E.O. Wilson on Becoming a Great Scientist
fs.blog
fs.blog
Deborah Gordon’s [3] work on red harvester ants may also be of interest to the HN community:
> In 2012, she found that the foraging behavior of red harvester ants matches the TCP congestion control algorithm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_a_Young_Scientist
This makes me think for how many people basic math competence remains an obstacle for getting into science.
Shameless plug for my new book about "basic math competence" for adults that think they "suck at math." See extended preview here: https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSmath_v5_previe...
The material is similar to the more advanced books on mechanics, calculus, and linear algebra, but contains ONLY the essential material from high school math that is the most practical and useful for day-to-day "quantitative analysis."
[1] https://minireference.com/blog/multilingual-authoring-for-th...
[2] https://minireference.com/static/conceptmaps/math_concepts.p...
[3a] https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSmath_v5_previe...
[3b] https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pd... (same as above but in IEEE journal format)
Not to cast any doubt whatsoever on his impressive scholarship and advances for the public good of science at all, but the environment he succeeded in is not the same world that today's young professors face.
You should do all the things he suggests. But don't expect that that alone will lead to greatness without a lot of luck too.
A large pizza feeds a family of four^H^H^H^H two.
I need to make adjustments for pizza inflation too, even though it still beats out the phd. How depressing.
As I recall -- Not quite explicit in Letters from a Young Scientist: He worked really hard and is prolific. For those lucky-enough to hit personal resonance with a field of study, what looks like others to be really hard work is enabled by the joy of great passion.
It is a great book -- definitely worth a read.
This seems like decent enough advice to a young scientist.
Startups famously cannot afford to do science, Big Corp. doesn't have an R&D budget, academia is stultifying, so that leaves...Gentleman Hobby Scientists! The kind of people who are a software architect by day and watch 3blue1brown at night, or watches Steve Caroll's "Biggest Ideas in the Universe" series (great, btw). The kind of people who 20% time was made for. The kind of people who kick themselves for not dropping out in 1996 when they had solid funding for an internet startup available, but they wanted to finish their degree.
But yeah, "greatness" is always going to be about luck more than anything. The only consolation is that no matter how great you become, on a long enough timeline you will be forgotten. Heck, go out on the street and ask about "minor" scientists like Lavoisier or Leibniz or Gauss or Bohr or Brahe or, heck, Archimedes. You will get blank stares, or worse, ridiculed! So yeah, "greatness" (which they used to call "immortality", interestingly) is a pretty bad reason to do science, in my opinion. OTOH if you want to push the boundaries of human knowledge, and want to be the first to see it (and also one of the first to appreciate the progress of others), then that sounds good to me.
The budding chorus of "fund the researcher, not the project" is finding solutions. UBI stipends and crowdfunding are a far cry from MacArthur Genius Grants for All (~$500k/anum). But the success of Fold.it, a citizen science protein synthesis game, demonstrates viable alternatives. The competitive landscape now isn't in the form of a Leibniz–Newton rivalry between humans. It's human+AI vs human. DeepMind with it's unlimited budget and GPU cluster can solve protein folding in less time than a theorist penning their grant application!