ARTEMIS

For an overview of the ARTEMIS project status, click here to be taken to the ARTEMIS (VR Software) page.

I’m finding the most difficult (and intimidating) part of pursuing discovery to be coming up with new ideas, at least on days when my “systematic mind” is team lead.  On these days I stick to knowns and try to refit combinations of knowns, or incrementally push ideas a little toward the boundary of the unknown parameter space.  A gentle shift here, a nudge there, but nothing really addresses the underlying discovery level shifts needed.  It’s as if I’m pushing the same pebbles around the table expecting an oil painting to appear.

On other days, systematic’s co-director “imaginative mind”, takes hold and I am overwhelmed with ideas, but drowning in the ability to sift and evaluate them.  At those time it’s as if there’s a canvas in front of me wild with splotches of thought, but no clear scale against which to weigh the relative merits or value of each, a splotch at a time.

In essence, it’s impossible to hold these two perspectives in mind at the same time.  But it’s also difficult to capture the outputs of each perspective in a way that lets me glide back and forth between them so that I can make meaningful progress on the crux of pursuing discovery: conceiving of something new and having the prudence to recognize that idea’s significance.  Which sounds to me like it’s time to find a good tool to augment the process.  As the saying goes, is there an app for that?

Certainly, there are mind maps, endless note taking software, pen and paper, LEGOs, clay, foam models, scientific visualization and more.  But none of these are purely designed to foster human conceptualization, let alone human conceptualization about Nature, through the modality of science.  In particular, as I’ve started to read more deeply into research on scientific discovery, and as I think back on my own experiences and difficulties in ideation and follow-through for truly novel ideas, I’m struck by how all the strategies revolve around mental models and reasoning skills; in other words, messy, qualitative, human thought, not structured, quantitative, human calculation.

When I then add to the mix the fact that I know this will need to be able to work with speed and to foster thinking up ideas as much as thinking about ideas and working with ideas …  Well then, I conceive of a tool I’ve nicknamed ARTEMIS, Artificial Reality Tool for the Enhancement and Manipulation of Insight in Science, whose job it is to help you recognize the undiscovered, both in Nature (i.e., scientific discovery) and in your own understanding of Nature (i.e., scientific insight).

I envision this tool will work in virtual reality, where images, sounds, and direct hand manipulations will be the mode of operation; feeding your perceptual and sensory-motor mind as much as your cognition to aid in ideation and evaluation; moving language, computer code, and mathematical symbolics to the background, all of which are slower and cognitively more cumbersome.  Most importantly I imagine it will run in different modes and allow you to enter your own research questions as various abstractions designed to trigger different innate reasoning skills linked to insight and discovery.  And it will allow you to evaluate among options at times when you are a fountain of ideas or to find new streams of thought on days when the well of inspiration runs dry.

I already have in mind a few neutrino questions to use as test cases, to hone, refine, and infuse ARTEMIS with everything I learn in my pursuit of the process of scientific discovery.  The power of virtual reality as a serious research tool remains untapped, especially in its ability to redefine the relationship between humans and computation.

In the act of discovery one can think loosely of three phases: (1) conceptualization, (2) calculation, and (3) interpretation.  (I take here a different and more physics theorist-based view of the phases of discovery than philosophers, psychologists, or historians might.)  Much, much work has been done on automation in physics, and tools abound for precision calculations.  Interpretation is also receiving its due with the advent of numerous tools for scientific visualization.  But conceptualization remains neglected.  Perhaps because it requires augmenting human thought rather than human action.  Whatever the case, I am designing ARTEMIS to fill that gap and serve as a tool on the path to scientific discovery.

And as for the name, perhaps a bit of a lucky chance that I could think up such a quaint acronym; for in pursuit of discovery, who better to have as a traveling companion than the Greek goddess of the hunt.