issue87-[Spring 小组]-第３次作业

gloriaguo1986UID: 2232808

Issue 87 :In any field of inquiry, the beginner is more likely than the expert to make important discoveries."                                                                                                                  Words: 697
To some extent, I agree with the assertion that beginners are more likely to make breakthroughs in any field of inquiry, for the chief reason that the greenhorn are full of  enthusiasms, curiosities and innovative idea, while experienced experts tend to be more conservative. However, fields of research require extensive professional knowledge and experience, which experts hold, to make important discoveries.

To begin with, beginners can bring new perspectives into the research field, which facilitate new developments. Fresh men are not always the same word as "amateur" and "layman". They are expected to have some special insight into the modern world which changes fast, especially in such new fields as computer science and biomedical science. Also, young people entering a new field can detect some mistakes in the study of that field that experts neglect. With a novice's eyes, he may have some opinions different from those so-called authorities. Sometimes their keen discernment is unimaginable.

What's more, I concede that beginners hold great courage to try new things and intense curiosity about the unknown. When it comes to proposing a new idea or making some bold assumptions, a novice is more creative and braver than an experienced expert. Instead of thinking toward formed theories and old solutions, a beginner usually thinks away from them, making the leap from the unexpected to the inspired. Maybe it is the shortage of deep understanding and meticulous methodology that makes them absolutely free to thinking without any restraint. Or perhaps experts care about their reputations, while what matters to beginners is not what others think of them but what they think of themselves. There are quite many examples illustrating this phenomenon. For example, French physicist De Broglie found wave mechanics when he was a university student. And it is a graduate student who concluded the long and pain-taking odyssey of generations instead of astronomers to find a kind of supernova.

Nonetheless, experts still contribute more to important discoveries. As the saying goes, zeal without knowledge is fire without light. A novice may be more enthusiastic than a passed master, but the latter has more important experience than the former. As far as we know, a man to be creative has its roots in some remote past no longer operating consciously but sill there nonetheless. The inventions we shall see are all examples of departures from tradition, but none could have occurred without tradition. Just as Newton once said "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants", so experts who put a lot of effort into learning from the past while holding the present and imagining the future are certainly the main resource for important breakthroughs.  For instance, Daniel Chee Tsui, a world-renowned physicist of Chinese descent, Nobel Laureate in Physics 1998, discovered the remarkable fractional quantum Hall effect, which has had a profound impact on the understanding of the collective behaviour of strongly correlated electrons. This important discovery depends not only on his rich experience and knowledge, but also a series of apparent failures and his unremitting efforts. This reveals the fact that many discoveries did not spring to life in a flash of inspiration but evolved slowly from previous works.

Besides the field of physical science, we can find evidences in the field of social science as well. Psychology, for example, requires extent professional knowledge and experience to make breakthroughs. The more experienced the person, the more likely great discoveries will follow. Freud developed his psycho-analysis approach for the treatment of psychological and emotional disorders on the basis of his wide range of psychological knowledge and so many cases he studied for many years. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that a valuable antique may be mistaken as nothing more than a common article in the eyes of a beginner. A novice may overlook its significance and hence lose the chance to make an important discovery.

In the final analysis, beginners do bring new perspectives into the field which promote new developments, thus create important discoveries. However, experts are still the main resource for those breakthroughs, for all important discoveries break from the past but remain indebted to it.


[ 本帖最后由 gloriaguo1986 于 2007-12-7 11:33 编辑 ]