The Scientific Pursuit of Doing the Right Things

we assume to know what the right thing

to do is

but sometimes people do things that end

up being really really bad

they take actions they regret till the

end of their lives

i’m actually a huge fan of denurven’s

ted talk inside the mind of a massive

procrastinator

it’s probably my most watched youtube

video out of many reasons

in this ted talk he mentioned the

concept of a live calendar

and i quote that’s one box for every

week in the month of your life

and that’s not that many boxes

this calendar has been haunting me since

then i’m

terrified of feeling regret when i’m at

the last week of my own calendar

what are the right things to do to avoid

this

throughout the last decade while

studying and practicing physics

i started to see a pattern it’s just a

hypothesis

but it explains plenty of cases why

people are successful

my idea is that scientific thinking

leads to doing the right things

let me quickly walk you through the

concept of scientific thinking

everything starts with seeing and i

don’t mean

literally it’s more observing the active

acquisition of information from your

environment

like reading the newspaper talking to a

person

conducting an experiment and so on after

seeing

comes explaining trying to find answers

to

why you see what you see these two steps

are done by pretty much everybody we see

things and most of the time we have some

explanation to it

now comes the part that distinguishes

modern science from

others it’s testing and at its core

you have to predict additional

observations you would make

if your explanation was right and then

go make

those observations if your prediction is

right

hooray your theory just got stronger and

if your prediction is wrong

i’m sorry you have to ditch your theory

and start again

this is pretty much scientific thinking

i like to call it the golden triangle

countless scientists and philosophers

has refined

this theory throughout the last

millennium running through this process

once

can be as short as a few seconds of

parts in your mind

up to centuries of work divided over

multiple generations of commitment

and you will discover by time that the

more you iterate over this triangle

the deeper your knowledge gets above

all this golden triangle is extremely

powerful with

any kind of topics even beyond science

for example in which universe is that

person more popular than i

am why does that guy get better grades

even though he hardly studies at all

what is the meaning of life it is

cereal soup

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i have found out that continuously

practicing this golden triangle

is the best preparation for doing the

right things

everyone does that consciously or

unconsciously but the inspired people

they are aware of taking advantage of

scientific thinking they know the

importance of applying these rules and

they know how to use it as a source

to motivate their actions scientific

thinking leads to doing the right things

now let me give you an example imagine

you discovered

something important that nobody would

believe

even worse your discovery might get you

into serious trouble

and that’s what happened with nicolas

copernicus 15 14.

back then during the renaissance

understanding the march of the stars was

one of the hottest research topics in

europe

and there virtually everybody believed

that the earth was in the center of the

universe and all the stars revolved

around it

copernicus saw like everyone else that

the standard objects moved from one side

to the other side every single day he

learned in school from the explanation

that this is

due to the so-called geocentric system

in order to test it he calculated the

exact trajectories on how the stars

would move

pointed up his telescope towards the sky

and bam

the geocentric boat we did not agree

with this experiment

the outcome we all know is the dawn of

the scientific revolution

without it the law of gravity could have

never been discovered

and the industrial revolutions might

have never taken place

the root cause of copernicus action is

that he believes that not

only himself but the society as a whole

should follow the principles of science

scientific thinking

leads to doing the right thing let me

give you a more

recent case sir is my go-to example

to a facility which is nowadays running

and enthusiastically following the

principles of science

as the largest particle physics

laboratory in the world

it has 23 member states and over 12 000

participating scientists

the core facility as serm is the

particle accelerator called the large

headroom collider

it is a 27 kilometer underground ring

located 100 meters

below the swiss french border near

geneva

and it is the most powerful as separator

ever built

and it is designed to collide protons

together up to 40 million times each

second

these collisions take place at four

points around the ring and at each

collision points is a large

particle detector each detector is built

and operated by different

international collaborations cms and

atlas are two different general purpose

detectors designed to observe any kind

of physics

that nature might manifest cms stands

for

compact neon solenoid it gets its name

from the fact that it’s 50 meters high

21 meters long and it is really compact

for all the material it contains

and it is designed to detect particles

known as neons very accurately

it has also the most powerful solenoid

magnet ever made

this detector weighs about 14 000 tons

and has around 75 million individual

channels for detecting

and identifying all sorts of particles

now while i was speaking you might have

realized that particle physicists

love to use fancy words like the large

hadron collider

or compact neon solenoid and if you are

worried of not

understanding all the words i said

they’re worried not

even seasoned bbc journalists can become

victims of service terminologies

when they have to report the 2013

headroom collider restart

that actually really showed up in the

television

certs continuous practice of the golden

triangle

has inspired not only the discovery of

the higgs boson that gathered a nobel

prize in 2013

and the invention of the world wide web

but it has been a factory for numerous

scientific discoveries

and industrial revolutions i myself

am part of a team testing a theory that

predicts a new particle which we call

the heavy neutral laptop

this particle explains plenty of

questions

that looms over the greatest thinkers we

have today in the world

it answers questions like what dartmouth

is made of

and other interesting things like

why is the neutrino mass so small or why

do we have so much more matter than

antimatter in the universe

my role here is to see if cern can

produce

this dark matter particle during the

proton conditions or not

the core challenge here is to go through

the entire detector recordings

and observe at every single collision

whether this documentary particle has

been produced or not

and this can be particularly difficult

if we cannot detect the dark matter

particle directly

but can only observe how it interacts

with those the detector can

record under this circumstance

we were inspired to come up with new

static

statistical methods and is based on

advances in modern machine learning

algorithms

that are very similar to those applied

in applications

that can interpret photos like this one

which can distinguish

chihuahuas from blueberry muffins

since detector recordings are

mathematically very similar

to photography digital photographies

we ended up training an artificial

neural network that helps us to identify

the collisions where we have a new

particle or not

the result of inner analysis tells us

with which certainty we have found this

kind of new particle

with which certainty we have found that

kind of new particles since there are

different kinds of particles we can find

and with which certainty we have found

nothing which is also a very valuable

piece of information

now after carefully analyzing the data

for many years

with countless all-nighters and problems

to overcome

i’m actually very proud to stand in

front of you today to announce

that last week friday almost at midnight

we finally managed to

still not have on this particular

we might end up really not finding it

but don’t you see it is too important

not to try it

overall we managed to apply surgically

artificial intelligence to some of our

problems it is also helping some of

other scientists too it is not by far

not as great as leading the scientific

revolution

or inventing the world wide web but

continuously practicing the golden

triangle has given

me the reassuring feeling of being proud

of what i’ve done

and not regretting the sacrifices i had

to make

it’s worked out pretty well so far for

me scientific thinking leads to doing

the right things

let me give you one more example and

this time it is a failure

in scientific thinking that animal

has caused so much trouble in australia

it is called the sugar cane toad and

everything started

at the 1930s

back then sugarcane growers in

queensland were very concerned

of crop damage due to beetles the

australian government

of agriculture looked into possible

solutions

based on reports from successfully

introducing beetle eating cane tools and

hawaii sugarcane fields

the australian government has decided to

import

the toads and that was a catastrophic

decision the toads ultimately failed to

feed on the beatles and instead they

became a massive pest

just over 100 were introduced and there

are now hundreds of millions

native predators that feast on those

toads rarely survived the meal

and australia’s ecosystem was on the

verge of collapse because of this

now i have no doubt that those involved

believed that they were doing the right

things

they saw that the toad method worked in

the hawaii and they believed that

everything would also work

in australia but instead of extensively

testing this idea they took the shortcut

and implemented an untested hypothesis

just a simple but well thought

experiment might be enough to prove that

idea wrong

okay no matter whether it was

overconfidence

or industrial pressure what i want to

stress here is

how hard it is to really know something

how careful we ought to be

with checking our experiments how easy

it is to make mistakes and fool

ourselves

it is so easy to practice the golden

triangle but it is insanely hard

to practice it right but if we try

we will ultimately be rewarded with deep

long-lasting knowledge scientific

thinking

leads to doing the right things

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there’s actually one more problem to

solve this whole concept

is not consistent yet

how can i avoid sugarcane toad disaster

happening with me

when i practice this golden triangle

when do i know that the scientific

thinking i did was

enough or not and i think the solution

is the intuition

listen to your intuition use your gut

feelings it

appears to me like that our intuition is

like a little scientifically thinking

man

sitting in the unconscious part in our

brain far cleverer than our rational

selves

constantly generating wisdom while we

live alone

and once in a while this little man

comes out of his house gives us an

advice

without explanation okay this explains

at least

why some experienced professionals can

develop astounding intuitions of their

skills

and we can also nourish our own

intuition

by putting ourselves deliberately in

specific sceneries

and meditate over the memories once we

have them

do you want to have a better intuition

for culture and language

go travel you want a better intuition

for physics so some physics exercises

you want to be a funnier person

go watch some comedies and practice

telling some jokes

now you can argue if i want to practice

this rational golden triangle

how can i include intuition in such a

process

we are actually already doing it when we

see

things our intuition tells us what

catches our attention

and what we doubt and immediately want

to investigate

and when we explain things our intuition

provides us with a first

guess which we can iterate on rationally

and if we want to test our explanation

the intuition gives us ideas how to test

the hypothesis and whether the testing

we did

was sufficient or not scientific

thinking

leads to doing the right things but

really respect your intuition

for it is an integral part of the whole

process

but also beware of the dangers of

blindly following the intuition and over

trusting it

for the intuition also has its limits it

is only as good as the number and

quality of experiences we had in our

lives

many bankers have ruined their careers

and

even their lives are intuitively betting

on the wrong stocks

i think we should let the intuition be a

loyal consultant to us

but not let it completely and

unsupervised take over the whole wheel

now like many of the young audience here

today

i’m still in the process of finding the

right things i want to do in my life

i’ve certainly not experienced enough

to tell you how to forge a perfect life

but when i

look at other people doing good or

terrible things

i start to realize more and more that

this rule

has something to it scientific thinking

leads to doing the right thing

this is my take home message for you

today and i believe that if more people

practice the golden triangle if more

people believed

and they evaluated and doubted

their worldviews before they start to

make them their own

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the world would then become a better

place thank you

you