Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter (who is really an excellent follow, linking to a wide range of always interesting stuff), I read this really nice blog post from Kanjun Qiu summarizing the essence of research:
I misunderstood the nature of research for most of my life, and this prevented me from doing any. I thought significant research came from following the scientific method until novel discoveries popped out. I'd never contributed something new to human knowledge before, so being a researcher—which required replicating this outcome—felt impossibly far out of reach.
But it turns out the novel discovery is just a side effect. You don't make novel discoveries by trying to make novel discoveries.
Instead, research is simply a continuation of something we already naturally do: learning. Learning happens when you understand something that someone else already understands. Research happens when you understand something that nobody else understands yet.
I think that’s great, and really gets at some core truth about the nature of scholarly activity.
One of the footnotes to the essay gets into the question of the boundaries around this definition— do incremental tweaks in methods really count as “research” in this scheme?— and I had an immediate negative reaction to that. That seemed sort of illuminating, about me if not about the definition of research, and seemed a thing worth exploring a bit.
This is actually a pretty common occurrence for me whenever discussions stray into what I might overgeneralize a bit and call the territory of philosophy. This isn’t restricted to what actual philosophers would call philosophy, of course, but crops up in areas ranging from formal math (what’s a derivative really?) to literature (is Star Wars really science fiction?). What they all have in common is a descent into arguments about demarcation— fixing the exact boundary between one thing and another thing.
I used to enjoy this category of argument, but these days I find it unappealing, because it’s basically fractal. Whenever seem to have found some rule for defining a line between Thing 1 and Thing 2, somebody can construct a baroque new hypothetical calling that rule into question again, and it just goes on forever. It’s like trying to map a coastline at smaller and smaller scales, and at some point you’re drawing lines around individual grains of sand, and the whole thing seems pointless.
What I find unsatisfying about these arguments is that fussing about the minute details of the boundary ends up distracting from what’s inside, which is frequently both uncontroversial and pretty awesome in its own right. In the nature of such things, there’s also a lot more of it— the surface area increases like the square of the size, but the volume scales like the cube of the size. As the region you’re trying to enclose increases in size, the boundary becomes more and more insignificant compared to the bulk.
This colors a lot of what I choose to write about, too, in a way that’s arguably career-limiting. I’m just not excited about the prospect of reading the umpteenth round of “Is string theory good science?,” let alone writing about it, but there seems to be a boundless appetite for that among the pop-science-reading public. And, you know, de gustibus and all that, but I’d much rather look at what’s going on inside the boundaries of what everybody agrees to be solid scientific knowledge.
It’s also part of my frustration with “science is political” arguments on social media. While it’s perfectly true that issues of politics affect how science is done, for the vast majority of scientific situations the effect of politics is really, truly insignificant, and I’d much rather spend my time thinking about that bulk than the more controversial boundary layer.
That leads me to write books like Eureka, which is about scientific thinking very broadly, but not really concerned with the difference between science and not-science, and Breakfast with Einstein, which is about applications of well settled quantum physics. The new book, A Brief History of Timekeeping is explicitly historical, again looking at the ingenious answers that have already been found to questions that used to be on the borders of science.
I wouldn’t say that I’m completely uninterested in the question of setting boundaries. I’m glad somebody is poking at these issues. At the same time, though, I’m glad that the people doing that poking aren’t me, because I don’t have the patience for it. I’d rather play on the beach or swim in the ocean than work on more precisely defining the coastline.
While I was thinking about this, a pretty good trolley problem joke drifted through my timeline, so I’ll close with that in lieu of any kind of coherent summary paragraph:
I guess “experimental atomic physicist” is a lot closer to “engineer” than I realized. At least relative to “philosopher”…
This post is, admittedly, kind of noodle-y, but to be fair, I said that up front. Anyway, if this kind of thing holds any appeal, here are some buttons:
The comments will also be open.
Programming note: posting here will continue to be sparse into next week, as I’ve got a bunch of work meetings and family stuff to deal with. I’ve got a couple of ideas in mind, but am unlikely to have any time to write over the next several days.