{"id":2301,"date":"2009-05-07T17:31:42","date_gmt":"2009-05-08T00:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=2301"},"modified":"2009-05-07T17:31:42","modified_gmt":"2009-05-08T00:31:42","slug":"too-few-wrong-papers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2009\/05\/07\/too-few-wrong-papers\/","title":{"rendered":"Too Few Wrong Papers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

After watching Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk* it occurred to me to go back and look at my own scientific papers<\/a> and try to assess them for how creative they were. Some things you should just never do, I guess, but it did lead me to an interesting question.
\n* The first 2\/3 of the talk is excellent, ending not as great. I’m heartily in support of his cause, but it felt to me like he was implying that this was the one and only problem with the education system, which I find hard to swallow.
\n
\nLooking at the list of my papers, I’m struck by many things. First of all I’m amazed by how tightly I’ve said in the quantum realm since I started graduate school. Now quantum computing is a big field (which leads to a quite annoying habit among faculty and students in other disciplines pegging you as narrow because you work in the quantum world) but still I’ve produce very little which perhaps could not have been predicted circa 2001 (Quoteth the Shins: “Family portrait circa 95”)
\nAnd then I think about the creativity in these papers. Certainly I feel that all these papers solved some new problem, but this just brushes things under the rug. How new? How surprising? I won’t bore you with the ego bashing resulting from my analysis, but it did raise for me the question, why haven’t I been more creative?
\nIn assessing this I was struck by something which Sir Ken said in his talk. We are taught, especially in school, to not be wrong. Yet, Sir Ken argues, being wrong is an essential part of being creative. Now I don’t want to go so over the top touchy-feely that I emphasize wrong as right, but it does seem to me that he has got a decent point. Being wrong is a way of exploring territory. Being allowed to be wrong means that you are freer to explore ideas outside of your normal comfort zone. Being wrong can spark you to think why you are wrong and thus lead you down a very constructive new path.
\nWhich got me thinking: do I have too few papers which are wrong? Now don’t get me wrong, I know that the papers I write aren’t perfect. I’m certain that there are many minor but hopefully zero or only a few major “errors” in the papers. I’m not talking about that kind of wrong. I’m talking about papers that present a radical idea which just doesn’t work. Those of you who know me outside of this blog (yes dear reader, there is more to me than the disembodied head a la the Wizard of Oz) know that I come up with a lot of totally whacked ideas which never make it anywhere. Oftentimes I’m kind of sad about these ideas, mostly because I often feel that they are good ideas which I am just too dense to make any progress on. Why shouldn’t I write down these ideas in some form and share them with the community? In some ways this is just a rift on the ever-recurring thought that someone should start a journal to publish negative experiments. But this is a slight twist in that these ideas are meant to push one outside of one’s comfort zone, to lead to more creativity in science, and not just a writeup of where things go wrong. Further I would hope that they would serve my egotistical purpose of improving my own creativity.
\nSo maybe it’s time for me to write a wrong paper. Just don’t tell that to other faculty here at my university (what, cats out of the blog, you say?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After watching Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk* it occurred to me to go back and look at my own scientific papers and try to assess them for how creative they were. Some things you should just never do, I guess, but it did lead me to an interesting question. * The first 2\/3 of the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Too Few Wrong Papers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,65,76,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brain","category-quantum-computing","category-self-meet-center-center-meet-self","category-the-loony-bin-called-academia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}