Advice to a Young Scientist by P. B. Medawar

Once again, stumbled across a book in the Plant Systematics Lab library.

Once again, captivated by the preface. The reading of the preface is a relatively new habit, which I didn't use to do. I used to read mainly for the content and knowledge acquirement. Nowadays, I find myself reading, because I enjoy it. And the preface contains the heart of the writer. Why did he do it? What inspired him? Who helped him and made it possible?

"I use the word opinion to make it clear that my judgments are not validated by systematic sociological research and are not hypotheses that have already stood up to repeated critical assaults. They are merely personal judgments, though I hope som eof them will be picked up by sociologists of science for proper investigation."

"A good tutor taught the whole of his subject and not just that part of it in which he himself happened to be especially interested or proficient; to 'teach' did not, of course, mean to 'impart factual information,' a relatively unimportant consideration, but rather to guide thought and reading and encourage reflection."

How Can I Equip Myself to Be a Scientist or a Better One?

"The beginner must read, but intently and choosily and not too much."

The Scientific Process

"A young scientist has now a meter or so of bench space, let us say, a white coat, authority to use the library, and a problem that he has thought up himself of a senior has asked him to look into. To begin with, anyway, it is almost certain to be a small problem - one of which the solution will facilitate solution of something more important, and so on, until the long-term objective of the enterprise is in sight. Nonscientists cannot immediately see the connection between the lesser problem and the greater. It must often occur to a humanist as he reads the minutes of the board of the faculty of science that young scientists are engaged in comically specialized activities. A scientist might equally well wonder what there could be to engage a grown man in the study of the parochial affairs of Tudor Cornwall, because he does not realize that such an investigation is about the Reformation, a very great affair indeed."

hypothesis = imaginative preconception

"Thus the day-to-day business of science consists not in hunting for facts but in testing hypotheses - that is, ascertaining if they or their logical implications are statements about real life, if inventions, to see whether or not they work."

experiments = acts undertaken to test a hypothesis

"In the outcome, science is a logically connected network of theories that represents our current opinion about what the natural world is like."

"As a point of logic that has some bearing on the way he thinks he goes about his business, a young scientist must always avoid saying or thinking that he 'deduces' or 'infers' hypotheses. On the contrary, a hypothesis is that from which we deduce or infer statements about mattersof fact, so that, as the great American philosopher C. S. Peirce clearly recognized, the process by which we try to think up the hypotheses from which our obesrvations will follow is an inverse form of deduction - a process for which he coined the terms retroduction and abduction, neither of which has caught on."

"Before he sets out to convince others of his observations or opinions, a scientist must first convince himself. Let this not be too easily achieved; it is better by far to have the reputation for being querulous and unwilling to be convinced than to give reason to be thought gullible. If a scientist asks a colleague's candid criticism of his work, give him the credit for meaning what he says. It is no kindness to a colleague - indeed, it might be the act of an enemy - to assure a scientist that his work is clear and convincing and that his opinions are really coherent when the experiments that profess to uphold them are slovenly in design and not well done. More generally, criticism is the most powerful weapon in any methodology of science; it is the scientist's only assurance that he need not persist in error. All experimentation is criticism. If an experiment does not hold out the possibility of causing one to revise one's views, it is hard to see why it should be done at all."

By P. B. Medawar from Advice to a Young Scientist (1979). London: Pan Books (From this book! Not plagarism!)