Are you an empirical skeptic?
Do you practise/teach scientific medicine?
Do you belong to the Greek school of Skeptics?
Are these questions beyond the scope of your understanding?
If the answer to the last question is yes, I have another questionnaire..
Do you intend to make a discovery?
You think you can make a certain forecast about the price of crude oil in 2050?
Can you predict when will the next BIG search engine replace Google?
You think I'm bored, munching on some groundnuts, devising new methods to perplex people?
The answer to the last question is, I can do better. Nevertheless that's not what I aim to do now, given that I've no intention of making my small audience smaller.
Most discoveries that have happened in the past have largely happened inadvertently. Alexander Fleming who was researching on a strain of bacteria called staphylococci, was off for a holiday leaving the culture in one of the culture dishes. When he was back, he found the bacteria contaminated with a fungus which prevented the bacteria from further growth. The fungus, what he later called Penicillin lead to the discovery of antibiotics.
Radio astronomists, Penzias and Wilson in 1965 when installing an antenna, were faced with a background noise. They thought it resulted due to the bird poop and cleaned up the excrement. However the noise still persisted, and there came the discovery of microwave radiation. This further led to the speculation of the big bang theory.
The discovery of the pacemaker, the laser and also Charles Darwin's theory of evolution were discoveries by accident. You set out looking for something, and you stumble upon something else. It's called serendipity. It's beautiful when the discovery is favorable and it's fame-giving when the discovery is world changing. This is reflective of what a Greek scholar, Menodotus of Nicomedia from the Empirical school practised. The school treated medicine as an art, and thus viewed empirical methods with skepticism. They would perform experiments in medicine, keeping in mind past experiences and earlier methods employed, but they always kept the avenue for a new discovery open. If there was a possibility of a grave aberration, they didn't feel threatened or stupefied by it, instead it was a like throwing the hat in the ring hoping it would land there.
Nobody sits down making a time table for a discovery. You work on something and then it may chance upon you. It's only the outlook that matters. There are some people who work a whole lifetime and go unnoticed, maybe because the Swedish Academy didn't recognize their work, or they didn't get that lucky moment to claim something big to the world. But there are many others who just weren't looking for it, and suddenly took a walk to their backyard and found something even more fascinating. Either ways it appears that most people who come out with the brightest of ideas are the ones keeping their mind open, looking for basic solutions, going by trials and tribulations and being an empirical skeptic.
I guess being in the SEP field can prove fatal. Somebody Else's Problem, a term I first read in Douglas Adam's book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was pretty much how I came to realize why discoveries don't happen everyday. He said that we just tend to see what is of current interest to us and neglect everything else that may surround it even in it's proximity. And that "everything else" was SEP. He was a funny guy, but indeed he had a point.
Do you practise/teach scientific medicine?
Do you belong to the Greek school of Skeptics?
Are these questions beyond the scope of your understanding?
If the answer to the last question is yes, I have another questionnaire..
Do you intend to make a discovery?
You think you can make a certain forecast about the price of crude oil in 2050?
Can you predict when will the next BIG search engine replace Google?
You think I'm bored, munching on some groundnuts, devising new methods to perplex people?
The answer to the last question is, I can do better. Nevertheless that's not what I aim to do now, given that I've no intention of making my small audience smaller.
Most discoveries that have happened in the past have largely happened inadvertently. Alexander Fleming who was researching on a strain of bacteria called staphylococci, was off for a holiday leaving the culture in one of the culture dishes. When he was back, he found the bacteria contaminated with a fungus which prevented the bacteria from further growth. The fungus, what he later called Penicillin lead to the discovery of antibiotics.
Radio astronomists, Penzias and Wilson in 1965 when installing an antenna, were faced with a background noise. They thought it resulted due to the bird poop and cleaned up the excrement. However the noise still persisted, and there came the discovery of microwave radiation. This further led to the speculation of the big bang theory.
The discovery of the pacemaker, the laser and also Charles Darwin's theory of evolution were discoveries by accident. You set out looking for something, and you stumble upon something else. It's called serendipity. It's beautiful when the discovery is favorable and it's fame-giving when the discovery is world changing. This is reflective of what a Greek scholar, Menodotus of Nicomedia from the Empirical school practised. The school treated medicine as an art, and thus viewed empirical methods with skepticism. They would perform experiments in medicine, keeping in mind past experiences and earlier methods employed, but they always kept the avenue for a new discovery open. If there was a possibility of a grave aberration, they didn't feel threatened or stupefied by it, instead it was a like throwing the hat in the ring hoping it would land there.
Nobody sits down making a time table for a discovery. You work on something and then it may chance upon you. It's only the outlook that matters. There are some people who work a whole lifetime and go unnoticed, maybe because the Swedish Academy didn't recognize their work, or they didn't get that lucky moment to claim something big to the world. But there are many others who just weren't looking for it, and suddenly took a walk to their backyard and found something even more fascinating. Either ways it appears that most people who come out with the brightest of ideas are the ones keeping their mind open, looking for basic solutions, going by trials and tribulations and being an empirical skeptic.
I guess being in the SEP field can prove fatal. Somebody Else's Problem, a term I first read in Douglas Adam's book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was pretty much how I came to realize why discoveries don't happen everyday. He said that we just tend to see what is of current interest to us and neglect everything else that may surround it even in it's proximity. And that "everything else" was SEP. He was a funny guy, but indeed he had a point.
