a firm grasp of the topic. Far more interesting to me than the basic concepts of electromagnetic waves and their propagation are the ideas of longitudinal waves and plasma antennas. The fun thing about these waves is that they don't seem to travel through typical space-time as we generally understand it. They may in fact travel faster than C (subspace communications anyone?). It's my ignorance that tells me that C is a predictable constant and not a hard limit.
The tragedy is that research into this phenomena seemed to stop early in the 20th century. So the only thing left to do is dawn your tin foil hat, jump in with both feet and and get lost in the woods picking up where our electrical engineering ancestors left off.
I don't think we'll be finding quantum theory, relativity or the neutron again soon.
What do we hope to find these days? A paper about the 12th decimal place of a century old observation written by 35 authors so the university/employer market can keep expanding?
Who will fund you when you're "lost in the woods"?
...makes you stronger, that still holds some merit to it.
I'm an old bugger by now, and I can tell you this is quite right. It's like teaching a kid the difference from right and wrong, from bad and good, the kid touches the stove...burns himself a little - life lesson learned, sure beats hearing about it in theory.
Same thing with me, instead of always being politically correct here at Slashdot, I throw some stuff out there. I know how to hoist easy modpoints, any one who have been here for a long time knows the cheap tricks, heck...I've cheapened out myself once in a while, but the really cool stuff happens when you toss out there the content of your heart, risky...yep - troll away - but you'll never truly know unless your theories gets peer reviews.
In animation class, a wise teacher asked me - does anyone else than your mother & friends love your work? Show your work to your worst enemy...and if he is silent, you've done good!
So yes, by all means - take a chance. You may not get another one.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
"Science is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." -- Werner von Braun
this attitude will get you killed in space.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Many fields these days are pervaded with a false confidence in theories that really do not deserve it. They get a few significant p values, put zero or minimal effort into ruling out alternative explanations, then accept the favored explanation. When the evidence conflicts, ad hoc adjustments are made to the theory over and over, or that evidence is just ignored. And really, a lot of these theories CANNOT EVEN PREDICT ANYTHING. Try to find a theory capable of quantitative prediction in biomed, it is extremely rare. It is very easy to find evidence consistent with such vague theories, so it doesnt mean much when this occurs.
When this occurs, the theories are really obstacles to our understanding.
This is just the lie grade crap scientists living off ur taxes or endowment justifying that they have nothing to show for it.
Often in science discoveries are made different from the original goal. Much like Columbus looking for a shorter route to India and "discovering" the Americas. With Einstein as mentioned in the article, it was more like asking the right question such as, "What if the speed of light is independent of the observer?"
All different.
This was so vapid and banal, I checked to see if the byline was Bennett Haselton.
Then again, it wasn't a 6000-word opus, so I should have known better.
Yes, it's intellectually useful to be challenged. And?
-Styopa
The newest and lamest form of science is having an assumption, then writing a paper that supports your assumption, then presenting that assumption as fact for an even bigger, but more important assumption. These papers start with something like a thought experiment... "I like green jelly beans and I'm fairly normal, therefore it is likely that green jelly beans are the most popular jelly beans". It then moves into writing the paper... "I asked 15 people whether green jelly beans were the best and a slight majority said 'yes'". Now it is time to attach, lamprey style, to a hot new science topic by careful selection of an interesting title. "String Theory models favor universes with a green jelly bean preference."
String Theory is just an example and may get you laughed at today. Better to try to tie it into Global Warming. "Green jelly beans disappearing faster than expected in a warming world, models predict."
There, you is now a scientist
Good for science, yes, a lot of discoveries were stumbled on by accident more than by scientific method.
Good for you, no.
Unless you don't mind never getting funded again after taking a wrong turn just once.
If you visit a Scientific Forest in the northeastern US, just make sure that you use tick repellent!
...because the people that have cornered the scientific markets in industry want free ideas.