What Constitutes Good Science

It's Not All Luck

Everyone says great science is luck. But that doesn't explain Einstein doing many different good things. Or Shannon doing other good work years before information theory. You see it again and again: good people produce more than one good thing.

Hamming quotes Pasteur: "Luck favors the prepared mind." I think that's right. There's luck in the particular thing you do. But that you do something? That's not luck. The prepared mind finds something important and does it.

Newton put it this way: "If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results." The prepared mind, the hard thinking. That's what actually matters.

Courage

Successful scientists have courage. Once you believe you can do important problems, you can. If you think you can't, you won't. Simple as that.

Hamming tells this story about Shannon. Shannon wants a coding method but doesn't know how. So he makes a random code. Then he's stuck. Then he asks: "What would the average random code do?" He proves the average code is arbitrarily good, so there must be at least one good code.

Who else would think that? Who else would even ask that question? Great scientists have courage. They think and keep thinking.

Working on Important Problems

If you don't work on an important problem, you won't do important work. Great scientists think through important problems in their field. They watch for ways to attack them.

"Important problem" needs definition. Three problems in physics were never worked on while Hamming was at Bell Labs: time travel, teleportation, and antigravity. They're not important because we don't have an attack. The consequence doesn't make a problem important. Having a reasonable attack does.

Most great scientists know 10 to 20 important problems. They watch for attacks. When a new idea appears, they say "That bears on this problem." They drop everything else and pursue it.

Drive and Commitment

Most great scientists have tremendous drive. Hamming worked with John Tukey at Bell Labs for ten years. Tukey had tremendous drive. Three or four years after Hamming joined, he discovered Tukey was slightly younger. Tukey was a genius. Hamming was not.

Hamming stormed into Bode's office: "How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?" Bode leaned back, put his hands behind his head, grinned, and said: "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years."

Bode's point: knowledge and productivity compound. Two people with the same ability. One works ten percent more. The latter outproduces the former by more than double. The more you know, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you can do. The more you can do, the more opportunity. It compounds.

Tolerating Ambiguity

Most people want things to be true or false. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity. They believe the theory enough to proceed. They doubt it enough to notice errors and faults. Then they create the replacement theory. Believe too much and you'll never notice flaws. Doubt too much and you won't start. It requires balance.

Most great scientists know why their theories are true. They also know about slight misfits that don't quite fit. They don't forget them. Darwin wrote in his autobiography that he had to write down every piece of evidence that contradicted his beliefs. Otherwise they would disappear from his mind.

Emotional Commitment

Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don't commit seldom produce outstanding work.

Everyone who studies creativity ends up saying: creativity comes from your subconscious. Suddenly, there it is. It just appears. We know little about the subconscious. But you know your dreams come from your subconscious. Your dreams rework the experiences of the day.

If you're deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. You wake up one morning, or some afternoon, and there's the answer.

Stupidity

The great scientists are practiced in being stupid. They've cultivated the virtue of asking entirely boneheaded questions.

Feynman walking into meetings asking "Is a cathode plus or minus?" Later, in the middle of equations: "Wait, there's an error!" How did this guy who barely understood at the beginning find the mistake? Because he asked dumb questions. He built concrete examples in his mind. He watched them.

Niels Bohr was famously slow. Couldn't follow movie plots. At scientific meetings, everyone would understand the argument clearly except Bohr. So everyone would try to explain it to him. In the resulting turmoil, everyone would stop understanding.

Finally Bohr would understand. And what he understood would be different from what the visitor meant. And correct. While the visitor's interpretation was wrong.

Laziness

Hard work is necessary. But it must be matched by commitment to relaxation, slacking off, fucking around.

Poincaré worked four hours a day. He had several experiences where hard work failed to crack a problem, but laziness did. Drinking coffee too late, messing up his sleep - ideas rose in crowds. Or getting on a bus - the idea came to him, without anything seeming to pave the way for it.

Linus Pauling got a head cold. Read detective stories in bed for a day. Got bored. "Why don't I have a crack at that protein structure problem?" Led to his Nobel Prize.

So next time you think "I shouldn't read detective stories, I should be working" - reconsider.

Most Great Work Comes From Things That Seemed Like Pointless Nonsense

Von Neumann: "A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful. The whole system functions without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful."

Right now, almost no one sits down and writes a scientific paper for pure pleasure. People who signed up for academia to uncover mysteries of the universe end up doing something that kind of looks like that but isn't really. They come to hate their papers by the time they get them published.

That doesn't mean science is inherently ugly. It means we aren't doing it the beautiful way. But you can. You can make knowledge the way you'd make music in your basement. Just because you like doing it.

Great work is about building a specific relationship with problems.

Prepare your mind to recognize importance. Develop courage to not give up when approaches feel impossible. Focus on problems with handles.