What is So Special About Being a Scientist?
What is so special about being a scientist?
The answer is – NOTHING!
In this short piece “What does it mean to be
smart?” I wrote: “No one is born smart. But EVERYONE is born
POTENTIALLY smart. Healthy infants (99 % of population) may have slight
deviations in the potential of smartness, but the actual level
of being smart mostly depends on one and one thing only – LUCK (when and where one was born, parents, friends,
teachers).”
When people ask me what I do and I say that I
teach physics, they often say something like “You are probably very smart”, and
I say “I just got lucky”.
There is a general public perception that to
become a scientist one has to be born a scientist.
This perception is
absolutely wrong.
Our skills and knowledge is the result of our
training. Our training is the result of the culture we grew up in. There are
no Mowglis. If baby
Einstein was left in jungles and raised by monkeys he would become a monkey - a
very smart one, but still a monkey.
Human Albert Einstein was smart - no
doubts about that. But what made him stand out from the crowd was not his
technical skills - in fact, for several fundamental research papers he used
help with doing math. What made him stand out from the crowd was
his infinite curiosity and unparalleled imagination (two qualities which
contemporary scientific world - which looks today much more like an
industrial complex than a hundred years ago - values much less than advanced
technical skills, e.g. "How
much of the NSF fundamental research in education is really fundamental?").
The majority of scientist I have met during the
last 20-ish years have been born in a nice family, surrounded by nice culture,
attended nice schools with nice teachers, and as the result, had a good
background for attending a college. They did not struggle, they did not have to
overcome challenges, they just were following the road which had led them
straight to where they are now.
Doing science requires one skill, the same skill
which is required for digging trenches – consistency. Even with a small spoon
one can dig a large tunnel, if the one is patient enough to do it for a long
time.
Someone might ask, why then
so many students struggle when taking science courses?
Middle and high school
students struggle due to only one reason – they have a bad science teacher (bad
luck). College and university students may struggle because they don’t have
sufficient background (because they didn’t have good science teachers), or the
teaching faculty is not good at teaching.
Both problems (the quality of
school education and the quality of college education) are solvable. Unfortunately,
too many officials formally responsible for solving those problems spend too
much time on speaking about solving those problems and too little time on actually
solving them (e.g. “Education
reform needs a new paradigm”; “Three myths of higher
education”).
Ninety nine percent of scientists are no
different from people from any other professions – all they do is "walk their path" - professional path, and as
long as they move their legs they propel themselves ahead – like everybody
else. BTW: like everybody else, scientists can be very sloppy, and they usually don’t know much beyond their
professional area (which often rather narrow, "one-dimensional", the result of a long-time "boring" in the same direction), hence often they do very stupid things or make stupid suggestions.
However, because they are considered to be smart, they rarely accept the fact
that they may be stupid, too.
An interesting fact: everything what is said
about scientists is also true for about 99 % of businessman. Examples are
numerous. Even so-called "college dropouts" like Bill Gates or Mark
Zuckerberg first had to get good school education, good enough to get
in a top-notch university, and then drop out from it. The story of Chris Gardner is so
unique, that Will Smith made a movie about him.
As a case study of becoming a scientist I want
to tell about my path. My generic letter of interest I used
when applying for jobs shows that the only reason I am where I am, is that
I was always moving myself.
provide a clear description of what does it mean "to think as a scientist".
Thank you for visiting,
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