Thoughts at the end of another busy year…. Good science is a creative enterprise. Some stereotypes paint most scientists as toiling away, so deeply constrained by logic that they function more like automatons grinding out the next incremental advance in a steady if slow march of progress. In practice, originality and creativity are necessary to develop and grow a research program. Some of this is laid out (paradoxically, in a methodical list) by Carl Wieman in this article here. Picking the right open questions to address (hopefully ones that are deep and interesting to other people as well as you), and figuring out how to address them given the tools at your disposal, frequently requires intuition, leaps beyond incrementalism, and some measure of intellectual risk-taking.
One aspect of modern science as practiced today with which I find myself struggling is the issue of time. We live in a short-term world. Grants are generally brief in duration compared to doctoral student timescales and the time it takes to tackle big questions. There are many more demands on our time than in the past, and it seems like most funding sources profess to want fresh, new, ground breaking ideas that are both high-risk/transformative/disruptive and yet somehow very likely to produce rapid, high-profile glossy results. Some also want to see brand new approaches to education and outreach each time. Finding the time to think deeply about the science and the educational aspects, reinventing research programs like clockwork, is something that I find very challenging. One answer is, since creativity doesn’t generally respond to on-demand calls, always be thinking and noodling on ideas, but that’s much easier to say than to do consistently. I’d be curious to hear others’ strategies for dealing with this; while I’m pretty set in how I work at this point, a discussion could be fun and useful.
3 comments:
To think, to write, I need unstructured time alone, or to argue informally with colleagues at a white board. I simply can't do it with distractions from grant writing, diversity programs, the drum beat of travel, a 9-5 scheduled day etc.
I'm proud to have spent some years as a 'free electron', changing topics, and discovering new stuff. However, I ultimately decided that creativity was incompatible with academia and growing family responsibility, and quit.
Much has changed in the last decade or so. The system has evolved to favour a particular kind of smart-slack wearing, organised 'manager' type. This is to the exclusion of odd-ball creative people like me. Not to mention the explosion of low-quality/incremental papers, which unceasingly arrive like sausages in a factory. I hope that there will be a phase transition back to the roots of academia one day though :-)
Published in socarxiv.
Recommendation for dual peer-reviewing in science journals supported by two interpretations of Jacques Derrida’s critical thinking and not so-tiring queries of Michel Foucault
AUTHOR
Ramasubramania Iyer
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/f3bgc/
Since , Prof Roald Hoffmann’s Derridean interpretation was used in the paper , emailed him for comments . His comments and critique are available in the attached pdf in research gate below first paper. .
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ramasubramania-Iyer
The above preprint was by Rama . Apologies for the earlier anonymous.
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