Interpersonal Interactions among Materials Scientists
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POSTERMINARIES
Interpersonal Interactions among Materials Scientists or
“You Can’t Fight in Here...This is the War Room!!” (from Dr. Strangelove, a Stanley Kubrick film) Near the end of the POSTERMINARIES that appeared in the March 2002 issue of MRS Bulletin, the following line appeared: “....in the face of vicious colleagues who live every day just to try to expose you in a mistake so they can build their own egos and prove how much smarter they are than you....” Well naturally, subsequent to the appearance of these lines, some of my colleagues criticized me for writing them and told me that they thought I had made a mistake in doing so. Encouraged and motivated by such a response, I felt that this was clearly a worthy topic on which one could and should expand. First, we all know who these vicious, mean-spirited colleagues are—you know, the ones who love to expose another colleague in a mistake, and to do it in an obvious and preferably public way! They are, in fact, a significant fraction of those of us (yep, I’ve done it too) who are engaged in the business of materials science and engineering research. Who among us hasn’t felt the warm glow of self-satisfaction when sitting down at a conference after pointing out that the speaker hadn’t thought of some really important point, or had made some fundamental error, or had perhaps not measured some obvious thing that should have been measured—and that, if measured, might have clarified the whole thing? Exposing the errors of nervous beginning graduate students who are giving their first oral conference paper obviously scores extra points. If their advisor has the courage (and not all do!) to rise in their defense, then one can show that not only did the advisor do something stupid as well, but that they also should have known better—Wow, it’s like triplecoupon day at the supermarket. As someone who has been in the research “business” quite a while now and who has known a large number of very smart (plus a couple of even brilliant) people, I have to say that I have never known anyone who was right all of the time and who didn’t make mistakes and errors at one point or another. We all do, with varying frequency, some really “not smart” things in this business—and we do them in spite of our best efforts not to! From my personal observations, it seems to me that the only people in research (at least in the physical sciences) who don’t make mistakes and errors and who aren’t wrong occasionally are the
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people who, in fact, actually just don’t do any research. In our trying to understand or discover something new, or solve a difficult problem for the first time, or create something original, it is effectively just impossible to be right all of the time. It is a tough business. If it were easy, then a lot more people would be doing it (for the huge salaries if nothing else, right?), and the ones who are doing it would be doing a better job.
Who among us hasn’t felt the warm glow of selfsatisfaction when sitting down at a conference after pointing out that the spea
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