And So It Begins…
How do I set my mind to make a scientific discovery? And why bother? I suppose it goes back to my Ph.D. advisor’s old advice, “work on the problems that keep you up at night.”
Many years ago I heard a fascinating idea proposed in neutrino physics, one that would change not only the field of neutrinos, but also the fields of nuclear physics and particle physics. It was an accidental encounter. I remember that so clearly. A little moment of serendipity when, as a graduate student, I was kindly cc’ed on an email chain by a senior professor. And that was all. One email. But almost a decade later I still picture it as clear as day. And the questions it forced me to ask about “how the world works”, to this very day, remain unsolved. So, on occasion, it keeps me awake when I’m trying to sleep–that gently yanked thread in the fabric of what is known, reminding me that something needs to be smoothed out, something needs to be worked out.
Although I pursued it somewhat at the time, like always, it didn’t take long before the frustration and impending sense of futility set in. I remember that equally sharply. Another phrase rang just as loudly in my head as my advisor’s. A bit of “advice” from a different professor of physics, at a much, much earlier time, shortly before I dropped out of my first attempt at earning a college degree in physics.
I had just started at a new university and I was finishing my third or fourth week of classes. One day I was sitting in a lab class with a lab partner; a physics first year class on electrical circuits and electromagnetics. The student next to me asked me what I wanted to do after majoring in physics. I replied, “Become a theoretical physicist.” I had known this since I was five years old. My Mom and I had gone to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. and I had watched a planetarium show about the universe, Newton, and Einstein. And the moment I set eyes on Albert, I knew that we were kindred spirits–he had hair like mine, loved to imagine things, and asked interesting questions about how the world works. Such is the genius of childhood–that children can find kinship where adults fail to find common ground. And so fourteen years later, without any doubt, I told my fellow student what I wanted to do with my physics degree…to “Become a theoretical physicist.” The professor happened to be walking past our lab bench. He stopped at our table, looked at me and said, “Don’t bother. You’ll never be able to come up with anything new.”
So there they are, the Chylla and Siribidus, between which the opportunity for me to pursue discovery-level physics questions has been caught for the last decade.
But in that decade serendipity has favored me with many other moments. And as I have moved–between fields of study, cities, countries, interests, friends, being vanquished and being victorious–I’ve found one thing to be constant: the root of all outcomes is process, and process can always be learned. Even in my own field, I see how differently training, lived experience, and apprenticeship styles under a given advisor are fused by the individual into a legacy process for “how to do science”, for “how the world works”, that they carry with them.
So then, why not consciously aim to add to my repertoire processes that will foster my capacity to achieve scientific discovery? Why not produce the common ground between myself and those that have come up with something new, those who have discovered, instead of failing to find common ground between us? That common ground is process, is interest, is focus; those are the kinship ties of discovery and discoverers. If discovery awaits the mind that pursues it, then it’s just a matter of giving chase to both the process and the discoveries themselves.
I have set my mind to it.
And, more importantly, I have chosen to bring to bear all my accumulated capacities as scientist, thinker, writer, creative, and human being. For tonight the question of my last decade will probably still be my companion as I fall asleep. But somewhere the answer already sits, waiting to be found. So, let the pursuit begin…