High-risk high-reward research
Saturday, May 10th, 2008High-risk high-reward research
The back page of Mar 2008 APS news features a preliminary report by the AAA&S committee about “physics tomorrow”. The authors discussed what needs to be done in terms of funding strategies. Two focuses are about supporting young physicists and supporting high-risk high-reward research.
One of the authors, Steve Chu, recently visited Northwestern to give the Heilborn lecture series. Students and postdocs were given a time slot to chat with him. I took the chance to ask him how, for young physicists, to embark on a high-risk high-reward (high impact) research, or how to find such a topic. He first clarified that h-r h-r research topics probably should be chosen by experienced PIs, and then he went on to talk about his own experience as a graduate student at Berkeley and as a researcher at Bell lab.
Then I and someone else asked whether or not it boils down to the money issue, i.e., if you have lots of money, can buy top-of-the-line equipment and hire talented people, then you can try thing risky. His answer is not necessary, again he use his own research as example, for bio related research, they only need some microscopes, no fancy equipments. However, he emphasized that talking to the right people (in bio) is very important.
He also says he encourages moonlight, i.e., to try your own ideas in evenings and weekends. Although useful for some, these suggestions probably are not practical for people in high energy experiment, or even people doing liquid helium experiment.
Another trick as Steve claimed is to steer your research to some new technology. He again talked about his own experience. In fact, in the autobiography by another Nobel laureate, Ahmed Zewail, it is also mentioned that combination of technique breakthrough and new concepts leads to high impact research.
One interesting remark by Steve: “try it out and fail fast. Fail in three weeks you have some fun; fail after three years is painful”. Again, this type of quick turnaround experiments doesn’t fit for all subfields but certainly fit for some.
In summary, I find this one hour meeting worthwhile and appreciate Steve to spend time with us and to share his research philosophy.