On why activities should be the largest part of a scientist’s repertoire.

 

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This is the first post in a four-part series.  In an older post I defined “activities” as “tasks you complete to finish skilled procedures”.  You can view that post here.

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One day when I was in high school an English teacher gave our entire class an odd assignment:

She told us to go outside, lay down on the grass around the school, and stare at the sky.

After about 15 minutes of this impromptu freedom she rounded us up (or woke some up from a nap) and took us back inside.

Once we were back at our desks she asked us to “free write” for 25 minutes. We had to write as fast as we could, without stopping, thinking, or stopping writing.  We wrote whatever came into our minds.

That was the first time I ever heard about free writing, and it created a lifelong habit.

Writers use free writing all the time, as part of their writer’s repertoire.  It’s a way to unstick lose thoughts, capture fleeting impressions, and allow new associations to spring to mind.

It’s also a regular practice that keeps writers’ craftsmanship fresh, nimble, responsive, and consistent.

Do a little free writing every day and writing that novel or screenplay won’t seem so intimidating.

So what about scientists?  Do scientists need these kinds of activities in their repertoire?

The answer is yes.

And the most important thing is not what activities you have, but how many activities you have in your repertoire.

 

From a first principles perspective:

Reacting to new data requires a broad spectrum of activities in your repertoire.

 

To see why that might be true stop and think about this for a moment:

Making a scientific discovery is an unpredictable venture.

It may require millions of dollars, years to construct, design, and approve, and big data (like the DUNE neutrino experiment under construction, see link below).

Or it may be as simple as accidentally letting something sit around somewhere unusual (like discovering the microwave by melting a candy bar in your pocket, see true story in link below).

What is most difficult to control, in these varied moments of either precision engineered insight or haphazard serendipity, is the resources needed to bring everything together.

Life happens.  Accidents happen.  Windfalls happen.

You never know what you are going to encounter.

Against the backdrop of life scientists always contend with a built-in handicap—we know we don’t have all the evidence for a better model.

If we did, we’d already recognize and know the model.  But instead, we don’t have enough information, so we have to discover the model.

Discovering the missing evidence, or ideas, or logic to get to this better model requires lots of activities, because activities are like tools in a toolbox when you’re making repairs.

We know our picture of the world is naturally broken, because we don’t have enough information.

Therefore, we need to go in and repair it.

But, like a plumber visiting someone’s house, you can’t possibly know precisely what’s broken, or what you’ll need to fix it, until you see it in person.

This seeing it in person is what we call new observations.

Sometimes, you have correctly guessed the problem with your existing model and diagnosed the solution beforehand (like the discovery of general relativity and the bending of light around stars).

But other times you’re caught off guard, an anomaly strikes, and you have to scramble to find the right tools to fix your model (like the discovery that neutrino particles can change a particle property called flavor as they travel).

Those “fixes” are the activities in your repertoire.  Have too few, and you’ll be poorly equipped for the job.

 

From a holistic perspective:

More activities in your repertoire makes better use of resources.

 

It’s also best to have a lot of activities in your repertoire because it makes the most of the community of fellow scientists and supporters you have around you.

“Many hands make light work,” is a popular expression.

By having many activities, you can divide up the load and split it among many people, making something that might take one scientist a career or lifetime to do, possible within ten years or less.

Having a collection of experts with varied talents at your disposal also allows you to divvy up the activities in efficient (by expertise) or interesting (by non-expertise) ways.

This can bring fresh ideas to stuck agendas, and greater speed to stagnant ones.  A different person performing the same activity in a slightly different way has a way of infusing momentum into a situation.  It’s like a little symphony of activity and industry being carried out one scientific project at a time.

Also, perhaps you don’t have the resources at all to carry out one activity.

Having alternative activities in your repertoire, which serve the same function but use the resources you’ve got, can prevent you from being blocked.

 

From an applied perspective:

Activities can be added to your repertoire through daily experience.

 

So in practice, what are these activities and how do we acquire more of them?

Well, my little story at the beginning is an example of an activity that applies just as well to scientists as to writers.

Free writing is a good way for anyone to get ideas out of their head.  This makes your ideas less abstract and more concrete.

Seeing your ideas in writing also lets you evaluate them, adapt them, expand them, reject them, or confirm them.

So activities, like free writing, are the mundane, everyday tasks that fill the time and make the business of discovery happen.

Activities are what you do to fill the hours and minutes that you sit at a desk, work in a lab, lie on the grass and stare at the sky, or any other moment of your discovery path.

Other activities that appear in a standard scientist’s repertoire include tasks like

• performing literature reviews,
• visualizing new models,
• honing working definitions of things to test in the lab,
• sifting through analogies to find the one that best highlights an important feature of a phenomena,
• managing a reference bibliography,
• creating a project time management tool,
• brainstorming, and so many more.

Activities affect every outcome and trajectory of your discovery path.

The more activities you have in your repertoire the better.  Because you never know what you will need.  And some activities are quite specific to only certain use cases.

How do we add activities to our repertoire?

Good old-fashioned experience.  Try out new activities every day.

See someone else do it and you can learn it.

Realize you need it and you can invent it.

Read about it and you can adapt it.

Luckily, you don’t need lots of memory capacity for activities.  You just need awareness.  So the more activities in your repertoire the merrier.

 

By analogy:

A scientist’s repertoire activities are like events on a travel itinerary.

 

That activities in a scientist’s repertoire are like activities in a travel itinerary is an even better analogy than the one I used earlier with the plumber.

Activities will vary depending on what territory you are going to explore and why you are going (i.e., the purpose of your “trip”).

If you wander into a new or familiar topic just to be inspired for an hour or so then perhaps activities like pondering, walking, reading, conversing, or sketching will be on your agenda.

But if you are journeying deep into the heart of undiscovered territory, a place with no roads to travel, no lights to guide your way, and no maps to tell you where you are, then your “itinerary” will look very different.

You will need to engage in careful activities, like logging your movements, photographing and observing the territory as you go, and scrutinizing what your observations mean about where you are headed.

And there will be plenty of practical activities to get done too, like making sure your tools are maintained and respected so they are ready for heavy use.  (I’m looking at all those poor messy archived folders, overflowing email inboxes, and derelict scraps of “ideas to get back to” tumbling out of nooks, crannies, boxes, and folders you have lying around.  Respect your tools.)

I have begun collecting a list of activities that apply to scientific discovery.  I hope to be able to synthesize them into a cohesive framework I can share.

As we each follow where the data lead, like a compass aligned to true north, activities empower each and every step we take.

By building up a better picture of all the activities filling a scientist’s repertoire and knowing which ones are most useful for a discovery trip, you and I can better fill our days with meaningful industry instead of misplaced busywork.

 

Interesting Stuff Related to This Post

 

1. Press, Allison. “5 Brainstorming Exercises for Introverts.” IDEO blog.  March 20, 2018. https://www.ideo.com/blog/5-brainstorming-exercises-for-introverts.
2. Blitz, Matt. “The Amazing True Story of How the Microwave Was Invented by Accident.” Popular Mechanics, February 24, 2016. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a19567/how-the-microwave-was-invented-by-accident/.
3. Fadelli, Ingrid. “The DUNE Experiment Could Lead to New Discoveries about Solar Neutrinos.” Phys.org website.  October 21, 2019.  https://phys.org/news/2019-10-dune-discoveries-solar-neutrinos.html.

 

Related Content on The Insightful Scientist

 

Blog Posts:

• Elements of the Scientist’s Repertoire, Part 2 of 4: Mindset – On why mindset is the most effortful part of a scientist’s repertoire
• Elements of the Scientist’s Repertoire, Part 3 of 4: Knowledge (coming soon)
• Elements of the Scientist’s Repertoire, Part 4 of 4: Skills (coming soon)
• Spring and Well: How to divide an individual’s discovery ability into four major themes

How To Posts:

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Research Spotlight Posts:

• —

 

How to cite this post in a reference list:

 

Bernadette K. Cogswell, “Elements of a Scientist’s Repertoire, Part 1 of 4: Activities – On why activities should be the largest part of a scientist’s repertoire”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, December 6, 2019, https://insightfulscientist.com/blog/2019/elements-of-the-scientists-repertoire-part-1-of-4-activities.

 

[Page feature photo: Beautiful shallow focus photography of a compass on a wooden table.  Photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash.]