Sabio Column

By James H. Choi
http://Column.SabioAcademy.com
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When we think of “scientists,” we often think of someone wearing a white coat and holding a test tube. When I was getting my master’s degree, I worked in a signal processing lab, and this “lab” was nothing more than a computer on each desk, and I didn’t have to wear a white coat, so I still remember thinking, “What kind of lab is this?” while working in the lab. But in this era of big data, there’s a lot more science that doesn’t involve labs and white coats.

For starters, when we think of a “scientist,” we think of the iconic figure of Albert Einstein, who sat at a desk in a patent office with no computer, no lab, and only a pencil and paper, doing Nobel Prize-winning research. This is the true story of Einstein. “Theoretical physics” is literally a theoretical discipline, so we don’t do experiments. It’s better not to do it than to do it.

Theoretical physicists use the tools of math like a telescope/microscope to look at the universe and the insides of atomic nuclei to discover new things, and then, decades later, when technology improves, experimental physicists do experiments to see if the theories are right or wrong. Einstein’s gravitational lensing was theorized in 1916, but it wasn’t confirmed until nearly 100 years later. There is no theoretical physics research that middle and high school students can do. But with a computer and some imagination, you can find and solve problems that no one has thought of yet. For example, recently there was an article in the news that said, “An asteroid has been found to have a ring,” and while it is well known that planets as large as Mercury have rings, it is a shocking new discovery that an asteroid only a few kilometers in diameter could have rings. A student who has studied physics and programming can think of a theory like “How can a small asteroid have a ring?” and conduct an “experiment” by running the computer all night long, and as a result, enter it in a science fair. It’s not for everyone, of course, because it requires knowledge, but for students who have learned math, physics, and programming beforehand, it’s a way to show off their skills to the envious eyes of their classmates.

Pure math is also a highly developed field that is inaccessible to middle and high school students, but with computers, not only is it accessible, but you can create new problems and find answers, or you can just irresponsibly say, “Here’s a fun problem,” and leave it unanswered. That’s a conjecture, and in middle and high school, you can enter a science fair just by coming up with a creative conjecture. A few years ago, an eighth grader won first place in the math portion of the Illinois State Science Fair, beating out all the high school students, and his research was an extension of the Collatz Conjecture, meaning that he won first place by not only not solving Collatz’s problem, but finding out that there were more problems.

In a field like meteorology, if you want to study temperature changes over the past few hundred years, you have to use data that has been recorded by others, so you get the data and analyze it without experimentation. In astronomy, you can make your own telescope measurements, but a lot of data from advanced astronomical telescopes can be downloaded for free and analyzed, so unless you’re doing a very specific study, you don’t have to stay up at night hoping for a clear sky. When I was judging the physics category at an international science fair, there were students who measured the data directly and students who downloaded it, so I watched with interest, but in the end, only the student who downloaded it won. I thought that if the other students had analyzed the existing data during the observation time, they might have won.

Moving on to medicine, clinical trials are not something you can afford to do, and sometimes you can’t get approved even if you just try to read palms. For example, my student had to abandon her study “Do palms predict life expectancy?” because her school’s IRB (Institutional Review Board) wouldn’t allow her to read palms. She wanted to go to a nursing home to identify palm characteristics of people who lived long lives. The research proposal for “The relationship between blood type and personality” started with the intention of proving that there was no correlation, but the school said that “it could cause family discord” and did not approve it. At the same time, I learned that in the US, most students do not know their own blood type, so it is not as simple as I thought.

In contrast, the strategy of downloading and analyzing clinical trial data for free requires no permission, no equipment, and no time, so you can start analyzing from day one and focus on the research itself.

One thing to avoid is research that requires you to go to a specific lab and get permission to use someone else’s machine, which means you have to coordinate your time with theirs, and the machine is only available during orchestra concerts and final exams. There’s also the risk of the machine breaking down right before the deadline and making the world turn upside down, and the possibility that something is fundamentally wrong with the data I’m measuring and I have to start over, such as realizing in hindsight that it’s contaminated or out of calibration.

In this era of big data, there is a lot of free scientific data available for each specialty, and a lot of data that you can measure yourself at home with things like a digital camera, so it’s a smart strategy to avoid all the time/cost/risk of experimentation and instead find data in your field of interest and learn how to analyze it, because it’s scientist-like preparation and maximizes your odds in many ways.