Science Feels
In a time of chaos, uncertainty, and bad news around the future for science in the US we should remember this...
This feeling doesn’t come along very often as a scientist - but when it does it’s very addictive and makes some of the pain feel worth it. I’ve experienced this kind of feeling maybe 4 or 5 times during my 30+ year career in science (many more times at a kind of micro-level though).
Interestingly, this can come even when the insight or knowledge gained turns out to be not quite right. I had an experience last summer that was a two-fer: I had a realization about a problem we’d been working on that felt a lot like this - a sudden clicking in to place of understanding and concurrent feeling that you could suddenly see an underlying truth and pattern in reality; AND, this occurred while I was walking a summer intern through the results of her project. The second part meant that I was able to share some of this feeling with the next generation of scientist and see her excitement about the understanding, which was nearly as good as the insight-dopamine rush I got myself. As I said, it wasn’t quite right: after consideration I realized that what we were seeing wasn’t quite the clear picture that I originally thought it was, but the experience transformed the way I was thinking about the problem permanently, and opened up a whole new avenue for analysis that I am excited to see come to fruition. That’s how science is - a series of dead ends that somehow continues to move you forward, and the excitement about seeing a new alley that didn’t realize was there before is not (always) damped by seeing that the alley ends at a wall. There’s more to this metaphor that seems to make less and less sense but imagine that I found a door in that wall instead of a new street.
As I said, addictive. The day-to-day trudging through the scientific trenches (and worse yet, the publishing trenches. And worse STILL the administrative bureaucracy trenches which are in the bottom of an absolute dungeon in the middle of a desert) can wear you down. All it takes is a tiny dose of the fundamental cloth of the universe to keep you going.