The project review

Sometimes abandoning an effort is a positive step.

Our astronomer recently found himself doing a sort of project review.  He has had a Master Review on his mind for some time, in which he organizes his notes, ideas, copies of published papers and preprints, and makes an overall adjustment of his efforts.  This is not likely to happen soon; it would be a major undertaking and there are more pressing things at the moment.  But circumstances have made him look closely at one entry in his list, and decide not to do it.  Which made him happier.

We should note that every working scientist has more ideas than he or she could possibly follow up, even given a full stable of collaborators, postdocs and graduate students.  Some are no more than a passing thought inspired by a comment at someone else’s seminar; some are well-worked out extensions of an effort already in progress or recently completed.  Most are somewhere in the middle, needing a bit of refinement before they can be expressed in a useful way and maybe chosen for work.  A scientist without ideas is almost in an existential crisis.

Our astronomer has perhaps an unusual number of ideas of an inconvenient type: those that require a great deal of background learning, amounting to a full graduate-school course or perhaps several, before he could even start.  That is, he would need this much study just to know whether his question even makes sense, or (in some cases) what the question is.  Perhaps he was exposed to too many very capable and imaginative scientists in his grad school days, or too varied a selection.

He has of course learned things on his own for research before, swathes of mathematics and physics.  He doesn’t doubt that, given time and effort, he could follow up any of these ideas.  It’s a matter of deciding to get started, and deciding which to start on.  Hence the planned Master Review.

Well, a couple of weeks ago in his library he stumbled upon a book on non-equilibrium thermodynamics.  It was a brief survey of a subject that would be the beginning of a study leading, perhaps, to two or three lines of research.  He found that it combined many things he’d wanted to learn, or learn more of, anyway: thermodynamics of course, classical and quantum mechanics, dynamical systems and chaos, leading to complex systems.  He then located a file of more recent papers and articles dealing with work that had been done since the book came out.

After some study, he concluded that some of his ideas had been tried and found not to work; some had already been completed; and others were actively being pursued by many very capable scientists.  And while it would be wonderful to understand all these things in detail, he couldn’t see where he would contribute anything.  So he has put the subject away and turned to other things.

This could be depressing.  But it was actually rather freeing.  There are other, more promising, things to attend to, and clearing the way for them is something of an advance.