We’ve already had a round or two, discussing scientific inspiration. Authors get variations on this question all the time – where do you find your ideas? Their answers tend to spread out over a range from I don’t really know to Ringing changes to I just ask myself ‘what if?’.
I think it boils down to, how do you do what you do? When it’s a different career path from what one has chosen, and one has not necessarily had a liberal arts education, one can’t even imagine. But that doesn’t mean one is not curious. (It’s how I feel about things like investment banking, or what my brother or husband does during the day.)
Where we scientists diverge from artists such as authors is that having a flight of imagination, and the technique of exploiting it so as to reveal some fundamental truth, differs between writing a comic and testing a hypothesis. Although it is not so different as many artists might believe.
In Richard Hamming& ’s recommendable talk at Bell Labs on “You and your [great] research” (thanks to Deanne above), he said,
“One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can.”
I would substitute “confidence” for “courage”. Courage is when you think it highly likely you will fail, but you give it a shot anyhow. Yet somehow under it all, you do need to believe in your capacity to support an important insight with an experiment.
(I also appreciate the reminder to leave off resisting the red tape and get back to the science. Duly noted.)
Zuska summarized an article to which I don’t have access, but hardly need now, after reading her take and the comments, on how one can develop new research topics. I particularly liked the one about delegating – I’m still learning this trick, but it’s how to be everywhere at once and explore ideas in parallel rather than in serial. FSP took the same article and brought up the corollary “how personal (and therefore deedable) are ideas?”
I particularly like Lora’s comment that “I get a lot more fish on my fishing expeditions than I can ever hope to fillet, though.” I need to adjust to the idea that I don’t actually need to finish everything and exploit all data to the marrow, but rather that my most significant contributions will be to recognize and exploit the precious among the mundane. That would be more than nourishing enough. But I seem to have a thrifty instinct to glean.
I suppose there are worse things than being a scavenger or working in an unexploited niche. It entails smaller budgets, for one thing.
Gosh Heather, we really are on the same wavelength – first astronomy, and now Hamming’s article. I caught sight of it too from Deanne’s post back last summer and thought it a great read – fearless and very thought-provoking. In fact I circulated it in my group and we had a great discussion about it in group meeting last week. I was planning to do a post about it but haven’t yet carved out the time – still haven’t got the hang of 2009!
And thanks for the pointers to Zuska’s and FSP’s posts.
Well, if we are in some sort of mind meld, (I suppose our keyboard connections to the Internet could be a proxy for contact), you’re probably losing hair over saying yes to too many potential collaborators for deadlines hovering around the end of the month. So that doesn’t leave lots of time for blog posts.
Losing hair – check. Fretting about grants – check. No time for blog posts – check (though you seem to be doing rather well on that score!)