• Question: Hello, my name is Muhammad. I want to ask about the thought process that a scientist takes for a question or an observation. What do you think about if your experiment fails or if it succeeds. What keeps you going? That's the general gist of my question. Thanks for reading it.

    Asked by MuhammadT on 17 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Danny Hnatyshin

      Danny Hnatyshin answered on 17 Nov 2020:

      Hi Muhammad
      Ideally scientists are asking questions that they find interesting to ask! For me, since I am in geology, I am asking questions about how rocks form and how old they are.

      Then I have to come up with a method or experiment to answer these questions and design my research around them. I would have to ask if it is possible the answer the question based on theory or my access to the right equipment.

      Sciencitic experiments rarely totally fail! For example I sometimes don’t get the data I am expecting or need to answer the question I asked. In those cases I can try and figure out what went wrogn and repeat it. If it is just a weird result I can start asking new questions. For example I might think a rock should be 100 million years old, but I find out its 200 million years old. That changes the story I make by a lot, but doesn’t make it less interesting!

      What keeps me going is that I like my dat to day work and the results I get at the end of projects are pretty cool!

    • Photo: Marcello Valente

      Marcello Valente answered on 18 Nov 2020:

      Dear Muhammad,
      thanks for your excellent question, you hit an important point that few people understand.
      The thought process (also called “forma mentis”) is related to a certain caution we have on observation and the limits of our own mind (called “bias”).
      This is also the reason why science it’s a self-correcting process in which we test other collegues work to see if we are able to repeat the results.
      The answer of Danny to you is quite complete but I would like to present you an other important element of science: the falsability principle which is the idea that every theory must be made so that in the future I can always check if, with new knowledge, it’s true or not.

    • Photo: Lara Codeca

      Lara Codeca answered on 18 Nov 2020:

      Marcello and Danny covered it perfectly.

      Personally, I’m very curious, I’m not afraid of failure, and I know that discovery in computer science is based on trial and error.
      I work with simulations, so the reproducibility of my experiments is solely based on how much of my code I can share openly, and that depends on the presence of a partner in the project, and if the partner is a company that has intellectual property at stake.
      Having built a city-playground to work with, I can tell you that probably 90% of the “solutions” I come up with are not good at all. But they allow me to understand more the problem I’m dealing with, and that brings me closer to an actual solution.

    • Photo: Malgorzata Dabrowska

      Malgorzata Dabrowska answered on 19 Nov 2020:

      Hi Muhammad,

      This is an important part of science what you are asking about here. Thank you for this question. Science is not only reading something, conducting an experiment and show your data to the world, all done in 6 months, bam, finished. Creating a hypothesis and later on a thesis is a long and difficult process. Once someone told me, that if I’ll make a thesis, I have to truly try my best and extra hard to disprove it. Only if I can’t do it, that means that I created a good thesis. Daily life as a scientist is full of failures, but you have to constantly remind yourself, that you didn’t fail but the experiment did, so tomorrow you’ll design it better and better. Every obtained result, even the negative one, it still a result and you can learn from it. Being a scientist is also a learning process which never ends. Sometimes you have to spend a long time on reading and learning about something before you’ll start any experiments, but this is also some kind of being scientifically matured and respected towards your work, instead of performing failing experiments without a purpose. We also want our experiment to work so, because we are all only humans, sometimes we really want to see a positive results where it doesn’t exist and that is very dangerous for your research. And of course every positive result is giving a wave of happiness and should be celebrated. I think that I’m very patient person and this is helping me a lot. I also have some love for my work, I respect it a lot, so even when I’m not going forward for some time I’m always trying to tackle the problem from different angles and at the end something is working, giving me more information about the topic and I can move on again. And when it’s very very difficult, I’m thinking about all the people for whom I’m working for, about how much they are struggling with the disease every single day and people like me are a hope for them. This is always giving me a boost to stand up and start action again.

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