What Makes a Scientist? 科学家的主要工作就是探寻奥秘，而他们本身也变成了一种令大家好奇的奥秘。 The scientist’s job is to figure out how the world works, and to "torture" Nature to reveal her secrets, as the 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon described it. But who are these people in the lab coats (or sports jackets, or suits, or T-shirts and jeans) and how do they work? It turns out that there is a good deal of mystery surrounding the mystery-solvers. "One of the greatest mysteries is the question of what it is about human beings —brains, education, culture etc. —that makes them capable of doing science at all," said Colin Allen, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University. Few scientists have turned the microscope (or brain scanner) back on themselves. So even though the scientific method —with its hypotheses, data collection and statistical analysis —is well documented, the method by which scientists come to conclusions remains largely hidden. "If we could understand scientifically what makes a scientist, this would potentially feed back on science itself and accelerate scientific progress," Allen said. Two vital ingredients seem to be necessary to make a scientist: the curiosity to seek out mysteries and the creativity to solve them. "Scientists exhibit a heightened level of curiosity," reads a 2007 report on scientific creativity for the European Research Council. "They go further and deeper into basic questions showing a passion for knowledge for its own sake." According to one definition, curiosity is a kind of sensitivity to small discrepancies1 in an otherwise ordered world. Studies have shown that curious people have a mixture of seemingly conflicting desires: they seek novelty2 and strangeness and yet they also want everything in its proper place. The curious scientists believe there is an order to the universe but are always looking for unexpected data points that will test the accepted theory. To resolve the conflict between data and theory, scientists often have to think outside the box and approach the problem from different angles. Max Planck, one of the fathers of quantum physics, once said, "Scientists must have a vivid and intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction3, but by an artistically creative imagination." To understand this scientific creativity, some philosophers of science have made an analogy4 with child development. The idea is that scientists use the same strategies for investigating the world as infants do while discovering their surroundings for the first time. "This makes scientific abilities seem like part of a very basic 'tool kit’ that is not specific to science itself," Allen said. Astronomer Carl Sagan once said, "Everybody starts out as a scientist. Every child has the scientist’s sense of wonder and awe." But others disagree with this universal scientific mind. They believe that scientists have special abilities that set them apart. Discovering these abilities may be hard, as many scientists will be reluctant to reveal them and prefer to preserve the mystery of creativity, fearing that if it became an object of study it would lose its magic. But for Allen, this is all part of a bigger question of what lies behind anyone’s behavior. "We are only just beginning to understand how the traits of organisms, including ourselves, aren’t the fixed products of either genes or of the environment/culture, but each of us is the product of a continual interactive process in which we help build the environment that in turn shapes us," he said. "A brain makes decisions that alter its surroundings, which in turn affect later decisions. Discovering how this constant feed-back loop works in a scientist will not be easy to do with current brain imaging techniques. As long as our best technology for seeing inside the brain requires subjects to lie nearly motionless while surrounded by a giant magnet, we’re only going to make limited progress on these questions." Notes: 1. discrepancy n.差异 2. novelty n.新鲜；新奇的事物 3. deduction n.演绎；推理 4. analogy n.比喻；类推 本文来源：https://www.wddqw.com/doc/2a7e0ae4e309581b6bd97f19227916888486b919.html