At Discovery’s Edge
The balancing act between theory and practice, qualitative insight and quantitative assessment, is a tough one. In my quest to develop a repertoire of skills and practices targeted at scientific discovery, theory and qualitative insight have dominated the body of literature I’ve read so far. Until I came across a magnificent pair of papers published by a group of sociologists and a theoretical biologist. Their goal was to analyze a tension often discussed among scientists: stick with tradition or pursue innovation?
In these recent papers, the authors devise a living map of “what is known”, represented as a series of nodes and links between them, on a network graph. They use biochemistry as their scientific use case; nodes represent molecules and links between nodes represent published connections between molecules. They do this using a massive network mapping of molecules and connections appearing in abstracts of published articles in journals—around 6.5 million abstracts. Ah, the glorious face of big data.
So, in this little microcosm of knowledge about discoveries in biochemistry, what can we learn about community-wide research strategies?
The first thing we learn is that there are techniques to map “what is known” and “how was it discovered” in a way that make them amenable to quantitative interrogation. This is no small matter because in these two papers the authors pursue two fascinating questions: (1) what balance does a scientific community strike between pursuing tradition and pursuing innovation as the knowledge network grows; and (2) what can be done to maximize the exploration of such knowledge networks?
The answer to the first question is given in the longer of their two sociology papers (heavy reading for a poor physicist, but worth every ounce of effort). As the knowledge network grows, research becomes more intensive and localized on already well-explored nodes and well-explored links, i.e., research favors tradition. Innovation, exploring or seeking new nodes and links, is marginalized and receives less attention. The authors connect this leaning in to tradition and leaning away from innovation to numerous factors, including some of the usual suspects like pressure to achieve high publication and citation rates for job security and job advancement.
In their second, shorter, paper they examine their newly quantified knowledge network from the perspective of maximizing discovery, defined as discovering new links and nodes in the network. They find that when the knowledge network is young the approach of tradition, a localized search moving outward from central nodes (important molecules), is efficient. But as the knowledge network grows this approach becomes more inefficient, even though this is the strategy that becomes more favored and represented in the published literature over time.
They suggest a number of policy remedies that would trickle down to individual discoverers by enacting change at the community level:
“Thus, science policy could improve the efficiency of discovery by subsidizing more risky strategies, incentivizing strategy diversity, and encouraging publication of failed experiments…Policymakers could design institutions that cultivate intelligent risk-taking by shifting evaluation from the individual to the group…[Policymakers] could also fund promising individuals rather than projects…Science and technology policy might also promote risky experiments with large potential benefits by lowering barriers to entry and championing radical ideas…”
[Rzhetsky et al., PNAS vol. 112, no. 47, p. 14573 (2015)]
As always though, I remain most concerned with how the individual can take action: how, with my own two hands and one mind, can I weave outward and affect change in the shape and size of the known web of knowledge, especially in my own field of neutrino physics? If I combine what I’ve read in these fascinating sociology papers with my thoughts in “A Good Map is Hard to Find”, then I formulate an idea: my own two hands and lone mind can make one PowerPoint.
Now, I’ve been invited to attend a workshop to discuss possibilities for discovering new physics in a newly observed reaction called coherent elastic neutrino nuclear scattering, or CEvNS (i.e., a neutrino bounces off the nucleus in an atom as if it were one solid unit, instead of bouncing off of one proton or one neutron in the nucleus). Workshops to produce agendas, devise long-term strategy, and draft roadmaps and white papers are ubiquitous in physics (and other sciences). It’s how communities foster consensus on “what to do next.”
To me, an agenda-setting, roadmap-writing workshop seems like the perfect time to field test the idea of a “discovery call”: a voluntary, open-science call to action to trial scientific discovery strategies. A “discovery call” is something you can talk about with colleagues, add to a website, or put on a PowerPoint slide. The discovery call I’ll be pitching is as follows: in physics, particles are analogous to molecules and particle interactions and mechanisms are analogous to connections between molecules. Can we build a network map of published trends in our area of interest, CEvNS, and consider new strategies to maximize our network coverage with minimal experiments? And can we take this a step further and build two other deeply analogous maps to use for comparison: one for neutrino neutral current interactions (i.e., where a neutrino bounces off another particle) and one for neutrino charged current interactions (where a neutrino bounces off of another particle, changing particle type in the process)? It would be a way to provide a roadmap with a greater degree of informed choice about how, and how well, we’ve explored a given microcosm.
It seems to me that we have an opportunity to leverage our own history to help point our compass toward discovery, and to be able to see where untried paths have been neglected but might now be the roads best taken. Perhaps today is the time to map what is known, with greater awareness and more practical purpose, so that tomorrow we can stand at discovery’s edge.
Interesting Stuff Related to This Post
- Jacob G. Foster, Andrea Rzhetsky, and James A. Evans, “Tradition and Innovation in Scientist’s Research Strategies”, American Sociological Review, volume 80, issue 5, pages 875-908 (October 1, 2015).
- Andrea Rzhetsky, Jacob G. Foster, Ian T. Foster, et al., “Choosing experiments to accelerate collective discovery,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), volume 112, issue 47, pages 14569-14574 (November 24, 2015).
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How to cite this post in a reference list:
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “At Discovery’s Edge”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, September 21, 2018, https://insightfulscientist.com/blog/2018/at-discoverys-edge.
[Page feature photo: A dewy spider’s web in Golcar, United Kingdom. Photo by michael podger on Unsplash.]