One day as a PhD student, I picked up a tiny book called “Longitude” by Dave Sobel, a book about the invention of the clock. Reading it eased my PhD-student nerves in a way that nothing else had done before. Later, I found myself seeking out more history-of-science content, subconciously as a form of therapy. I had basically discovered a PhD life hack. Learning from the centuries that have passed, it turns out, is an efficient way to nurture a type of emotional research maturity, one that is impossible to pick up through the brute force of the research process.

Lessons from the history of science

The very struggles you face in your personal research journey have also been faced at pivotal moments throughout history and at much grander scales by scores of scientists and scholars who came before you. Here are some common dynamics that you’ll notice as you read history:

1. Scientists failed a lot. Scientists gambled and made mistakes.
2. Lesser-known scientists were rarely taken seriously, especially by more powerful and more confident scientists who were backed by reputation or seniority or systemic power. There were always pushbacks, humiliations, and complete indifference.
3. Controversies between scientists have always been the norm. “Big and proud” personalities in power have made other scientists’ life’s miserable. Or at times, two “big” scientists on an equal footing sparred publicly with each other. It wasn’t very nice.
4. Credit assignment has been noisy and at other times, deliberately unfair. Some great scientific discoveries were tragically known only long after their originator’s passing.

There are lessons in these observations¹² that make you a more level-headed researcher. You learn to:

• recognize the inevitable ups and downs of the research process,
• navigate the terrain of research with grit,
• value long-term ambitions over anxiety-inducing short-term goals,
• not perceive certain setbacks or the lack of external validation as a personal attack in situations where it is not personal but pure noise,
• not be intimidated by those who may assert their subjective opinions as objective truth with authority,
• hold on to a measured conviction in your own opinions.

You may think that some of these lessons sound like platitudes; but learning how these have manifested in history — through vivid narrative detail — leaves a profound imprint on how you operate as a researcher, and how you construct an inner narrative about your role in the scientific community. For this reason, I strongly recommend PhD students to read history!

Reading list

Here are some of the books I would recommend, I can’t recall the whole list, so I’ll continue to update them over time. ^{3 4}

• Longitude by Dave Sobel: This little book describes the story of how 18th century governments and monarchies funded a race to design the clock, a race that stemmed from colonial ambitions (you need clocks to track the longitude which until then was extremely cumbersome and prone to ship-wrecking errors). The book describes the competition and drama the ensued between inventors and powerful astronomers and the magnitude of grit that was involved in the inventor’s process.

• Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick: This narrates the emergence of Chaos Theory as a standalone discipline (born from problems and observations in various other disciplines) and the pushbacks it experienced along the way. The book also describes the basic tenets of chaos theory in a way that I enjoyed and is easy to follow.

• Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens by Andrea Wulf: This thriller-like story tracks the journey of a dozen astronomers (of many) in the 1760s as they raced to colonies in various corners of the globe. Their goal was to time the journey of the Venus across the Sun in a bid to measure the distance of the Sun from the Earth. The scientists and astronomers worked across imperial borders to consolidate resources and collaborate (or not!), and in their race against time, they faced one obstacle after another, political, logistical and meteorological. Many failed. The book details the competition that developed between various astronomers (and like Longitude, also how all of this was deeply tied to colonization).

• Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever by Hal Hellman: This outlines instances across the vast history of science where two ideas or two people collided head-on. Some of these you may already be aware of, like the one between Newton and Leibniz or the one between Galileo and the Pope. But the book digs out little historical details which paint a nasty picture of many of these debates.

• The Knowledge Machine by Michael Strevens: Forgive me, I do not remember details here, but I remember learning how subjective science can get when it comes to interpreting observations.

Footnotes