Dear Ken,
Yep - let's require of ourselves levels of rigour that are commensurate with the task at hand. I am moved by a little piece in yesterday's Higher Education section of The Australian to re-animate dissections I have made on the list before about SEARCH, RE-SEARCH and DISCOVERY.
See what you think.
The original article is:
Sting in tale of bottled message
MERLIN CROSSLEY THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEMBER 06, 2013 12:00AM
* See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion/sting-in-tale-of-bottled-message/story-e6frgcko-1226753668509#sthash.bFbR0wOH.dpuf
My comments can be found below:
>>>>> KR
The problem with the story, offered by the Dean of Science at UNSW, Merlin Crossley, about the bee and the fly being stuck in a bottle that is lying neck down, as an example of two different kinds of research (moving towards the light or mission-directed for the bee; just-mucking-around or discovery for the fly) is that neither the bee nor the fly is doing research: both are engaged in problem-solving; both are searching for a way out of the predicament they are in.
If the bee, before dying, were to hypothesise that maybe its strategy was deficient, then it would have started to do re-search. The fly, happily buzzing off to its next bottle, would have learnt nothing it didn't already know. The moral of the story: search as much as you like you are not thereby conducting research.
Discovery is not research, as such. Discover is a five-year-old child disclosing a fossil and laughing in delight that they have discovered something. And, yes they have. The fact that their discovery is the billionth example of just such a fossil is of no account to the child. Equally, if the happy child discovered a fossil that had never been seen before, the child wouldn't have a clue that their discovery was front-page news.
The term "fossil" literally means "dug-up". That is, people dug-up such things and that was it: discovery! They discovered this and that and some people started collecting these weird things and then others started trying to work out what these dug-ups were and where they might have come from. Some suggested that maybe god was a joker and so he planted bone-like things of fantastic imaginary animals in mountains just for the pleasure of his people, humans, to dig up. These were the theories of imaginative flies.
Still, many people find the childish delight of initial discovery to be the affect that best describes their love of science (look, a four-leaf clover). For researchers proper, the affect of delight is more that of the bee the moment before it dies as it realises that bottles have bottoms as well as tops and that the relationship between the angles of the sides and the sunlight might provide the basis for a formula that could indicate to all future bees exactly where they are in a bottle when the sun is in that part of the sky. Which gets us to the history of navigation, an excellent example of many bees and no flies.
So maybe to account for the connections between discovery and research we need an extended story just about bees, a story that also includes bumble bees?
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