Research Challenges Quotes

The thing in Alzheimer's disease to remember, and we remember this all the time at Axovant, is we don't fully understand the way the actual underlying disease works.

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.

It's a manic-depressive life. You run in here, you open your incubator, your experiment makes no sense, you think, 'I hate this job.' Then ten minutes later you think, 'Well, now, maybe I'll try this or I'll try that.' You do it because you know there will be an 'a-ha!' day.

If I'm flying to China, I can sit and think about a problem. Other scientists have to go to the lab. I'm always thinking about maths, even when I'm doing other things. A lot of the time you're going up blind alleys and it's very frustrating, but then you have a sudden rush of ideas. You can live off that for quite some time.

… we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

People go on exploration; they're trying to find places that weren't known before. But it is an inevitable fact of research, as is in any other form of exploration of the unknown, that some people find they go down a dead end.

The biggest handicap in research is an ability to think outside the box. The handicap is being encumbered by all the conventional wisdom in a given field.

The most extraordinary thing about trying to piece together the missing links in the evolutionary story is that when you do find a missing link and put it in the story, you suddenly need all these other missing links to connect to the new discovery. The gaps and questions actually increase - it's extraordinary.

There are other sources of psychological knowledge, which become accessible at the very point where the experimental method fails us.

Can a controlled experiment explain why people like Kewpie dolls in one year, Beanie Babies in another, and American Girl dolls this year? Yet social scientists are asked to answer analogous questions. We economists and perhaps psychologists shouldn't overreact to the derision. That is, we shouldn't try to overlay a false sense of precision on our admittedly squooshy work.

With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.

Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.

Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.

I had a stormy graduate career, where every week we would have a shouting match. I kept doing deals where I would say, 'Okay, let me do neural nets for another six months, and I will prove to you they work.' At the end of the six months, I would say, 'Yeah, but I am almost there. Give me another six months.'

When I started my Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, I was told that it would be difficult to make a new discovery in biology because it was all known. It all seems so absurd now.

Soon I knew the craft of experimental physics was beyond me - it was the sublime quality of patience - patience in accumulating data, patience with recalcitrant equipment - which I sadly lacked.

Physics is not a religion. If it were, we’d have a much easier time raising money.

This is often the way it is in physics - our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort.

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

It's really difficult working with kids and with babies because they are not cooperative subjects: they are not socialized into the idea that they should cheerfully and cooperatively give you information. They're not like undergraduates, who you can bribe with beer money or course credit.

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

There's the wonder of being able to do research from your own living room, of course. I do find that my biggest research issue, though, is how to frame my questions.

I often say in my speeches, I say, 'It's rare in life that you get a controlled scientific experiment.' 'Cause you can't do controlled scientific experiments with real people, normally.