Physics Blog Number 8 - August 6, 2013

Diagramless Crossword Puzzles

"Physics research is like solving a diagramless crossword puzzle."

Who said that, you ask?  Why, I did. As I was reading Robert Crease's article on Sam Treiman on physicsworld.com, where he discusses Sam Treiman's view of the discovery process in physics, I realized that a diagramless crossword is a perfect analogy.  That is, we are given clues that we don't know the answers to. But we not only don't know the answers, we don't know how those answers fit in with what we already know - exaclty like a diagramless! If you want to try your hand at one, look here. (It also has some nice comments about symmetry, which is a subject that all physicists like.)

I have known for a long time that the actual course of scientific discovery has very little to do with the well-known "scientific method" that we all have learned in elementary school. That is, the "hypothesize, test, conclude" ridiculousness. As Edmund Bolles wrote in "Galileo's Commandment," a wonderful anthology of science writing,  

    "Although I have been reading science prose all my life, I found that I had a somewhat constricted theory of scientific thinking. For example, I had thought that scientific observation without some prior notion to be tested was impossible, and I would have insisted that speculation without data was more metaphysical than scientific. But these assumptions were shown to be false. Science comes less from method than from attitude."

In my own scientific discovery processes, as limited as they have been, often I have a general question I am interested in answering, but mostly I just play around and try to "see what happens."  I suspect there's a lot of that going around, and many discoveries are serendipitous.