Physics and Physicists: “What Is The Most Important Thing You Learned In Becoming A Scientist?”
Let’s cut to the chase:
[L]earning how to learn is the most important thing I learned in becoming a scientist.
swans on tea
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Physics and Physicists: “What Is The Most Important Thing You Learned In Becoming A Scientist?”
Let’s cut to the chase:
[L]earning how to learn is the most important thing I learned in becoming a scientist.
Object, Equipment, Procedure, Data, Calculation, Conclusion, Recommendation. Oh no! Where is the social context?
Males do stupid painful things to establish dominance among their kind, and learn. Women seduce the winners. Hazardous environments injure and kill – ultimate social equity. Reality cannot be seduced, for that would be magic. Magic is crap.
http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm
HOPE! But the other way.
The greatest obstacle to understanding reality is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Reality is not a peer vote. Theorists boast promiscuity while empiricists pay child support. The universe does not tolerate contradiction, but it has been known to throw curves. Look around, always look around.
At Oregon State University is a lovely old building, Kidder Hall (once the library, now maths, college of Science offices, etc)
When I was a child, my parents took me there, pointing out the dips in the well-worn marble stairs. Always, we would stop to read, carved above the doors, the Henry Adams quote ‘They know enough who know to learn’.
Later I walked those stairs as a student, and they always evoked images of the hundreds and thousands of students who had been there before me, and would come after me; an endless procession in the search of knowledge. There is no greater joy than uncovering insights, whether from the people around you, abstruse science, or natural wonders.
To know to learn is, I believe, the greatest gift anyone can have, in science or in life.