When someone asks you what you do for a living, how do you answer?

Do you give your job title?  Do you say what kinds of project(s) you are working on?  Do you give your company name or name of the topic you work on?

From researchers of all stripes, working in non-profits, volunteer and hobby groups, schools, universities, industry, and government, you hear many answers.  But when scientists get together I’ve noticed people tend to label themselves as one of four “flavors” of scientist: as an experimentalist, a theorist, a computationalist, or a citizen scientist (sometimes called a “hobbyist” or “amateur scientist”).

Often times, scientists will use these labels when they get nervous about having to answer questions.  If you listen to or watch videos of a lot of science talks for scientists, you might have noticed this too.

I’ll give you a few examples from physics:

If someone is asked an intensely mathematical question they might say “I’m just an experimentalist, so that’s above my paygrade.”  If someone is asked to defend the possibility of building a real prototype they might say, “Oh I’m just a theorist, so I don’t know about building things, I can just tell you the physics is there.”  If an audience member asks a question that gets a dismissive response from a speaker, they might say “I was just curious.  I follow the topic as a hobby, but I don’t really keep up with the details.”

Lately, as I’ve started studying connections between researching fundamental physics and the science of scientific discovery, I’ve been asked many times, “What would you call yourself?”, “How should I introduce you to people?”, or “What would you say you do?”

Which got me thinking about how we see ourselves as scientists.  And I’ve started to wonder if using labels as personal identities might be hurting our attempts to actually discover things.

 

Finding the Third Way

 

So, “experimentalist”, “theorist”, “computationalist”, and “citizen scientist”.  First off, I should define what I mean by these words:

“Experimentalists” conduct laboratory experiments to gather new data and generate equations to describe data they’ve collected.

“Theorists” look through old, new, and especially anomalous data to invent new descriptions and equations to explain the misunderstood and to predict the unobserved.

“Computationalists” run large-scale precision calculations on computers to simulate meaningful phenomena and generate equations to capture the real world in a form they can put on computer.

“Citizen scientists” conduct projects to satisfy their curiosity and support their community and generate equations for joyful distraction or to improve the quality of life of a group they care about.

I think these labels apply to any scientific field—agriculture, psychology, geology, chemistry, physics, computer science, engineering, economics, you name it.  And I emphasize equations because I think that’s what distinguishes the fine arts (literature, music, art, dance, etc.) from the sciences.  The sciences try to represent Nature using numbers, language, and symbolic math, while the fine arts try to represent Nature using sound, light, movement, color, texture, and shape.

Like I said in the opening of this post, I certainly see people use these words to navigate tricky audience questions.  But I also think they get used in two other ways, depending on what kinds of scientific discoveries people are pursuing: longstanding problems in mature fields, or unrecognized opportunities in emerging fields.

 

Work Identity

 

In mature fields, the kinds with lots of funding and famous teams that people can name off the top of their head, I think three of these four labels (experimentalist, theorist, computationalist) are used by scientists and that they mean them as a sort of personal identity.  That’s because mature fields tend to have larger networks of people working in them.  With larger networks comes more specialization (to help manage the large volume of people and ideas).  People get assigned to roles and they develop expertise in that particular role over the course of their work career.

In mature fields even training tends to start labeling people early.  For example, at my current institution undergraduates in their first year are already assigned to “Physics Theory” track (which requires fewer lab hours and more math) versus “Physics” track (which requires more lab hours and less math).  And in the United States at the Ph.D. level students are divided into either experimental or theoretical tracks.  Computational folks usually fall into one or the other track as a sub-category, depending on whether or not they mainly work on simulations for large experimental collaborations, or simulations for a small (maybe five people or less) theoretical group.

Meanwhile, the pursuit of scientific discovery in mature fields tends to take the form of trying to answer longstanding open questions.  The kind that make headlines in popular science journals.  In physics these are things like the nature of the early universe or why the universe has more matter than antimatter.

When individual scientists choose to see labels like experimentalist, theorist, or computationalist as work identities, they engage with discovery in more limited ways.  They do so only to the extent that the field at large has decided they should have a role in it.

So, for example, if anomalous data is generated by an experimental group, but the field decides that it’s most likely an experimental error causing the blip, then computationalists and theorists will be discouraged from contributing to the discussion, or will suffer a hit to their credibility if they join the debate.

 

Stay in your lane.

 

Work identities are kind of like a rule that says, “Stay in your lane.”  But if the key finding is to be found by taking an off-ramp, then progress will be slow or non-existent because there’s not enough freedom of intellectual movement.

Also, I mentioned at the beginning that only three of the four labels appear in mature fields.  There’s rarely any place given to the voices of citizen scientists or hobbyists at all.

 

Work Ethic

 

On the flip side, there are emerging fields and topics.  These areas are so new that very few people are actually studying them, no rules have been established yet, and even the kinds of discoveries being pursued are hard to define.  Emerging fields are uncharted territory so anything is possible.

With so few people working on them, emerging topics don’t need hierarchies, they just need bodies willing to do the work.

So an experimentalist will be someone who values running a huge amount of tireless trial and error.  A theorist is someone who values digging around to think up reasons, and ideas, and questions.  In emerging fields you are more likely to be dismissed by co-workers until the value of the project proves itself and gains more acceptance in the mainstream. So taking on a hobbyist work ethic becomes more important as you have to value things like “passion” and “obsession” to keep people motivated through the tough times.  And a computationalist is someone who values grinding through data on computer until all those numbers start to look like a pattern.

 

Mindset over matter

 

So in science, I think that means the labels we usually think of as identities in mature fields become a kind of work ethic in emerging fields; a style of taking on each and every task to bootstrap your way to a successful breakthrough.  They are not so much you, as they are the mindset you approach them with.

This mindset over matter approach is what allows researchers in emerging fields to pursue high-risk opportunities that may lead to scientific discoveries, or may prove to be dead ends.

But this still puts the brakes on the speed with which discoveries could be made, because I think researchers still feel like they have to find people who either innately have that mindset, were raised with that mindset, or have acquired that mindset by experience or training.

In other words, in both mature and emerging fields these labels are seen as compartmentalized rather than fused—you can own one, but not the others.

 

Troubleshooting Approach

 

That brings me back to the cryptic header I started this post with, “Finding the Third Way”.  I think of this as “finding the middle way”.  To me that means using these labels as skillsets and thinking of the whole pursuit of scientific discovery as a troubleshooting exercise.

The trouble might be that you’re bored and you want something interesting to do with your weekends, so you’re going to volunteer as a citizen scientist to contribute to research on soil health in your local area…just because you love veggies.

Or the trouble might be that you’re tired of having patients die on your watch from a preventable condition, so you’re going to raise money to run experiments on cheap lifestyle interventions to reduce the number of deaths.

Or the trouble might be that you think nuclear weapons are dangerous, but there’s all this plutonium sitting around in stockpiles with no safe, permanent way to get rid of it, so you’re going to dig into all the theories on how to dispose of anything that might give you a breakthrough idea to help solve the problem.

My point is that we solve problems that matter to us.  Personal problems, social problems, global problems.  But the problems are what matter most, not the fields.  Scientific discoveries are often made because their discoverers saw a problem that they couldn’t let go of and so they worked until they found a way to solve it.

These aren’t abstract, philosophical things.  They are practical, specific challenges that we tackle one troubleshooting step at a time.  And over the course of solving that problem, every one on of the roles I’ve mentioned will probably come into play.

So instead of always looking, or waiting, or hoping that we can involve someone willing to take on “the experimentalist”, or “the theorist”, or “the computationalist”, or “the citizen scientist” responsibilities, we should consider building up a reserve of each of those things within ourselves.

 

Moving Beyond Our Training

 

If we want to give ourselves the best chance of solving a problem that matters to us and discovering something along the way, then maybe we shouldn’t be just one of those things (experimentalist, theorist, computationalist, hobbyist) in our lifetime.

Maybe we should be all of those things at one time or another.

They’re just skills.  Not destiny.

Like the logo for my website says, “Discovery awaits the mind that pursues it.”  And I chose “The Insightful Scientist” as my websites name for reason.  Because I wanted to remind myself every day that I pull open the homepage that science is about discovery and that science is bigger than just physics or just the ways I was trained to pursue discovery as a theoretical physicist.

We use our training as far as it will take us. But if the science is bigger than our training then we don’t give up, or say it’s a job for someone else.  We just stretch our minds a little wider open, learn a new skill, and jump once more into the fray.

 

Mantra of the Week

 

Here is this week’s one-liner; what I memorize to use as a mantra when I start to get off-track during a task that’s supposed to help me innovate, invent, and discover:

Be a person of many hats.

So when people ask me what I am or what I do I think I’ll start saying:

“I’m a Bernadette.”

“And it just so happens that the problem I’m trying to solve right now is how to put the science of scientific discovery into practice in neutrino particle physics.”

I won’t label myself as a theorist, or a neutrino physicist, or an academic.  Because the titles don’t matter.  The problems we’re trying to solve do.

There’s an English expression that says taking on different roles at work is like wearing different hats.  Well, I’m willing to wear whatever hat gets the problem solved, even if I don’t look good in fedoras.

 

Final Thoughts

 

So let’s recap the ideas and examples I’ve talked about in this post:

• I narrowed down the labels we use for scientists to four: experimentalist, theorist, computationalist, and citizen scientist.
• I classified scientific discovery into two types: trying to answer longstanding questions in old fields and recognizing new opportunities in young fields.
• I argued that we use the four labels as identities or work ethics; but that a more agile approach is to think of them as skillsets.

Have your own thoughts on how we label ourselves as researchers and whether or not this helps or hinders the pursuit of scientific discovery?  You can share your thoughts by posting a comment below.

 

Interesting Stuff Related to This Post

 

1. Website – Chandra Clarke’s Citizen Science Center, sharing open science projects.
2. Web article – Angus Harrison, “Self-taught rocket scientist Steve Bennett is on a mission to make space travel safe and affordable for all – from an industrial estate in Greater Manchester,” interview in The Guardian online, April 4, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/04/building-rockets-all-over-house-space-travel-safe-affordable-for-all.

 

How to cite this post in a reference list:

 

Bernadette K. Cogswell, “Experimentalist, Theorist, Computationalist, Citizen Scientist: Work Identity or Work Ethic?”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, March 29, 2019, https://insightfulscientist.com/blog/2019/be-a-person-of-many-hats.

 

[Page Feature Photo:  Fedoras fill a costume rack at the Warner Brothers movie studio in Burbank, California.  Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash.]