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Asked by anon-252499 to Sofija, Sheila, Josh, John, hollycampbell, Elizabeth, Edoardo, aprilcridland, Anne on 7 May 2020.
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April Cridland answered on 7 May 2020:
Its natural to want to give up when things are difficult. Sometimes I need to take a break, walk outside, have a coffee and then come back and try again. If that doesn’t work, then I ask one of my colleagues to help. Sometimes talking through the problem with someone else can give you ideas, or maybe they have suggestions for things that you can check.
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Josh Dorrington answered on 7 May 2020:
Hi,
Yeah sometimes! Like many things in life, science can be really difficult and sometimes we all make mistakes or can’t make any progress on a problem or project.
It’s good to try again and again if something is really important to you, sometimes succeeding happens after failing a lot! But sometimes I ‘give up’ in that I move on to something new, especially if its making me very stressed or unhappy.
You might come back to that old thing later, or you might not, but the most important thing is to remember that just because you made mistakes, that doesn’t make you bad at what you do. It just makes you a normal human being 🙂 Besides if you never fail you aren’t really challenging yourself to your full potential!
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Anne Green answered on 7 May 2020:
I’m often tempted to give up…
For small or specific problems, it’s usually helpful to take a break. I often find solutions to problems when I’m walking or running. Talking to someone else can also help. Even if they can’t help with the problem directly, explaining it to someone else can help you find a solution.
For bigger problems, it’s not so much a case of giving up, but trying to find a different way of doing the thing you’re trying to do.
Comments
anon-252499 commented on :
i will try that thankyou
Greg commented on :
definitly take a break! your brain will keep working on the problem in the background but you won’t be stressing about it 🙂 Also talk to someone about it, even if they’re not actually a person! I heard a story of a programmer who kept a rubber duck on their desk for this reason exactly. If their code wasn’t working they would explain why they thought it should work to the duck, and in doing so they would usually figure out what the problem was!
Susan commented on :
Sometimes you give up because it becomes apparent that you do not have the technology to do it. When I was a PhD student, the particle accelerator we were working on (PETRA), was pushing the energies it could reach to the absolute limit to try to discover the top quark. It was very painful: working at the limits of what the machine is capable of makes the operation very tricky, so we spent a fairly large portion of each day with no beam, because something wasn’t working at tip-top efficiency. Eventually we decided that the top quark was not in our energy range, and went back to running at an energy at which the machine was much more reliable. We were completely right ot do this: the energy needed to make a pair of top quarks is about 7 times higher than we could reach!
That decision was pretty easy: we knew that top quark production would make a bg, easily detectable signal in our data, so after a fairly short while running at our highest energy we were confident that it wasn’t there. And trying to push PETRA to even higher energies would have been essentially impossible without rebuilding the machine. And we knew that higher-energy accelerators were being planned, so by the time we’d rebuilt it we’d have been scooped anyway. It’s much harder to give up when you DON’T know whether the thng you’re looking for is right round the next corner: one more month of data, one more improvement in the analysis, one more clever idea for background reduction…
Sometimes you are forced to give up because yu can’t convince your colleagues or your funding agency that it is worth keeping going. Sometimes you go and do something else for a bit, in the hope that when you come back to the original problem you will have had some new ideas (this is particularly true for theorists). Sometimes you go away and work on improving the technology (that’s what LIGO did prior to discovering gravitational waves). Sometimes you, or someone else, come up with a completely different approach. And sometimes it turns out that nature doesn’t work the way you thought it did, and you make a completely different discovery!