Expert: Daniel Mazur - 8/19/2007

Question
Dear Daniel Mazur

I'm have some interest in astrophysics and astronomy, but I just don't know what a scientist does?

Answer
Hi John,
I apologize for a late answer. Now, what does a scientist do...?

Many things, all working together to achieve better understanding of nature, or simply of any object of interest, or to find out a way, how to make some already known phenomena work to be harnessed in applications. This is quite a mouthful, let me describe it in a more accessible way.

A scientist comes out of graduate school already having some pretty narrow expertise and (hopefully) broad enough awareness of the rest of science. In the scientific community, the air is thick with yet unresolved problems about nature's laws in a multitude of systems, and a primary task for a scientist is to pick some that interest him or her. Of course, if one has access to a good instrument of some kind, one tries to pick problems that can be solved using that instrument. E.g. if you have a great fancy telescope, you will try to answer questions about stars and galaxies. If you have a precise ohmmeter, then you should focus on questions of resistivity of materials. Sure, then you have to sit down, and write up a proposal of scientific intent, stating "This is an interesting problem to solve, it is of great importance, because blah blah blah, I want to do this sort of measurement .... and I need this amount of money". One sends it to an agency that offers grants to scientific project in one's field and hopefully it will get approved and funded. Can't do anything without money, of course.

Then comes the phase of preparing everything for the work to be done and to actually do the work. If you are a theorist, you don't need more than enough paper, pencil, and these days also a fancy computer to do your work. If you are an experimentalist, you are going to need specialized instrumentation (like the telescope or ohmmeter above...) and to make some effort to prepare the measured object: You have to think about where to move your telescope so that it gives you the most accurate information, free of atmospheric influence. For your ohmmeter, you need to get the material whose resistivity you want to measure, consider how you're going to measure temperature dependence of this, dependence on magnetic field, dependence on illumination... simply everything that you find interesting and that can help you answer the more fundamental questions. This preparation can be a lot of work, and if you are starting from scratch (without any instrument to begin with) it may take you years to get your first result. After everything is ready, you do the measurements best you can, you are constantly discussing your progress with you peers and your boss (if you have one) and adapt to anything new you learn along the path.

At some point you must take your results and decide "this is enough for a paper" (paper=article in a scientific journal). You can still continue your experiments and everything else, but you must also sit down and prepare a presentation of your work and write the article. This writing is a tough job for most of us, I guess, but it is an essential part of science. You need to let the world know, what you've discovered, because: 1) you want to show you were not lazing around all this time, 2) you want the credit and fame for your discovery, 3) only if your funded project has a result, you have a good chance that you will get some grant money next time you ask, 4) part of the definition of scientific truth is that the result is *reproducible*, so you need to allow anybody to exactly reproduce your experiment and confirm your result, 5) this is the ONLY thing that stays behind when we're long gone, the results of our work being remembered, used and appreciated by future generations!!!

So whatever your main motivation is, you sit down and write your manuscript, while communicating constantly with you colleagues, polishing every word and every sentence, and when that is done, you send it to a journal for refereeing. The referees either say it is good or that it is not good enough, so you may have to rewrite the manuscript, sometimes do some more measurements, and try again to have it refereed and published. When you succeed in this one, you are done and you can focus on your other projects.

The above describes a cycle of a single project. Usually, though, there are more concurrent projects and they are being solved by several people in a group, so that the work needs to be divided and coordinated. One needs to remember to spend some time every week reading up on the latest scientific discoveries - there is alway something new to learn. One also needs to consult people outside one's area of expertise to get some special advice, sometimes one needs to have somebody to produce special materials for the experiment, sometimes one needs special equipment that somebody else has. So, time needs to be dedicated to a lot of discussions and negotiations. Then of course one should get to a few conferences and workshops every year to meet with fellow scientists (some of them competitors) to exchange experience, to learn about what is going on and has not yet been published, and to forge useful contacts.

I think you realize it is a busy lifestyle. The advantages are flexible working hours, huge variety of activities included, the rewarding feeling when you discover something that *really* matters. Disadvantages may be large responsibilities for managing your time and other resources,  this work cuts significantly into your personal life and family life, and maybe that your paycheck is not at all proportional to the number of years you spent at school - you'll do much better if you become a banker of a stock broker right after your Bachelor's degree.

I hope I answered your question and now you have an idea what it is like being a scientist. Just on the sidelines: you expressed an interest in astrophysics and astronomy. As much as I think these are going to become extremely useful in a few centuries, there are many more astro- graduates (also theory graduates) nowadays than the field can feed. I advise anybody, who likes astro- and has not yet reached the graduate level, to read something on more earthly matters - plasma physics, materials science (that's a huge one), geophysics, biophysics, radiation physics... that you might also find fascinating. They are not more nor less challenging than astro- to study, and they offer much broader range of careers to choose from after every degree.

Good luck to you!
Daniel