I'm a great believer in our ability to come up with the ideas necessary to solve the big questions. I have less confidence that we'll be able to find a consensus about which ones are right without experiment.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My philosophy is that we should ask the most important question that's capable of being solved.
What intrigues basic scientists like me is that anytime we do a series of experiments, there are going to be three or four new questions that come up when you think you've answered one.
A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?'
Ideas do not always come in a flash but by diligent trial-and-error experiments that take time and thought.
Big ideas we tend to like are the ones that seem impossible or crazy.
The scientific issues that engage people most are the truly fundamental ones: is the universe infinite? Is life just a sideshow in the cosmos? What happened before the Big Bang? Everyone is flummoxed by such questions, so there is, in a sense, no gulf between experts and the rest.
Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.
So if I could just go back now to something which I am sure we should cover here regarding our original scenario: we have, in fact, four ways - four major potential lines of research.
I have generally sought to work on questions that I thought were both interesting and approachable, yet not too widely appreciated. To struggle to make discoveries that would be made by others a short time later seems futile to me.
If you ask almost any of them, 'Do you stand behind your theory? Is this the answer?' I think almost everyone would say, 'No, no, no. I'm just trying to expand the range of possibilities.' We really don't know what's going on.