I have been reading books about Dr Richard Feynman. He is one of best American physicist in history. His life is very interesting to me both as human being and scientist. I am not sure there is correlation between hardship on life people have and great achievement they can achieve. But at least, because of the hardships, people might think deeper and can have philosophy of life.
Then, I am reading book about Elon Musk. His life is also interesting. I think I would like to read biographies more. These biography books give me energy when I work on difficult problems. The problem is once I read one biography, I normally find 2-3 book to read next. After Elon Musk, I would like to re-read about “Howard Hughes”, “Warren Buffet”, or “Albert Einstein” for sure. I know there is more to come.
From Feynman, this time what I learned is “ignorant” as a scientist. If scientist doesn’t have answer to a problem, he is ignorant.This is strong words but I do understand now. Physicist does best because we are using very fundamental elements to prove our hypothesis, still it is insanely difficult. I am sometimes asked my boss, what is the problem? I can’t say I am not sure because there should be somewhere the reason. As a professional scientist I have to find out what the problem is and fix it, at worst I need to make sense. I am trying to avoid ignorance whenever we do experiment, we have now a lot of black box, such as electronics and software, we can run experiment but we can never get anywhere until I understand them very well.
The other thing is this “Scientist does not know the answer social problem because normally social problem is much harder than science.” This made very sense to me this might be long term question I was wandering these days. I was wandering by reading a lot of writing on the web, why are they so sure what they know? How can you possibly conclude that? I was feeling like why people think they are so smart because I can see a lot of statement on the web in this internet age. People are talking and always convince someone based on never tested hypothesis, to me sometime it looks insane, even Physics is not easy, making decision in real life is a lot more tough.
Today, we stayed at lab little late like 11 p.m. or so. Since we measured the sample 40K and wanted cool back down to 0.1K, it took so long time to get there. We are using so called dilution fridge with 3He to reach below 1K, we finally reach 0.8K and we think it is going to go 0.1K so we left after we put long scan for tonight. Hopefully we have good data by tomorrow.
I am working from April 27th so I am bit tired. I am going to be back Sydney 10th of May. I have learned a lot last two weeks. I am now motivated to improve the capability on instrument to pursuits more higher level of science. And I also started thinking how we could make our Canadian group in Australia. The neutron scattering group in university is very important because students can learn how to operate neutron scattering instrument and would grow up as professors later. And then, they will have other students under him/her. It takes very much time but this is like snowball.