http://magic.aladdin.cs.cmu.edu/wp-uploads/hamming.pdf
(((He wanted to know the practical difference between great scientists and mediocre scientists.
That was way back in 1986... but I don't imagine these human realities have changed all THAT much.)))
Richard Hamming
‘‘You and Your Research’’
Transcription of the
Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar
7 March 1986
J. F. Kaiser
Bell Communications Research
445 South Street
Morristown, NJ 07962−1910
[email protected]
At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W.
Hamming, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a retired Bell Labs scientist, gave a very interesting and stimulating talk, ‘You and Your
Research’ to an overflow audience of some 200 Bellcore staff members and visitors at the
Morris Research and Engineering Center on March 7, 1986.
This talk centered on
Hamming’s observations and research on the question ‘‘Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?’’
From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.
http://magic.aladdin.cs.cmu.edu/wp-uploads/hamming.pdf
(((Excerpts:)))
"If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, ‘important problem’ must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at
Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn’t work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity.
((Note: this is why great science fiction writers aren't great scientists.)))
They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack.
That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don’t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems.
(...)
Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ‘‘The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.’’ I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing − not much, but enough that they miss fame.
