With No Particular Application in Mind
Or, if you start with something you don’t understand, you’ll bump into something no one understands
I’ve recently been thinking about the importance of doing science. I strongly feel more and more people should do science. Even if there’s no practical purpose. Especially if there’s no practical purpose.
You don’t pick up your guitar and play a song because of some “practical purpose” do you? You do it because it’s fun. Because you enjoy it. You paint. You write poetry. You have sex. You go on adventures. Because it’s fun. Why not dabble a bit in science too? For the same reason. Just for the fun of it.
I strongly believe we can do with more amateur scientists. Physicists. Astronomers. Microscopists. Chemists. Ecologists. Meteorologists. Pedologists. Mathematicians. Geologists. Botanists. Zoologists. Entomologists. Microbiologists. Ornithologist. Dendrologists.1
In 1979, Allan Cormack and Godfrey Hounsfield were awarded the Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking work on computer-assisted tomography (CT) scanning.2 They were awarded in the Physiology or Medicine category. But none of them were medical doctors.
Cormack was a mathematician. He developed the mathematical theory for CT scanning in the late 1950s. Hounsfield was an electrical engineer who invented the scanner in collaboration with radiologists in the early 1970s.3
They didn’t even collaborate on it. Hounsfield came up with his own mathematical approach, unaware that Cormack had solved it a decade earlier. Cormack in turn didn’t know that a mathematician named Johann Radon4 had solved it forty years before him. In the 1910s. Just for fun. With no particular application in mind.
These quests for pure mathematical understanding (or, in other words, climbing Mt. Everest “because it is there”) had given CT scanning the tools it needed, half a century ahead of time. Think about it. Three dudes were doing interesting things because they enjoyed them. Suddenly we’ve got a medical miracle that can detect tumours, injuries, and other abnormalities.
In Cormack’s Nobel Prize address, he mentioned that he and his colleague Todd Quinto were trying to generalise Radon’s results to three- and even four-dimensional regions. That was hard for his audience to fathom. We live in a three-dimensional world. Why would anyone want to study a four-dimensional brain? Well, how about, just because it’s fun?
Great things have come from this spirit of pure adventure. When Einstein needed four-dimensional geometry for curved space and time in general relativity, he was pleased to learn it already existed. Thanks to one Bernhard Riemann.5 Like Radon, he did it for the purest of mathematical reasons. With no particular application in mind.
The future is convoluted at best. Baffling at worst. Thanks to lateral thinking, peripheral consequences, unwanted side-effects, nonlinear insights, we cannot always foresee how something familiar can lead to something entirely different. So, it’s only better if we don’t worry so much about practical applications and pursue things just because we want to. For their own sake.
What you do may not be “beneficial” to the world. Who cares? It would be beneficial to you. That’s what’s really matters anyway. As Richard Feynman once said said, “Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”
The value of your hobbies shouldn’t be dictated by whether it helps the society, the world, or humanity. If you derive joy out of doing something in your free time, that’s enough. That’s the only yardstick. You don’t have to think beyond that.6
The more I study the history of science, the more I admire the “professional dabblers,” who played around with science for fun, and unknowingly shaped the modern world we currently live in. Most of them didn’t have traditional jobs.7
Francis Galton, the guy who came up with, apart from many other things8, correlation, regression, twins and family studies, composite portraiture, psychometric testing, fingerprinting, weather maps, was independently wealthy. So were Charles Darwin and Robert Boyle.9 Playing with science used to be a common pastime for rich dudes — a little astronomy here, a little vivisection there.10
Money makes everything easier. Obviously. But plenty of now-legendary scientists did their thing part-time while finding other ways to keep the lights on.
Einstein published some of his phenomenal work while he was still a patent clerk. In 1905, often referred to as his “miracle year,” Einstein published four groundbreaking papers, each worthy of a Nobel Prize: Photoelectric Effect, Brownian Motion, Special Theory of Relativity, and Mass-Energy Equivalence.
Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, whose experiments with pea plants established the foundation for the understanding of heredity and formed the basis for the principles of classical genetics, was a monk in an obscure Moravian monastery.
Michael Faraday was an impoverished Londoner without formal education who, without knowing mathematics, wrote one of the best books of physics ever written, virtually devoid of equations.
Thomas Bayes, whose work in probability theory still ignites fervour in the hearts of nerds, was a priest. Da Vinci, perhaps the most famous amateur scientist of all time, spent much of his career trying to worm his way into the good graces of various patrons. Marie Curie did her early work in a makeshift lab (which was essentially a shed) next to the University of Paris. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a largely self-taught man in science, sold clothes to support his side hustle of inventing microbiology. Srinivasa Ramanujan was dirt poor, didn’t have any formal training as a mathematician, and independently developed theorems from his home in Tamil Nadu. I can go on. But you get the gist. Curious minds are wired differently. Lack of means is rarely a blocker. Lack of curiosity always is.11
If you were to get started, perhaps start with a research question that fascinates you. Or, start off with a subject you don’t understand very well. If you start with something you don’t understand, you’ll eventually bump into something no one understands.
It doesn’t have to be hard science. Such as physics and maths. Doing science can be as simple as going to your backyard with a magnifying glass and recording the colours, sizes, and other identifying features of insects you meet. Doing science can be as simple as taking some water from a pond, observing it under a microscope, and exploring the algae, protozoa, and other tiny aquatic creatures.12
It can be even simpler than that. All of Daniel Kahneman’s and Amos Tversky’s experiments involved putting people in different situations and observing them. In an experiment, participants were asked to estimate the frequency of words with specific letters at the beginning or end of words. If it helps, Kahneman got a Nobel Prize for this.13
Alexandra Horowitz is a scientist and a dog lover. She specialises in dog behaviour. She explores topics such as canine perception, communication, and the unique ways in which dogs interact with the world. Like Kahneman, she likes to put her subjects in different situations, and then observe them. Only in Horowitz’s case, it’s dogs and not humans.14
When I was a design student at IIT Bombay, part of my research was observing people navigate their way inside the campus. I was trying to find out if new visitors relied on road signs or preferred asking strangers for directions.15
If you’re into hard science, the first job is to crack the fundamentals.16 After that, perhaps the next best thing is to do small experiments or solve tiny problems. Not to follow a certain process. Rather, to understand the process. Not to reconfirm some result. Rather, to rediscover the result. To question it. Even to challenge it.
This is something that even fulltime scientists like Richard Feynman did.17
When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
The most awesome thing about “doing science” is that it’s totally okay to be terrible at it. Science is a strongest-link domain. What science really cares about is how much good stuff we get, even if it means we also get a tonne of bad stuff.18
Part of me also feels that, given the abysmal state of academic research, doing science is becoming more and more of a necessity than a hobby.
In 2001, one Jan Hendrik Schön from the famed Bell Labs gained global attention after he developed a carbon-based transistor which was significantly smaller than silicon-based ones. This breakthrough promised a revolutionary shift in circuit construction. Picture the first version of the iPhone being as good as iPhone X, which launched ten years later. Much more memory, much more battery, and much much more firepower.
Schön received immense acclaim for his work. Obviously. There were whispers of a Nobel Prize. Naturally. There was just one problem. Other labs were struggling to replicate his experiments. When Bell Labs requested raw data from Schön, turns out the dog ate his homework. An investigation committee eventually concluded that Schön had fabricated all the data. In other words, he wasn’t doing science. He was selling horse shit wrapped in cat shit.
The bar is so low19 that if you follow the right scientific methods without worrying about grants, awards, acclaim, etc., you’d contribute much more than most “professionals.”20
The best of the best part is that you don’t need anybody’s permission to “do science.”21 For the first time ever in human history, the tools to do science are dirt cheap and accessible to (almost) all of us. Knowledge is (nearly) free. Our laptops can store and analyse more data than Einstein ever could have imagined. There’s ChatGPT to give directions, guidelines, ideas, and problems to ponder upon.
This is the best of the best time to do science. The world is your oyster. Go have some fun! Because having fun is certainly what Alan Cormack was after when he talked about doing maths in higher dimensions. After he got the Nobel Prize.
What is the use of these results? The answer is that I don’t know. They will almost certainly produce some theorems in the theory of partial differential equations, and some of them may find application in imaging with MRI or ultrasound, but that is by no means certain. It is also beside the point. Quinto and I are studying these topics because they are interesting in their own right as mathematical problems, and that is what science is all about.
We also need more psychologists and philosophers. But since it’s easier to do BS than real science in those fields, I’m refraining from that. I didn’t mention professions such as palaeontologist or nuclear scientist because it would be slightly tricky to do them from your bedroom or basement or backyard.
Computerised Tomography is the process of visualising something by cutting it into slices. A CT scan uses x-rays to image an organ or a tissue one slice at a time. Imagine sending x-rays through a section of the brain. X-rays lose intensity as they pass through various tissues of the brain, similar to light dimming through a series of sunglasses. We can calculate the overall strength reduction along a single path, but not the detailed point-to-point attenuation pattern. Our goal is to determine the opacity of each “sunglass” in this sequence. To solve for this, we shoot x-rays in numerous directions. This is the essence of computerised tomography. The mathematical challenge Allan Cormack tackled was finding a way to reassemble the information obtained from all the measurements along lines into a coherent two-dimensional picture of the whole brain slice.
Hounsfield had a prototype which he tested on pigs’ brains. He was desperate to find a clinical radiologist to help him extend his work to human patients, but one doctor after another refused to meet with him. They all thought he was a crackpot. Finally, one radiologist agreed to hear him out. The conversation didn’t go well. At the end of the meeting, the sceptical radiologist handed Hounsfield a jar containing a human brain with a tumour in it and challenged him to image it with his scanner. Hounsfield soon brought back images of the brain that pinpointed not only the tumour but also areas of bleeding within it.
Johann Radon, born in 1887, was an Austrian mathematician most notable for his achievements in the development of the Radon Transform, which laid the foundation for understanding how mathematical transforms could be applied to reconstruct an object from its projections. Radon’s work was not fully recognised during his lifetime, but the importance of his contributions became more evident with the increasing use of medical imaging technologies in the latter half of the 20th century.
Bernhard Riemann, a German mathematician born on 1826, is best known for his contributions to differential geometry and his groundbreaking work on Riemannian Geometry (a branch of differential geometry that deals with curved spaces). While Riemann himself did not explicitly delve into four-dimensional geometry, his ideas laid the groundwork for the exploration of higher-dimensional spaces, including four-dimensional geometry.
“But, isn’t that a bit selfish? What about society’s needs?” Well, if you’ve found your calling — let’s say you want to teach underprivileged kids, or you want to help farmers become more financially literate — do that by all means. Nobody’s stopping you! The point of doing things without having any practical purpose in mind doesn’t mean, “Don’t care about society.” It’s more like, “If you like something but you aren’t sure how it might help others, don’t worry about it so much. Not right now. But, if you do know how your work will help others, nothing is stopping you anyway.” One doesn’t have to come in the way of the other.
Mostly because they came from wealth an didn’t have to work for money.
Galton coined the term “eugenics” in the late 19th century, drawing inspiration from his cousin, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. He believed that just as selective breeding improved agricultural crops and livestock, a similar approach could enhance human hereditary traits. Galton’s ideas gained popularity, leading to the eugenics movement that gained traction in the early 20th century in various countries, including the United States and parts of Europe. Eugenics has been widely criticised for ethical reasons, as it often involved discriminatory practices and infringements on individual rights. The movement reached its nadir with the implementation of eugenic policies, such as forced sterilisation in some countries, which targeted marginalised groups.
Robert Boyle, born in 1627, is best known for Boyle’s Law, which establishes the inverse relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas at constant temperature. This is taught to kids in schools. His collaboration with Robert Hooke (the dude who coined the term “cell” while observing cork under a microscope) led to the creation of the Boyle’s air pump, a groundbreaking device for studying the properties of gases. This isn’t taught in schools.
Thanks to modernity, the main problem today is that there are way too many distractions. During the time of Darwin and Galton, there wasn’t any cheap entertainment. At least not at the click of a button. Today, even if you genuinely wish to study hard topics, as soon as it starts getting a little bit tricky, you need a dopamine break. More than lack of intellect, I think this is what impedes growth.
Some curiosities might have dangerous outcomes. After the theory of natural selection is established in 1859, Darwin’s own cousin founds Eugenics based off of it in 1883. In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discover how to split atoms, and in 1945 we’ve got an atom bomb. Jennifer Doudna does pioneering work in CRISPR Gene Editing Technology (mostly by following her curiosity) in 2012 and the next thing you know China is creating designer babies in 2018, raising grave ethical concerns. Curiosity has a simple agenda — fun, play, adventure. Inventions and discoveries are the results of curiosities. How they get applied rarely has the same agenda. Following your curiosity is rarely a bad thing in itself (unless you’re deliberately trying to cause harm). The problem is usually with the application, not with the invention.
If you’re wondering if these little experiments really matter, this paper finds that flipped coins land on the same side they started slightly more than 50% of the time. Everything matters!
If you want to learn more about Kahneman’s research and perhaps replicate a few of them by putting people in awkward situations and observing them, Thinking, Fast and Slow is your bible.
If you are a canine lover (like me) and want to upgrade yourself into a canine nerd (also like me), you can read Inside of a Dog. Written by Horowitz.
It was 2013. Google Maps wasn’t as ubiquitous as it’s now. It was India. People were just more comfortable asking other people for directions.
I’ve started doing calculus recently. I can’t begin to tell you how painfully slow I am at it.
If you want to learn more about Feynman, nothing comes close to Surely Youre Joking Mr Feynman. It’s a joy to read this! Take my advice. Listen to the audiobook. You’ll thank me later. After you’re done, move on to What Do You Care What Other People Think? and Genius.
There are two kinds of domains: strongest-link domains and weakest-link domains. Weakest-link domains are those where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is. You make things better by making the weakest links stronger, or by eliminating them entirely. Food safety, for example, is a weakest-link domain. You don’t want to eat something that will kill you. Some domains are strongest-link domains: overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters. Music, for instance, is a strongest-link domain. You listen to the stuff you like the most and ignore the rest. The same goes for businesses. The best ones go on to become the Facebook, the Airbnb, the Google, and the poorer ones die. Science is also the same. In strongest-link domains, more is always merrier. More makes the best better.
If you want to delve deeper, read Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie to learn how fraud, bias, negligence, hype, and bad incentives pervade and undermine “doing science.”
If you decide to publish your experiments online (via a newsletter perhaps), all the more better. I mean, who on earth has the energy to read incomprehensible science papers anyway! Not me. Instead of trying to decipher scientific papers written by scientists for scientists, I would any day read science newsletters written by amateurs for amateurs. It’s much more fun!
If you say, “But the world has no value for curiosity,” I’ll fight you. Society is inherently utilitarian. I don’t see it changing anytime soon. It would be near impossible to make a case that entices society to focus more on “curiosity” — something which cannot be measured. Therefore, society has a point not to rely on curiosity so much. But, if you do science only for yourself, what do you care what society thinks? Curiosity may not be measurable, but you can sure as hell follow it. Can’t you? Fun cannot be quantified, but you know when you’re having fun. Don’t you? Why don’t you focus on just that? Think about it. If more and more people follow their curiosity, more and more ideas would find utility, thus more and more people would realise the value of curiosity. Eventually society as a whole would start appreciating curiosity more. Doing science has nothing but upside.