研究生能力2：初涉科研生涯的四个黄金戒律

Scientist: Four golden lessons
Steven Weinberg
Department of Physics, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas 78712, USA. This essay is based on a commencement talk given by the author at the Science Convocation at McGill University in June 2003.

When I received my undergraduate degree — about a hundred years ago — the physics literature seemed to me a vast, unexplored ocean, every part of which I had to chart before beginning any research of my own. How could I do anything without knowing everything that had already been done? Fortunately, in my first year of graduate school, I had the good luck to fall into the hands of senior physicists who insisted, over my anxious objections, that I must start doing research, and pick up what I needed to know as I went along. It was sink or swim. To my surprise, I found that this works. I managed to get a quick PhD — though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you don’t have to.

Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water. When I was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s, a student told me that he wanted to go into general relativity rather than the area I was working on, elementary particle physics, because the principles of the former were well known, while the latter seemed like a mess to him. It struck me that he had just given a perfectly good reason for doing the opposite. Particle physics was an area where creative work could still be done. It really was a mess in the 1960s, but since that time the work of many theoretical and experimental physicists has been able to sort it out, and put everything (well, almost everything) together in a beautiful theory known as the standard model. My advice is to go for the messes — that’s where the action is.

My third piece of advice is probably the hardest to take. It is to forgive yourself for wasting time. Students are only asked to solve problems that their professors (unless unusually cruel) know to be solvable. In addition, it doesn’t matter if the problems are scientifically important — they have to be solved to pass the course. But in the real world, it’s very hard to know which problems are important, and you never know whether at a given moment in history a problem is solvable. At the beginning of the twentieth century, several leading physicists, including Lorentz and Abraham, were trying to work out a theory of the electron. This was partly in order to understand why all attempts to detect effects of Earth’s motion through the ether had failed. We now know that they were working on the wrong problem. At that time, no one could have developed a successful theory of the electron, because quantum mechanics had not yet been discovered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein in 1905 to realize that the right problem on which to work was the effect of motion on measurements of space and time. This led him to the special theory of relativity. As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge.

Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science. The least important reason for this is that the history may actually be of some use to you in your own scientific work. For instance, now and then scientists are hampered by believing one of the over-simplified models of science that have been proposed by philosophers from Francis Bacon to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The best antidote to the philosophy of science is a knowledge of the history of science.

More importantly, the history of science can make your work seem more worthwhile to you. As a scientist, you’re probably not going to get rich. Your friends and relatives probably won’t understand what you’re doing. And if you work in a field like elementary particle physics, you won’t even have the satisfaction of doing something that is immediately useful. But you can get great satisfaction by recognizing that your work in science is a part of history.

Look back 100 years, to 1903. How important is it now who was Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1903, or President of the United States? What stands out as really important is that at McGill University, Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy were working out the nature of radioactivity. This work (of course!) had practical applications, but much more important were its cultural implications. The understanding of radioactivity allowed physicists to explain how the Sun and Earth’s cores could still be hot after millions of years. In this way, it removed the last scientific objection to what many geologists and paleontologists thought was the great age of the Earth and the Sun. After this, Christians and Jews either had to give up belief in the literal truth of the Bible or resign themselves to intellectual irrelevance. This was just one step in a sequence of steps from Galileo through Newton and Darwin to the present that, time after time, has weakened the hold of religious dogmatism. Reading any newspaper nowadays is enough to show you that this work is not yet complete. But it is civilizing work, of which scientists are able to feel proud.

Top of pageDepartment of Physics, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas 78712, USA. This essay is based on a commencement talk given by the author at the Science Convocation at McGill University in June 2003.

http://www.sciencenet.cn/m/user_content.aspx?id=21525

2003年Nature (2003, 426:389)上有一篇文章，是德克萨斯大学物理系的著名物理学家Steven Weinberg写的 “Four Golden Lessons”，是科学家对初涉科研生涯的学子们的一些忠告。暂且译为“四个黄金戒律”，内容编译如下：
1．边干边学，不要彷徨。当你开始接受一个新课题或进入一个新的研究领域时，往往会感到迷茫。经常遇到的问题是，我现在对这个领域的研究进展一无所知，或者如果我不详细了解已经开展的各种研究，我怎么去开展一个工作？实际上不必太彷徨，需要牢记的经验是：你必须立即开始你的研究工作，在工作过程中掌握你需要的知识。记住：没有一个人会知道所有的事情，你也不需要！
2．勇于创新，敢于挑战。当你在科学的海洋中遨游时，一定要敢于到险滩、未知的地方去闯闯。在选题时要去选择那些最有挑战性、争论最多、研究最少、还没有统一结论的课题，这些问题或领域往往是最有作为的，最容易有突破，最容易出成果。
3．忍受寂寞，注重过程。你要学会宽恕自己适当的“浪费”时间。在实际生活中，人们都想知道我选择的科学问题是否是很重要的或者是最重要的。但是要知道哪个问题是最重要的往往是很困难的，你也永远都不会知道在历史上的哪个时刻某一个科学问题将会被攻克。由于你不能肯定哪个科学问题是正确的，那么你在实验室或办公室中忙忙碌碌所化费的绝大多数时间有可能是白白“浪费”了的。但是，在科研生涯中，如果你想创新，那么你就必须习惯你所“浪费”的大多数时间不是在创新，而是很平静地在科学知识的海洋中漂流着。这个过程是你必须经历的过程。
4. 掌握历史，树立信心。你要学习有关科学史方面的知识，至少要知道你所从事的学科领域的发展历史。科学史对你的科研工作是很有帮助的，也可以使你感受到你工作的价值，还会增加自豪感。如果你在某个领域或某个科学问题上真的作出了成绩，在科学发展史上添了一笔，为人类作出了贡献，你怎么会有理由不自豪呢？