CM 060: Stuart Firestein on How Breakthroughs Happen - a podcast by Gayle Allen

How do breakthroughs happen? Not how we think.

Movies, books, and articles, constrained by time and word limits, often leave out the realities --  the messy work, filled with dead ends, abandoned questions, and accidental discoveries. That is what Stuart Firestein, Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, wants to change.He believes that the roles ignorance and failure play in the discovery process are vastly underappreciated, so much so that he has written two books about them, Ignorance: How It Drives Science, and Failure: Why Science is So Successful. An advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program for The Public Understanding of Science, Stuart shares insights from his own work as a successful researcher and scientist and from those of his peers, as well as scientific philosophers and historians.

Insights from our interview:  Knowledge and facts are important insofar as they help us ask better questions
Conscious ignorance offers a useful playground for discoveryThe messy process of science and discovery is where the value lies
The disconnect between scientific textbooks and courses and actual scienceThe innovative course he teaches that helps students gain a scientific mindset
What it is that makes a problem interestingHow scientists, researchers, and creatives look for connections
Why failure can be useful even if it never leads to an eventual successThe fact that the more expert a person is the less certain they will be
How systems limit innovationWhy we need better tools for assessment and evaluation in schools
Why we need feedback tools that are more diagnostic and less judgmentalWhy he worries most about people who dislike or are disinterested in science
Why he sees his lab as a cauldron of curiosityHow writing books requires a different way of looking at things
How philosophy and history can impact science in an interactive wayEpisode Links

Stuart Firestein@FiresteinS

Be Bad First by Erika AndersenIs the Scientific Paper a Fraud by Peter Medawar

James Clerk MaxwellPrinciples of Neuroscience

Eric KandelKenneth Rogoff

D.H. LawrenceDo No Harm by Henry Marsh

MCATNIH

NSFSidney Brenner

Michael KrasnyKarl Popper

Thomas KuhnIsaiah Berlin

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