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You & Your Research

By Richard Hamming

URL = http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Aim = How to do great research

Learning from observing people who do (Fermi, Feynman, Oppenheimer, Teller, Bethe) and those who might have done.

Observations:

  1. Ability to do great work != High IQ.

  2. Age seems to matter. A lot of great work in physics etc. done when people were young. In politics, music, etc., best work produced later in life. (GS: It would be nice to empirically verify this.)

  3. Problems with fame:

    • "When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems." "The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created"

    • Conversations become boring

    • To deal with issues with fame: "Somewhere around every seven years make a significant, if not complete, shift in your field."...you start out as a baby in the new field...

  4. "people are often most productive when working conditions are bad." They take problems that they can't solve and try to understand why not, etc.

How to do great work:

  1. Tell yourself: "I would like to do something significant."

  2. Big Questions:

    • "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work."

    • By "important problems", we mean: consequential + there is a plan of attack.

    • How do you find important problems?

      • Ask "What are the important problems in my field?"
      • Setup Great Thoughts Time: Time when you discuss big things to come up with big questions. Have a running list of big questions.

    • Have the courage to ask big questions, persevere.

  3. Tolerate ambiguity:

    • "If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started"

    • GS: Keep in mind that we are the most susceptible to our bullshit. Clearly state the theory but look closely for places where the corners stick out. "Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind."

  4. Prepare yourself:

    • "Luck favors the prepared mind" --- Pasteur

    • Learn:

      "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." --- Bode on Tukey

      "Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest."

  5. Work Hard:

    • "Hard work: "If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results." --- Newton"

    • "solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far"

    • "Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration" --- Edison

  6. Pay the Price:

    • Stress is part of the deal

    • "You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done."

    • GS: Nothing is free. Either you or someone else---generally someone who loves you---will pay the price. Find yourself someone like Dorothea from Middlemarch except, of course, don't be Casaubon.

  7. Focus

    • It is needed for creativity. "If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem."

    • And research is competitive so needed to come first: Keep track of opportunities on multiple important problems. And "when an opportunity opens up, [go] after it ... drop all other things."

  8. Keep your door open so that you are constantly being pushed in your thinking, getting clues about the world, etc.

  9. Try to abstract out to solve the bigger problem than one that is given.

  10. Sell: learn to write clearly, give a good talk (take time to give the broader context)

  11. If you want to be a first class scientist, learn to work the system (for instance, "the appearance of conforming gets you a long way") than spend a lot of energy fighting it. For instance, dress according to the expectations of the audience spoken to, humor the secretaries (tell jokes etc.), etc.

Generic Insights

  1. "Since from the time of Newton to now, we have come close to doubling knowledge every 17 years, more or less. And we cope with that, essentially, by specialization. In the next 340 years at that rate, there will be 20 doublings, i.e. a million, and there will be a million fields of specialty for every one field now. It isn't going to happen. The present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools. I believe that books which try to digest, coordinate, get rid of the duplication, get rid of the less fruitful methods and present the underlying ideas clearly of what we know now, will be the things the future generations will value."

  2. Science Vs. Management: "The day your vision, what you think needs to be done, is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, then you have to move toward management. And the bigger the vision is, the farther in management you have to go."