Scientist: Four golden lessons - publicado na Nature

Steven Weinberg

When I received my undergraduate degree — about a hundred years ago —
the physics literature seemed to me a vast, unexplored ocean, every
part of which I had to chart before beginning any research of my own.
How could I do anything without knowing everything that had already
been done? Fortunately, in my first year of graduate school, I had the
good luck to fall into the hands of senior physicists who insisted,
over my anxious objections, that I must start doing research, and pick
up what I needed to know as I went along. It was sink or swim. To my
surprise, I found that this works. I managed to get a quick PhD —
though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did
learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you don't have
to.

Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic
metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should
aim for rough water. When I was teaching at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in the late 1960s, a student told me that he
wanted to go into general relativity rather than the area I was
working on, elementary particle physics, because the principles of the
former were well known, while the latter seemed like a mess to him. It
struck me that he had just given a perfectly good reason for doing the
opposite. Particle physics was an area where creative work could still
be done. It really was a mess in the 1960s, but since that time the
work of many theoretical and experimental physicists has been able to
sort it out, and put everything (well, almost everything) together in
a beautiful theory known as the standard model. My advice is to go for
the messes — that's where the action is.

My third piece of advice is probably the hardest to take. It is to
forgive yourself for wasting time. Students are only asked to solve
problems that their professors (unless unusually cruel) know to be
solvable. In addition, it doesn't matter if the problems are
scientifically important — they have to be solved to pass the course.
But in the real world, it's very hard to know which problems are
important, and you never know whether at a given moment in history a
problem is solvable. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
several leading physicists, including Lorentz and Abraham, were trying
to work out a theory of the electron. This was partly in order to
understand why all attempts to detect effects of Earth's motion
through the ether had failed. We now know that they were working on
the wrong problem. At that time, no one could have developed a
successful theory of the electron, because quantum mechanics had not
yet been discovered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein in 1905 to
realize that the right problem on which to work was the effect of
motion on measurements of space and time. This led him to the special
theory of relativity. As you will never be sure which are the right
problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory
or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you
will have to get used to spending most of your time not being
creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge.

Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum
the history of your own branch of science. The least important reason
for this is that the history may actually be of some use to you in
your own scientific work. For instance, now and then scientists are
hampered by believing one of the over-simplified models of science
that have been proposed by philosophers from Francis Bacon to Thomas
Kuhn and Karl Popper. The best antidote to the philosophy of science
is a knowledge of the history of science.

More importantly, the history of science can make your work seem more
worthwhile to you. As a scientist, you're probably not going to get
rich. Your friends and relatives probably won't understand what you're
doing. And if you work in a field like elementary particle physics,
you won't even have the satisfaction of doing something that is
immediately useful. But you can get great satisfaction by recognizing
that your work in science is a part of history.

Look back 100 years, to 1903. How important is it now who was Prime
Minister of Great Britain in 1903, or President of the United States?
What stands out as really important is that at McGill University,
Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy were working out the nature of
radioactivity. This work (of course!) had practical applications, but
much more important were its cultural implications. The understanding
of radioactivity allowed physicists to explain how the Sun and Earth's
cores could still be hot after millions of years. In this way, it
removed the last scientific objection to what many geologists and
paleontologists thought was the great age of the Earth and the Sun.
After this, Christians and Jews either had to give up belief in the
literal truth of the Bible or resign themselves to intellectual
irrelevance. This was just one step in a sequence of steps from
Galileo through Newton and Darwin to the present that, time after
time, has weakened the hold of religious dogmatism. Reading any
newspaper nowadays is enough to show you that this work is not yet
complete. But it is civilizing work, of which scientists are able to
feel proud.