Sunday, August 31, 2008

Some Observations Related to Fame and Fortune in the Research Profession


The following is a short (perhaps apocryphal) story of Sir Isaac Newton’s neighbor, Fred.

Fred lived on a small farm with several apple trees. The farm was just across a small stream next to another farm that was frequently visited by Isaac Newton (called Izzy, by some). One day Fred was sitting in the orchard and an apple fell upon his head. This he found to be an exciting and marvelous experience and he began to study this phenomenon. He began to record the actions around him and his own reaction to these actions. He wrote a thick description!

In this thick description he recorded many amazing observations regarding the apple trees, the apples, the fertilizer and the movement of the creek and its waters as they occasionally bathed the ground around the trees with enticing ripples of thought provoking emanations. He noticed that some apples were green and some were red and that some were large and that some were small. He noticed that sometimes the apples hit the ground and sometimes they fell upon his body, and sometimes they even fell upon other apples. He noticed that when they fell upon his head, they hurt even more than when they fell upon his arm. This all amazed him and year after year he sat under the apple trees and observed with an openness that greatly impressed his neighbors.

Finally, he had five hundred pages of thick description of the orchard and the apple trees within it and even included information about the leaves and bugs on the ground. While directly relevant to the phenomenon of interest, Fred felt that it added to the triangulation of the events by including these other observations. He published his book under the name “Apple Observation Principals” and it was a great success. Other people read this book and began to praise it. One, named Yogred, even said that it was hard to believe that anyone could ever know any more about the world of apples and their falling than did Fred.

Fred was not proud, nor boastful, although all the praise made him more determined than before to observe apples and he spent even more time doing so. In another 15 years, it came about that he was able to exceed his earlier success by writing a second even thicker description, this one of almost 1000 pages in length. This volume was also praised by many people for its truly beautiful and insightful observations. Some people even described them as having a somewhat romantic, lyric quality.

During this time, Isaac came to visit the neighboring farm and having heard about Fred’s great success, he too went to sit under an apple tree. Being a person who was not always lucky, just after he sat under the tree, an apple fell upon his head, just as one had upon Fred’s head. He jumped up, not even noticing if the apple were red or green, large or small. Later, some of the people who praised Fred’s observations even laughed at his lack of perspicacity. He ran to the house and began to think about that experience and after a few years he wrote a book called Natural Philosophy and Mathematical Principals.

The friends of Fred ignored Isaac’s book. They knew almost intuitively that it was not a good description of the apples upon the trees and their motions as they fell and of the influences of the stream, or the bugs and the grasses. They, and Fred himself, knew from casual glance that they could not read the book but that it was not worth reading, in any case. They continued to observe and to love apples, for they knew that apples were important to mankind and life was good for them, as it should have been. Isaac, too, had some measure of success with his work, although he was never able to compete with Fred as an observer of apples.

The End.


The following are just a few quotes that are purported to be from an independent and anonymous contemporaneous observer of Isaac’s and Fred’s work. Great diversity of opinion exists as to the truth of these comments, but they are much like Zen Koans, perhaps worth contemplating.

“Researchers who do not know what to do focus upon writing thick descriptions.”

“Researchers who have difficulty working with abstractions write grounded theory.”

“If one observes constantly and does not move toward the development of theory, the difficulty is probably not due to their inability to observe but to their inability to think about what they are observing.”

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