No free lunches II: snacking between meals

Mole


I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again (and again). Science is hard – filled with frustration, setbacks, downturns, blind alleys and dead ends, disappointment and derision, humiliating reviewers, caustic critiques and sneering colleagues. But one of the astounding things is this (and don't you dare tell anyone): I'd do it for free if I could afford to. Even if I couldn't afford to, I'd probably do it for free. And even more astoundingly, so would you.

[Emergency Announcement. If you read the last sentence and did not agree, at least in your heart of hearts, then this is an excellent opportunity to get out now before your life is completely ruined. Go get a real job, have a life with friends and hobbies and vacations (real vacations, not congresses or ski meetings) and read about science in the newspaper. It really isn't for you – really. We've got way too many scientists who do feel this way. We'll manage without you and you'll save a fortune in therapy. I'm not kidding. Run away. It isn't too late. This has been a public service by the Mole.]

I'd like to return to the lunch issue. For those of you who just came in, lunch is not only a metaphor for an intellectually challenging problem but also an important meal that you should neither skip nor use as an excuse for a grease-fest. Faced with the problem of obtaining lunch, most reasonable people (i.e. not scientists) buy it, make it, or coerce someone to get it for them, and this is the basis of civilization. But scientists? We probe the essence of the lunch concept and question the inherent `lunch-ness' of the universe and, if we're lucky, we only miss one meal in the process.

In case you think that this is just the old Mole being characteristically flippant, I want to remind you that the brilliant and much maligned (owing to early 20th century sexism that resembles, in many ways, early 21st century sexism) astrophysicist Cecilia Payne was noted once to lie on her back and propose "a new theory of making cocoa." This is true. In contrast, it is almost certainly not true that Einstein once described the universe as a finite roll surrounding infinite and very thinly sliced corned beef. Nevertheless, the role of lunch in the history of science is largely overlooked.

Okay, so how do we explore our deep question? How do we explore lunchness? In other words, how do we as scientists ask questions and in the process somehow reach some sort of level of understanding? You know the answer; of course you do: we do experiments. And for this to actually lead to something of value, we have to decide in advance what is likely to be a meaningful experiment (i.e. it can provide an answer), manipulate the fabric of reality so that the experiment actually works (i.e. it gives an answer), and think about it so that we actually know what it's trying to tell us (i.e. we can interpret the answer).

And somehow we have to do all this while juggling the demands of life. So clear your calendar; we're going to get to work. We're going to design experiments. Then we'll go get lunch.

First of all, we have to ensure that the question is actually worth asking. This is hugely important, but it will have to wait until another time and, most likely, a completely different facetious analogy. Let's assume that the question is posed, and we agree that it's important. So how do we design an experiment to answer it?

Here is where our silly analogy comes in handy. It's a bit like deciding what to have for lunch. We imagine that we have it, our lunch, and then imagine ourselves eating it, and then decide if it's really going to satisfy us. If not, we think about having something else for lunch. We scroll through these virtual lunches and then develop a plan to go about getting it. Just so, we imagine the results of said experiment and decide if it actually will teach us anything, given that it may come out this way or that, and then develop a plan for making it happen. We look at all the angles and look to see if the results we might get are going to satisfy us. If not, we try a different approach.

But, you say, this is all wrong. What about testing our hypothesis? Doesn't the great philosopher Karl Popper teach us that science is really about the falsification of hypotheses? Don't we do science (as we often misquote the great philosopher Sherlock Holmes) to "eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" Aren't experiments designed to disprove our ideas?

Don't make me laugh. If you do experiments to disprove your hypotheses, you are in the extreme minority, and you're probably really, really bitter. We do our experiments to see if our foolish notions of reality are right, and we do them again and again until we're forced to conclude that we're on the wrong track, in which case we revise our original idea so that we were (ta-daa!) right all the time. I mean, get real, Karl. As if.

This is for a very good, and rather practical reason. There are many ways that an experiment will fail. Anything can go wrong. So we have to be sure in our imaginary run-through that we've got something built in that will tell us if the experiment should have worked, or if it's just being ornery. And this is what controls are for. Most likely if it doesn't give us the answer we want we're going to do it again anyway, but in that case controls help to convince other people that we were right after all.

Still with me? Okay, so now you've got a good design, and you play out all the possible results you can think of, and you're ready to go. So, like all good cutting-edge scientists, you look in the catalogues to see if there's a kit. And if there isn't, you go back to the very start and think of a new question. In fact, you probably notice a really neat kit that gives you an idea for a completely different question that might not be interesting at all, but, hey, it's do-able. And there's a kit.

There's nothing wrong with kits. But you should be careful and suspicious of things that come in boxes with a logo. Work out the details for yourself. Make sure it works. Do the titrations and tests and make sure that when the big investment of time, energy, and money comes, the kit isn't going to let you down. This goes for anything you buy at the science store. Check your antibodies (who says they're specific – the company? Pull-ease!); titrate your reagents (most of the time they want us to use them at high concentrations to use them up more quickly); be scientific. Novel idea. But this most of all: if there isn't a kit to do what you need, this is not an excuse not to proceed as planned.

This is the path to a bad end, and you'll be wishing before long that you took my advice and got a real job in sales. Not only should the question, and the right experiment, dictate the methods that you will develop and use to answer said question, but in shying away from experiments that might require you to develop a new method, you leave yourself out of one of the most fun things that scientists get to do. We get to play. We know what we need to do, we know that it's going to give us an answer, and we know that the answer is very likely to be interesting; so go think of a really good way to do this. Work it out. Maybe you won't be able to do the experiment tomorrow, but you'll be on the lookout for ways to do it, and you'll be engaged to the full extent of your science. And you'll come up with something creative and expressive... something that says "I was here." It's why we do science. It's just that in the day-to-day we tend to forget that. Have fun. And make sure you do the controls.

Great. And now, some time later, some results are in. You check the controls, and the experiment has `worked': there are interpretable results. And if this says that your initial idea might be right, and we've already agreed that that means you've found something fundamentally cool, then do what any really good scientist will immediately do: celebrate! We have so few chances to feel really terrific about what we do that a really good experiment has to hold us for a long time. Feel great, and have a great time (if tomorrow it turns out you were wrong, at least you had a party). Go have lunch.

Most of the time, though, it doesn't happen like this. The result is in, and you need to think about it. Modify your idea. Change things around a little. Explore. But this is good: it's why you're doing science and not just insisting that the universe is the way you say it is because the idea amuses you. And if the results don't make sense? You know the experiment is trying to tell you something (because the controls worked; so you have reason to suspect that this isn't just capriciousness on the part of nature), but you don't know what it is. This happens. And now you have to do the hardest thing that we ever have to do.

You have to think.

This may not be small-time thinking. It may not be `light workout' thinking. This could be high-level, trained, professional thinking. This could be thinking until you hit the wall and then thinking through it. `My head hurts, I'll think about this some more tomorrow' thinking. You can do it. Get in there and think.

If you do it right, you'll get a new idea. And guess what? That's doing science. Not every idea is lunch. Not everything we do will give us what we yearn for. But along the way, we snack here and there. We go back, think about it, and try a new experiment. And hopefully, along the way, we ask better questions and get surprising results until the question and the results suddenly come together. And then? We feast.


Related articles in JCS:

Sticky Wicket – designing experiments

JCS 2004 117: 605. [Full Text]  




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