Four golden lessons

Steven Weinberg：Advice tostudents at the start of their scientific careers.

When I received my undergraduate  degree — about a hundredyears 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 muststart doing research, and pick up what I needed to know as I went along. It wassink or swim. To my surprise, I found that this works. I managed to get a quickPhD — though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did learnone big thing: that no one knows everything, and you don’t have to.

当我拿到我的本科学位--大概几百年前--物理文献对我来说是一片广阔、未探索的海洋，在开始我的研究之前，每一部分我都要记录。一个什么都不懂的我，对于已被做过的事，我还可以做什么？很幸运在读研的第一年，

Another lesson to be learned, to continue usingmy oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you shouldaim for rough water. When I was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyin the late 1960s, a student told me that he wanted to go into general relativityrather than the area I was working on, elementary particle physics, because theprinciples of the former were well known, while the latter seemed like a mess tohim. It struck me that he had just given a perfectly good reason for doing theopposite. 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 manytheoretical and experimental physicists has been able to sort it out, and puteverything (well, almost everything) together in a beautiful theory known  as the standard model.My advice is to go forthe messes — that’s where the action is.

My third piece of advice is probably the hardestto take. It is to forgive yourself for wasting time. Students are only asked tosolve problems that their professors (unless unusually cruel) know to besolvable. In addition,it doesn’t matter if the problems are scientificallyimportant — 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 whetherat a given moment in history a problem is solvable. At the beginning of thetwentieth century, several leading physicists, including Lorentz and Abraham,were trying to work out a theory of the electron. This was partly in order tounderstand why all attempts to detect effects of Earth’s motion through the etherhad failed. We now know that they were working on the wrong problem. At thattime, no one could have developed a successful theory of the electron, because quantummechanics had not yet been discovered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein in1905 to realize that the right problem on which to work was the effect of motionon 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 thetime that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If youwant to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of yourtime not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientificknowledge.

Finally, learn something about the history ofscience,or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science. The leastimportant reason for this is that the history may actually be of some use toyou in your own scientific work. For instance, now and then scientists arehampered by believing one of the oversimplified models of science that have beenproposed by philosophers from Francis Bacon to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. Thebest antidote to the philosophy of science is a knowledge of the history ofscience.

More importantly, the history of science canmake your work seem more worthwhile to you. As a scientist, you’re probably notgoing to get rich. Your friends and relatives probably won’t understand whatyou’re doing.And if you work in a field like elementary particle physics, youwon’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 isa part of history.

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

Steven Weinberg is in the Department ofPhysics,the University of Texas at Austin, Texas 78712,USA. This essay is basedon a commencement talk given by the author at the Science Convocation at McGillUniversity in June 2003.