

It Takes Guts To Do Research (2013) - gwern
https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/it-takes-guts-to-do-research/

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ihnorton
The OP makes an interesting point, but I think Steve Hsu's post below provide
a more nuanced discussion of Oppenheimer and of the book mentioned in the
linked article:

[http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/07/strange-gadget-
robert-o...](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/07/strange-gadget-robert-
oppenheimer.html)

Elsewhere, Hsu also links to this review by Freeman Dyson of the same book:

[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/oppenhe...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/oppenheimer-
shape-genius/?pagination=false)

in which, rather than to lack of confidence, Dyson attributes Oppenheimer's
"failure to be a great scientist" to:

 _a lack of Sitzfleisch. Sitzfleisch is a German word with no equivalent in
English. The literal translation is “Sitflesh.” It means the ability to sit
still and work quietly. He could never sit still long enough to do a difficult
calculation._

~~~
mtdewcmu
Insightful comment. I don't think we need to pity Oppenheimer for not winning
a Nobel Prize. He accomplished quite a lot. We're still talking about him.

By the by, I'm always amazed at how deep particle physics got all the way back
in the 1930s.

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kylemaxwell
The key point, and one the author believes applies just as well to computer
science, is:

 _He was insufficiently confident of the power of the intellectual tools he
already possessed and did not drive his thought to the very end because he
felt instinctively that new ideas and new methods were necessary to go further
than he and his students had already gone. Some may call it a lack of faith,
but in my opinion it was more a turning away from the hard, crude methods of
theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition._

In my own field of network security, I think that's largely true: we have a
lot of analytical tools that we haven't applied sufficiently well, largely
because people are not interested or educated in the sorts of theoretical
tools we could apply (ML or graph theory, for example).

How well this applies to theoretical research is outside my expertise,
though...

~~~
jmj42
It's funny you should mention graph theory and network security. I'm involved
in cyber security research, though more on the operations side of security
than networks. However, our research group does do quite a bit of work on the
network side. Most of it's focused on SCADA networks, but there's a couple of
really cool tools (read startups) that have come out of our group that lean
heavily on graph theory.

NP-View[1] maps connections. That is, If HostA can reach HostB, and HostB can
reach HostC, is there a path from HostC to HostA.

Veriflow (which I know far less about) is a large topology mapping tool.

[1] [http://www.network-perception.com/](http://www.network-perception.com/)
[2] [http://www.veriflowsystems.com/](http://www.veriflowsystems.com/)

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blastrotaco
The broader point--that research takes a certain amount of courage--is
generally true, but to me, it's weird to make the point by focusing on
Oppenheimer's lack of a Nobel Prize. It's not exceptionally rare that someone
so brilliant just happened to miss a Nobel.

Scientists, as individual human beings with limited time and energy, have to
make an informed decision on just how far they really want to pursue an idea.
The fact is that brilliant scientists have just as easily followed dead-end
paths as have failed to go far enough down the right one. Hindsight is 20/20,
so it's easy to see which is which only now.

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yongjik
Isn't it strange to ask why Oppenheimer "missed" a Nobel prize while Harold
Urey and Carl Anderson got one?

It is Oppenheimer who is far more famous, and probably made a bigger
contribution to physics or the world. IMHO, it just shows that Nobel Prize is
a poor means to measure physicists.

~~~
javert
Social distinctions such as Nobels will always be a poor means to measure
anything whatsoever. Though of course they are sometimes right on the mark.

------
bkcooper
In the first two examples, I don't see how Oppenheimer failed to be
"courageous." He disagreed with Dirac! He made technically accurate points
that proved not to be rebuttals after all. This isn't about not following his
ideas far enough, it's about just being wrong.

To me this reads more as the authors projecting their own ideas about what is
important in science onto these anecdotes. While I think that's a natural
parlor game for scientists to play, I don't think it's well argued here.

