Click on the “Continue reading…” link immediately below to read the final draft of my essay on doing research in science. (4800 words, non-technical). Feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Author: Michael Nielsen
About this blog
This is an experimental weblog.
At least initially, it’ll run in tandem with a weekly discussion group on how to do effective research in physics. I’ll post notes, essays, quotes, and so on, to stimulate further discussion of the ideas arising out of our meetings, and to maintain a record. Hopefully this will also enable people not directly involved in the discussion group to become electronically involved.
On the air!
The first real post to this blog. The “earlier” posts were accumulated prior to installing the blogging software, and were ported over by hand.
Tough learning, part 3: Critical comments on the first draft
Why on Earth would anybody be interested in somebody else’s essay revision?
This post is a bit of an experiment. In any case, I’m posting not so much in the hope that anyone is interested in the revision of this specific document, as in the belief that some people may be interested in the general process of how to go about revision, and this post may be of interest to those people.
Tough learning: first draft
Abstract: The natural sciences have a reputation for posing special challenges to the way we think and learn: they are a form of “extreme thinking”. In this essay physicist Michael Nielsen discusses some of the challenges facing researchers in the natural sciences, and how those challenges shed light on other tough learning situations.
This essay is the text for a presentation delivered by the author at the “Tough Learning” conference held in Brisbane, Australia, September 7-10, 2003, organized by Learning Network Australia (www.lna.net.au).
3600 words, available in ASCII, PDF, and Microsoft Word formats.
Running on empty
Ever find yourself staring dumbly at your computer screen, realizing that your “hard work” of the previous two hours has consisted mostly of web-surfing, writing and deleting poorly thought-out emails, and half-starting a couple of projects that, upon reflection, you don’t actually need to do?
Being very clever, you decide that what is needed is to work harder. You may work late, or at least try to work intensely, fueling yourself with caffeine and sugar. You leave work several hours later, having done virtually nothing effective, and absolutely exhausted. You’re irritable at home, don’t eat well, and have difficulty sleeping, in part because of the caffeine.
The next day is, presumably, unlikely to be a rousing success.
Sadly, the above paragraphs aren’t exactly based on hearsay.
Networking on the Network (NotN), Part 2
Update: This post (and the previous post) used to contain a link to a local copy of the essay “Networking on the Network”. I’ve taken it down in response to a request from the author; it can (probably) be found by searching online.
Notes inspired by sections 1 and 2
Professional networking is an incredibly useful skill. The direct impact of effective networking is to improve both your own and others’ research. As an indirect benefit, by being more useful to your professional community, and by making that fact known, networking has implications for your career – jobs, promotions, grants, and so on, that can help ensure both your security, and successfully accomplishing your goals.
Networking is, however, a complex skill that needs to be learnt. Phil Agre’s essay, NotN, is primarily about learning this skill, especially in the context of electronic networking, although many of the same ideas apply also to other forms of networking.
The concept of “networking” is widely reviled amongst physicists. People speak of “schmoozing” or “playing politics”, often with a slight sneer, or with a feeling that it is a necessary evil. The underlying feeling seems to be one of shame – it is something to be hidden from sight, not celebrated, and certainly not practiced, or thought about in any deep way.
In my opinion, this feeling has much in common with the sense, shared by many, that occupations such as lawyer, stock-trader, manager, or banker, are somehow less virtuous than occupations which directly produce a tangible good, such as medical doctor, farmer, engineer, or factory worker.
This is to misunderstand how our society functions. Our society engages in many truly amazing forms of co-operative behaviour. A town of a few thousand people may well have a fire station, ambulance, school, library, post office, supermarket, petrol station, and many other amenities. Each one of these is an amazing phenomenon, involving an enormous amount of co-operation – think of how many people are involved in producing goods in the supermarket, and how many levels of co-operation there are!
Networking on the Network (NoTN), Part 1
Update: This post (and a later post) used to contain a link to a local copy of the essay “Networking on the Network”. I’ve taken it down in response to a request from the author; it can (probably) be found by searching online.
Phil Agre has written an essay, “Networking on the Network” (NotN), that I strongly recommend to anybody involved in research, at any level, but particularly to those beginning research careers. NotN is ostensibly about the process of building and maintaining electronic networks as part of a research career. In fact, it contains an enormous amount of information on all aspects of research.
I intend to use NotN as source material to stimulate exploration, analysis, and synthesis. To that end, I have archived the August 18, 2002 version of the document on my website. More recent updates may be available at Agre’s website.
(As an aside, I wonder at the origin of the document. It offers a wide range of insights into research, so much so that the underlying organizing principle of electronic networking sometimes feels a little artificial. Perhaps Agre felt a need to distinguish the document from others texts on the research process?)
How to do research?
The question of how to do research is the central question to be addressed by the discussion group which motivated the setting up of this weblog. It’s not yet clear to me how we as a group should go about addressing the question. We’ll just have to try several different ways, and try to identify ways that work. I can, at least, identify a few important goals from the outset.
- Exploration: Identify important issues and problems involved in doing research.
- Analysis: With the issues identified, try to break them up into smaller pieces, susceptible to individual analysis.
- Synthesis: Try various ways of putting things together into coherent (and preferably enlightening) narratives.
Good methods for doing these things might include:
- Brainstorming lists of issues and questions, which are then to be described, and used as fodder for further analysis, finally to be put back together again.
- Identifying good source materials for discussion. Once again, the material can be analyzed, and then synthesized with other materials.
Tough learning: introductory draft
I’ve been invited to give a presentation at a conference on “Tough Learning”, being held in Brisbane, Australia, from September 7-10, 2003. The following is a draft introduction for my presentation.
Introduction (Draft)
Have any of you ever known a bratty teenager?
Have you ever known a bratty teenager who’s gone on a trip overseas for a few weeks or months, and come back a different person? They might have come back more aware of others, less quick to judge, less quick to anger when they feel trodden upon.
Of course, what’s going on here is common to all people. It’s just that it’s less visible in older people, perhaps because we’re less bratty before we go on our trip. When we go overseas, or even just to another town, we experience things outside our usual domain of understanding.
Such experiences broaden us. They provide new perspectives on our everyday lives, even if they are themselves very remote from our everyday lives. They are, in short, learning experiences, learning experiences whose very power derives from the differences they have with our usual experience.
Today, I’m going to be talking about physics. For most people, the word “physics” means something like: “the subject I disliked most / was worst at in high school”.
I want to talk about physics in a different way. All that stuff in high school – inclined planes, calculus, friction, and so on – bears very little relationship to what I mean today when I talk about physics.
When I talk about physics today, I’m talking about a human endeavour. It’s the endeavour to figure out what the basic rules governing our Universe are. What is the Universe made of? How did it start? How will it end? What’s out there?
These are hard questions. Doing physics is the process of trying to figure out the answers to questions like these. It is a learning experience. What makes it interesting and relevant today is that it’s different in some crucial ways from a lot of the other types of learning that people do. Here’s some ways in which it’s different:
- No teachers. The first way is that there are no teachers. The process of doing physics is a process of figuring out answers to questions that nobody yet knows the answers to.
- No guarantees. It’s pretty darn presumptuous to suppose that we human beings can actually understand how the world works. Maybe, as J. B. S. Haldane said, “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose”. Answering these questions certainly requires mind-bending exercises in mental ingenuity and creative thoughts.
I’ll talk more as we go on about ways in which physics is unusual.
Of course, it is precisely because physics is so different from many other learning experiences that makes it potentially so enlightening. The great computer scientist Alan Kay, inventor of the modern personal computer, is fond of saying that “A change of perception is worth 80 IQ points”.
My goal today is to describe to you some of the ways in which doing physics is an exercise in tough learning, in the hope that, like travel, this change of perspective will prove valuable for people doing tough learning in other areas.