The hardest part of sharing scientific discovery skills is giving good examples.
The pros of using real world examples:
• Your readers learn how skills played out in real life.
• Your readers have examples they can explore further.
• You readers will find examples in some topics fascinating.
The cons of using real world examples:
• Your readers will compare themselves with some stories and decide it doesn’t apply to them.
• Your examples might confuse readers because of grey areas.
• Your readers will find examples in some topics boring.
The biggest downside of a real example is that you will automatically compare yourself and your situation to it.
I don’t want you to do that.
I want you to think about the concept and see if it helps you. Not worry about the fact that Scientist X lives and works in place Y, does Z for fun, and isn’t anything like you, so you could never do anything like them.
That’s why I’ve decided to start illustrating my blog posts with examples using a fictional character from a real book I wrote, but never published.
Say hello to Mrs. Magnolia Mulliver, from “Mrs. Mulliver’s Travels”.
You’ll see her in my series sharing the framework I use to practice scientific discovery.
In this post I’ll give you enough backstory to understand Mrs. Mulliver and her mysterious log entries.
Love her or loathe her, she’s a good way to play with the concepts in your mind. And there is no need to compare yourself—she isn’t real anyway!
Now, about Mrs. Mulliver:
What would Mrs. Mulliver’s “About” page look like if she were a blogger?
“Magnolia Mulliver is a former part-timer, long-time housewife, mother of five beautiful children, and has many nieces and nephews. She lives happily with her husband Burt, a bookkeeper, who knows a lot about trash disposal. She was always quite keen on science in school. But she never got round to it. Too many other wonderful things popped up in her life.”
What are the log entries Mrs. Mulliver writes and why is she writing them?
Mrs. Mulliver has left behind what seem to be diary entries. These are now in an edited book called “The Posthumous Papers of Mrs. Magnolia Mulliver’s Travels in Trendel”. On The Insightful Scientist website, it’s called “Mrs. Mulliver’s Travels” for short. Each of her diary entries is labelled “Scientist’s Log” with a date and describes her challenges, thoughts, and events while serving as a Citizen Scientist in the fictional land of Trendel.
Her reasons for writing these entries are anyone’s guess. How they came into the possession of The Insightful Scientist remains a mystery. But in her honor the blog section of the website has always been called “The Scientist’s Log”.
What is Trendel? Why is Mrs. Mulliver a Citizen Scientist? What is going on?!
The details are murky. Mrs. Mulliver’s diary entries only partly cover a ten-year period. But here’s what we’ve pieced together on The Insightful Scientist:
Mrs. Mulliver was on her way to visit a niece when her plane vanished over the Pacific Ocean. She awoke in a strange land, maybe still on Earth, named Trendel (pronounced tren-dull).
Trendel has two regions: Trendellup, which is on the surface, and Trendellow, which is below ground. Trendelites appear to be human and most things, like the language and food, are still familiar to our Mrs. M.
But the Trendelian history is new to her. She described in her diary that Trendel lacks much scientific knowledge, even though they still have many familiar technologies. Except for the internet and other oddities.
From her diary entries we also know that Trendel suffered through a Great Information War, generations before Mrs. Mulliver arrives. But little is known about what existed before the Great War.
Now the Trendelites, a relaxed bunch, are left a lot of technologies and things that they don’t understand and aren’t quite sure what to do with.
Unfortunately, this confusion over how things work and what to do with them includes nuclear weapons, which have the Trendelites baffled.
Mrs. Mulliver has heard things about nuclear weapons because one of her nieces worked in nuclear threat reduction and was a physicist. Mrs. Mulliver’s science experience is limited. But she still knows more than the Trendelites. So, she’s assigned by the Royal Order of Trendel, the R.O.T. or a sort of managing body, to be a Citizen Scientist and oversee disposing of nuclear weapons (since the Trendelites can’t make heads or tails of how to do anything other than blow themselves up with it).
Mrs. Mulliver’s challenge is made worse by the fact that whoever created and maintained the nuclear weapons, and their specialized knowledge, mysteriously vanished overnight during the third and final phase of the Great Information War.
Luckily, Mrs. Mulliver is comfortable cleaning up other people’s mysterious messes (she did have seven siblings and five children). So, she jumps into the challenge.
Most of the Scientist’s Log entries about Mrs. M’s work revolve around something called “plutonium disposition”. Plutonium is a kind of chemical element that is used to make nuclear weapons and gives weapons a devastating chain reaction effect.
Plutonium’s chemical name is “Pu” for short. Unfortunately, the Trendelites know nothing about it except for the label appearing here and there. They pronounce “Pu” like “poo” and call it the “Pu Problem” (poo-problem).
This is no issue for Mrs. Mulliver, who, with her five children, has also frequently cleaned up other people’s left over poo.
But the science and safety of the Pu Problem are tricky.
Our Mrs. M has to solve a problem that was never settled in her world. And she must rediscover things that were only known by the weapons’ vanished makers.
It’s big task! But the Log entries suggest our Mrs. Mulliver is up to the job.
Mrs. Mulliver is fake, but is the science she’s working on fake too?
No. The challenges and science behind the Pu Problem are real.
The issue of how to get rid of the plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons, and of excess plutonium that was made for weapons, is a very serious and real challenge facing us today.
Mrs. Mulliver is fictional, and her ideas can be off-the-mark, since she struggles to find the information she needs. But I have tried to keep true to the reality of dealing with leftover plutonium from nuclear weapons. You can read more on the real-world problem in my previous post on plutonium disposition.
That’s our dear Mrs. Mulliver in a nutshell. She’s a great addition to the website and a neat way to explore practical themes in scientific discovery.
Simply put, sometimes you need a “Mrs. Mulliver” to help make tough ideas easier to think about.
Related Links
On The Insightful Scientist (InSci) website
Blog (The Scientist’s Log)
- Mega-series overview post
- Top related posts
Research (Research Spotlight)
How-To’s (The Scientist’s Repertoire)
Infographics (The Illustrated Scientist)
Printables (Spark Points)
Other blogs
Bulletproof Musician (performance psychology)
zen habits (achieving purpose)
Farnam Street (famous insights)
Around the web
How to cite this post
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “A fictional scientist is the way to learn how to make scientific discoveries”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, August 21, 2020.
[Page feature photo: Photo by Mohammed Gadi on Unsplash.]
