I. AVOID FRUITLESS EXPERIMENTS 5 



undertaken merely with the hope that something worth while will 

 result. The observer who is looking for something specific seems to 

 have a greater chance of seeing it than an observer who is just looking. 

 An investigator with a strong conviction that the natural world 

 operates on simple laws has a stronger incentive to work doggedly to 

 discover them than an individual who lacks faith in their existence. 

 Absolute devotion to a particular problem, however, must surely end 

 in failure in a great many cases; the number of relatively important 

 discoveries are but a fraction of one per cent of the number of experi- 

 mental attempts. 



The striving for important discoveries, for the "order-of-magni- 

 tude" advances, therefore carries a high degree of risk. Some scien- 

 tists are much better situated than others with respect to assuming 

 this extra hazard. Apart from the mental adjustment and the in- 

 testinal fortitude demanded, there is usually an economic or timing 

 factor. This is clearly true with most problems for graduate students. 

 Beginners generally feel the need for early successes, but it can hardly 

 be said that they gamble less than their older colleagues. The stu- 

 dent's gamble, however, is often on his professor's judgment rather 

 than deliberately on the problem. 



This type of approach doesn't seem well suited to workers who 

 need the frequent stimulation which results from minor successes. 

 The great-gamble type of experiment is not necessarily devoid of by- 

 products and incidental data which are of themselves valuable, pro- 

 vided the time and effort are expended to make them so. But the 

 latter procedure detracts at once from the effort that can be put on the 

 main purpose of the problem or on the next logical attempt at an im- 

 portant discover3^ Perhaps few scientists are entirely free to pursue 

 their own desires in the matter. 



4. Organized or Controlled Approach 



In commenting on the influence of Francis Bacon on the scientific 

 revolution, Mees (4, p. 81) has stated that "Bacon over-estimated the 

 ease with which scientific knowledge can be obtained, and he fell into 

 an error in which he is followed by many today^the error of believing 

 that scientific research can be organized like an engineering project 

 and that the way to make scientific discoveries is to plan to make 

 them." A great many scientific contemporaries share this view with 

 Mees and are distrustful of too much "direction" of scientific research 

 programs. President Conant of Harvard University has been (luntod 



