Excerpts from Advice to a Young Scientist

1. ...they should have more than one string to their bow and should be willing to take no for an answer if the evidence points that way.
2. ...if once a scientist experiences the exhilaration of discovery and the satisfaction carrying through a really tricky experiment - once he has felt that deeper and more expansive feeling Freud called the "oceanic feeling" that is the reward for any real advancement of the understanding - then he is hooked and no other kind of life will do.
3. Most able scientist I know have something for which "explanatory impulsion" is not too grand a description. Immanuel Kant spoke of a "restless endeavor" to get at the truth of things, though in the context of the not wholly convincing argument that nature would hardly have implanted such an ambition in our breasts if it had not been possible to gratify. A strong sense of unease and dissatisfaction always goes with lack of comprehension. ...Perhaps the restless unease I am writing of is an adult equivalent of that childish fear of the dark that can be dispelled, Bacon said, only by kindling a light in nature.
4. ...application, diligence, a sense of purpose, the power to concentrate, to persevere and not to be cast down by adversity - by finding out after long and weary inquiry, for example, that a dearly loved hypothesis is in large measure mistaken.
5. The novice who tries his hand at research and finds himself indifferent to or bored by it should leave science without any sense of self-reproach or misdirection. ... A scientist who pulls out may regret it all his life or he may feel liberated; if the latter, he probably did well to quit, but any regret he felt would be well-founded, for several scientists have told me with an air of delighted wonderment how very satisfactory it is that they should be paid - perhaps even adequately paid - for work that is so absorbing and deeply pleasurable as scientific research.
6. A graduate student should by all means attach himself to a department doing work that has aroused his enthusiasm, admiration or respect; no good will come of merely going wherever a job offers, irrespective of the work in progress.
   
7. It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be "interesting" - almost any problem is interesting if it is studied in sufficient depth.
8. Isolation is disagreeable and bad for graduate students.
9. Because the newly graduated Ph.D. is still very much a beginner, a new migratory movement has grown up in modern science that is spreading as rapidly as the at one time newfangled habit (deplored in the Oxford of my days) of taking Ph.D.s at all. This new movement is the migration of "postdocs." Graduate research and attendance at conferences usually gives graduate students powers of judgment that they often wish they had had before they embarked on their graduate work. Later on they will know a great deal more than they did at first about the places where really exciting and important work is going on, preferably in congenial company. To one or other such group the most energetic postdocs will try to attach themselves. Senior scientists welcome them because as they have chosen to come they are likely to make good colleagues; for their part, the postdocs are introduced to a new little universe of research.
   Whatever may be thought about the Ph.D. the treadmill, this new postdoctoral revolution is an unqualifiedly good thing, and it is very much to be hoped that patrons and benefactors of science will not allow it to anguish.
   
10. The great incentive to learning a new skill or supporting discipline is an urgent need to use it. For this reason, very many scientist (I certainly among them) do not learn new skills or master new disciplines until the pressure is upon them to do so; thereupon they can be mastered pretty quickly.
11. Too much book learning may crab and confine the imagination, and endless poring over the research of others is sometimes psychologically a research substitute, much as reading romantic fiction may be substitute for real-life romance.
    
12. The beginner must read, but intently and choosily and not too much.
13. It is psychologically most important to get results, even if they are not original. Getting results, even by repeating another's work, brings with it a great accession of self-confidence; the young scientist feels himself one of the club at last, can chip in at seminars and at scientific meetings with "My own experience was ..." or "I got exactly the same results" or "I'd be inclined to agree that for this particular purpose medium 94 is definitely better than 93," and then can sit down again, tremulous but secretly exultant.
14. ... imaginative guesswork that is the generative act in science.
15. ... their spouses are in the grip of a powerful obsession that is likely to take the first place in their lives outside the home, and probably inside too; they may not there may not then be many romps on the floor with the children and the wife of a scientist may find herself disproportionately the man as well as the woman about the house when it comes to mending fuses, getting the car serviced, or organizing the family holiday.
    
16. To be creative, scientists need libraries and laboratories and the company of other scientists; certainly a quiet and untroubled life is a help.
17. An ambitious young scientist is marked out by having no time for anybody or anything that does not promote or bear upon his work.
18. The ambitious make too obvious a point of being polite to those who can promote their interests and are proportionately uncivil to those who cannot.
19. The traditional reason given for a scientist's reluctance to write a paper is that it takes time away from research; but the real explanation is that writing a paper - writing anything, indeed, even the begging letters that are necessary if a laboratory is to remain solvent - is something most scientists know they are bad at: it is a skill they have not acquired.
20. The only way to learn how to write is above all else to read, to study good models, and to practice. I do not mean to practice in the sense in which young pianists practice "The Merry Peasant," but practice by writing whenever writing is called for, instead of making excuses for not doing so, and writing, if necessary, over and over again, until clarity has been achieved and the style, if not graceful, is at least not raw and angular.
21. In writing a paper, a young scientist should make up his mind about whom he is addressing. The easy way out is to address one's professional colleagues only - and of them, only those who work in a field cognate with one's own. This is not at all the way to go about it. A scientist should reflect that his more intelligent peers probably browse in the literature for intellectual recreation and might like to find out what he is up to. The time will come, moreover, when a young scientist will be judged upon his written work by referees and adjudicators. They are entitled to feel annoyed - and often do - when they can't make out what the paper is about or why the author undertook the investigation, anyway.
    
22. A formal paper should therefore begin with a paragraph of explanation that describes the problem under investigation and the main lines of the way the author feels he has been able to contribute to its solution. Great pains should be taken over the paper's summary, which should make use of the whole of the journal's ration of space (one-fifth or one-sixth of the length of the text, as the case may be), and its composition is the severest test of an author's literary skill, particularly in days when "precis writing" has been dropped from the syllabus in most schools for fear of stifling the scholars' creative afflatus.
23. A summary must be complete in its own limits. It may well start with a statement of the hypothesis under investigation and end with its evaluation.
24. The number of references cited in the literature list (be always scrupulously careful to observe the house style) should be that which is sufficient and necessary; it may be a symptom of scientmanship to quote references from journals published so long ago that librarians desperate for space have long since had them stashed away in the galleries of disused mines.
25. ...experiments are very often designed not in such a way as to prove anything to be true - a hopeless endeavor - but rather to refute a "null hypothesis."
26. Observation is a critical and purposive process; there is a scientific reason for making one observation rather than another. What a scientist observes is always a small part only of the whole domain of possible objects of observation. Experimentation, too, is a critical process, one that discriminates between possibilities and gives direction to further thought.
27. In real life it is not like this. The truth is not in nature waiting to declare itself, and we cannot know a priori which observations are relevant and which are not; every discovery, every enlargement of the understanding begins as an imaginative preconception of what the truth might be. This imaginative preconception - a "hypothesis" - arises by a process as easy or as difficult to understand as any other creative act of mind; it is a brainwave, an inspired guess, the product of a blaze of insight. It comes, anyway, from within and connot be arrived at by the exercise of any known calculus of discovery.
28. A hypothesis so permissive as to accommodate any phenomena tells us precisely nothing; the more phenomena it prohibits, the more informative it is.
29. ... falsification is a logically stronger process than what sometimes people rather recklessly refer to as "proof"...
30. A scientist is, then a seeker of truth. The truth is that which he reaches out for, the direction toward which his face is turned. Complete certainty is beyond his reach, though, and many questions to which he would like answers lie outside the universe of discourse of natural science.
31. ... an ambition that a scientist can always achieve: he can try to understand.
32. Science will dry up only if scientists lose or fail to exercise the power or incentive to imagine what the truth might be.