It Takes Guts To Do Research (2013) | Hacker News Reader

It Takes Guts To Do Research (2013)

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62 pointsgwern9 comments

The OP makes an interesting point, but I think Steve Hsu's post below provide a more nuanced discussion of Oppenheimer and of the book mentioned in the linked article:

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/07/strange-gadget-robert-o...

Elsewhere, Hsu also links to this review by Freeman Dyson of the same book:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/oppenhe...

in which, rather than to lack of confidence, Dyson attributes Oppenheimer's "failure to be a great scientist" to:

a lack of Sitzfleisch. Sitzfleisch is a German word with no equivalent in English. The literal translation is “Sitflesh.” It means the ability to sit still and work quietly. He could never sit still long enough to do a difficult calculation.

Insightful comment. I don't think we need to pity Oppenheimer for not winning a Nobel Prize. He accomplished quite a lot. We're still talking about him.

By the by, I'm always amazed at how deep particle physics got all the way back in the 1930s.

Non-paywall link to 2nd article:

https://www.adventuresofthemind.org/website/download.asp?id=...

The key point, and one the author believes applies just as well to computer science, is:

He was insufficiently confident of the power of the intellectual tools he already possessed and did not drive his thought to the very end because he felt instinctively that new ideas and new methods were necessary to go further than he and his students had already gone. Some may call it a lack of faith, but in my opinion it was more a turning away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition.

In my own field of network security, I think that's largely true: we have a lot of analytical tools that we haven't applied sufficiently well, largely because people are not interested or educated in the sorts of theoretical tools we could apply (ML or graph theory, for example).

How well this applies to theoretical research is outside my expertise, though...

It's funny you should mention graph theory and network security. I'm involved in cyber security research, though more on the operations side of security than networks. However, our research group does do quite a bit of work on the network side. Most of it's focused on SCADA networks, but there's a couple of really cool tools (read startups) that have come out of our group that lean heavily on graph theory.

NP-View[1] maps connections. That is, If HostA can reach HostB, and HostB can reach HostC, is there a path from HostC to HostA.

Veriflow (which I know far less about) is a large topology mapping tool.

[1] http://www.network-perception.com/ [2] http://www.veriflowsystems.com/

The broader point--that research takes a certain amount of courage--is generally true, but to me, it's weird to make the point by focusing on Oppenheimer's lack of a Nobel Prize. It's not exceptionally rare that someone so brilliant just happened to miss a Nobel.

Scientists, as individual human beings with limited time and energy, have to make an informed decision on just how far they really want to pursue an idea. The fact is that brilliant scientists have just as easily followed dead-end paths as have failed to go far enough down the right one. Hindsight is 20/20, so it's easy to see which is which only now.

Isn't it strange to ask why Oppenheimer "missed" a Nobel prize while Harold Urey and Carl Anderson got one?

It is Oppenheimer who is far more famous, and probably made a bigger contribution to physics or the world. IMHO, it just shows that Nobel Prize is a poor means to measure physicists.

Social distinctions such as Nobels will always be a poor means to measure anything whatsoever. Though of course they are sometimes right on the mark.

In the first two examples, I don't see how Oppenheimer failed to be "courageous." He disagreed with Dirac! He made technically accurate points that proved not to be rebuttals after all. This isn't about not following his ideas far enough, it's about just being wrong.

To me this reads more as the authors projecting their own ideas about what is important in science onto these anecdotes. While I think that's a natural parlor game for scientists to play, I don't think it's well argued here.

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