There are a lot of researchers who go by the book the right approach and write results, and observations in their field of work, proving the existing information or suggesting improvement in the experiment for better analysis and so on, very hard working but then there are other who are crazy thinkers always suggesting things with little backup from existing experiments or know facts, always radical in their understanding of results, and these people mostly get dismissed as blip by the first category of researchers.
So if I have to take your opinion who will you back for hitting gold one who is methodical and hardworking or who are crazy thinker?
I am afraid your question makes no sense whatsoever. "Crazy thinkers"... really? I would reread what you have written and revise. There may (by 'may' I am being as kind as possible) be a question in there that has some value, but it is not the one you have asked. (Hint: 'crazy' is a derogatory term.)
Brian Kelly may be we are interpreting the word "Crazy" differently. The best way to understand the way crazy is
"It is a crazy idea wow man"!! this does not sound derogatory to me in-fact it sound that your idea is different enough to get loud unconventional reactions
Thank you
PS : may be just may be no one should spend his effort in answering a non value question
Hello Haque Mobassir Imtiyazul Haque Shaikh ,
I agree with your contention that some ideas initially strike most people as 'crazy' both in technical and nontechnical fields. Examples from nontechnical fields include: opposing slavery, gun control, democracy, women voting, environmentalism, climate change, etc. Examples from technical fields include: mRNA vaccines (COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer), prions (self replicating proteins), continental drift, quasicrystalls, Josephson junctions (SQUIDs), quantum mechanics, the personal computer, the Internet, the airplane, radio, TV, electricity, etc. One person's 'crazy' idea may eventually become widely accepted, and even commercially important. And don't forget, many 'crazy' ideas originated from by-the-book investigations: the idea of the quantum of energy arose from Max Planck's tireless attempts at trying to explain the shape of the blackbody curve using classical thermodynamics, and superconductivity in some metals was the result of a rather pedestrian checking of electrical conductivity of metals at liquid helium temperatures - no one expected superconductivity and no theory predicted it.
I really like your question.
Regards,
Tom Cuff
Hi, again, Haque Mobassir Imtiyazul Haque Shaikh ,
In rereading my answer, I realized that I had not provided a yes or no answer. My answer is no, you need both the 'crazy idea' person and the methodical researcher. One cannot be profitable without the other. In some instances, they are the same person, for example, Kammerlingh Onnes, the discoverer of superconductivity in some metals. Onnes was both the methodical researcher, and the proposer of the idea of superconductivity on the basis of his exhaustive investigations. Sometimes they are two separate groups of people, for example, Prince Louis V. de Broglie had the 'crazy idea' of matter waves, but it was Clinton J. Davisson and Lester A. Germer who first provided the copious experimental verification. Note, Davisson and Germer were actually investigating secondary electron emission for their employer, Bell Telephone Company, because this phenomenon affected the electron vacuum tubes used by the company in the amplifiers used as repeaters in long distance telephony. Because of a fortuitous accident, they noticed that a metal target made up of large crystals exhibited multiple peaks and valleys in their electron diffraction apparatus, which Walter M. Elsasser had earlier proposed as a test of de Broglie's idea.
Regards,
Tom Cuff
Hi Haque Mobassir Imtiyazul Haque Shaikh ,
Re the chiding you received about your use of the word 'crazy', let me mention something I read in the book by Goldstein [1] on the life, times and work of Kurt Gödel. Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, when they were at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, used to walk to work together, in fact, they sought out each other's company. They conversed in their native language, German. In trying to describe Einstein's reaction to some of Gödel's ideas, Goldstein used the phrase "wirklich verrükt" or really cracked (crazy). So don't worry about your use of the same word, Goldstein is a MacArthur Fellow; you are in good company.
[1] Rebecca Goldstein; Incompleteness, The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel; Atlas Books; 2005; p. 14.
Regards,
Tom Cuff
Haque Mobassir Imtiyazul Haque Shaikh ,
First, I think there is no right or wrong answer to your question. What may exist are very particular points of view. In this case, my point of view is that both professionals are necessary and relevant, what will differentiate when one or the other should be heard is the situation being analyzed and, mainly, the risk involved and the expected results in decision making. In some situations, the case needs to be studied in depth, exhausting as many tests as possible and only then moving forward. At this point, a crazy person taking this forward is highly risky, as he will believe that a first result is enough. In other cases, in-depth study can be a pure waste of time and, at this point, relying a little on the "intuition" of a crazy person can barely change the final result. In short, my answer is: It depends. Choosing between crazy and methodical depends on a number of things.
William Claudio Alves Julian you my guy!! definitely the most relevant answer
The technically informed crazy thinker working with methodical thinking.
What is 'gold' here? If that would be finding something unexpected, then I'd go with the methodical scientists. They would likely recognize it whereas the crazy ones might intuit something unexpected also where method could save them from a false call.
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