Find Your ARQ

Every good story needs an arc: a master strategy that drives all the action from start to finish.  Something that, for the writer, guides every word written with the knowledge that an outcome must be obtained: the arc must begin and end.  It cannot run off to infinity.  Are not research undertakings much the same way?  You must achieve some end, be it innovation, new knowledge, new technique, or discovery.  And, as the lead researcher, you must keep that in mind at all times, allowing it to guide your actions.

Of course, this is just an analogy.

But I am struck by how frequently analogies and analogical thinking appear in the literature on discovery.  In cognitive psychology some consider analogy one of the key problem solving skills in working at the boundary of knowledge. It appears again in research on problem solving where written, drawn, and even animated analogies have been studied.  It’s even factored into relevant concepts like design innovation.

So I find it a great irony that, despite general agreement that analogical thinking plays a role (and possibly a crucial one) in scientific discovery; despite the fact that analogy appears almost universally as a reasoning skill across cultures; despite the fact that analogy can be applied to any human knowledge domain and that analogy can use as source material any human knowledge domain; analogy is called in the technical jargon a “weak problem solving method” (in reference to its general domain use; versus “strong” methods, which are highly domain specific). If ever a bit of technical jargon did a disservice to its meaning, I think it’s here.

In physics we tend to marginalize analogical thinking as something handy for pedagogy, or public engagement, or just private understanding.  [Here I refer to conceptual analogy; not mathematical analogy, which is used heavily in physics.]  But we rarely envisage analogical thinking as a systematic, efficient, front-line professional research strategy for even “low hanging fruit” questions, let alone for the serious and risky business of discovery.  But the research suggests to me that it can be.

Which brings me back to the analogy of an arc.

Initially, I struggled to develop a clear strategy in pursuing scientific discovery.  In other words, I struggled to find my story arc.  But it now seems to me that the main task of scientific discovery and scientific inquiry is to explicate new analogies–to draw links between the known world and still unknown aspects of Nature.

If I define analogy as a way of identifying similarities between seemingly dissimilar things, isn’t that the very foundation of what we do in physics?  To say that an apple falling from a tree and a planet orbiting the sun are both acted upon and behave that way through the same concept of gravity is the mental act of finding similarity in the apparently disparate.  In fact, to say that any set of behaviors or characteristics, for any observable, physical system, can be explained by a common law, function, or model seems a pretty radical act of analogy to me.  So, each and every scientific research question is in some nuanced way an analogical research question…or a scientific ARQ, you might say.

There is still much more to this story of course.  There is a great deal of deeply thoughtful research about analogies—qualitative, quantitative, and operational.  Ideas about how to use it to communicate, to educate, to investigate.  Frameworks for how to define the relationship between the source domain of the analogy and the target domain where it is applied.  And on and on.  I believe this research contains some of the first scientific discovery strategies to formalize and try.  But this will not be an easy task.  Still, at least now I have the first step in pursuit of discovery…

The first step toward discovery is to find your ARQ.