Naturally Obsessed

For my research course, we recently watched Naturally Obsessed:The Making of a Scientist. It was a public television special about the research experience in grad school. It followed several students and their PI (principal investigator) in a lab at a college in New York. They were doing biological research, so not everything in the movie completely applied to me. It did help to put perspective on what the research experience in grad school would be like.
These particular students spent a great deal of time working on the same project. They had to repeat the procedure for their experiment thousands of times over multiple years before getting any results. This would put a lot of stress on anyone. For my research in grad school, I don't really think that I will be repeating the same general procedure over several years, but I will probably spend several years in grad school just the same. Throughout all the years they spent in grad school, they only made around $24,000 a year and didn't have very much time for anything but research. It will take quite a bit of perseverance to get through that experience, but I think I have the dedication to do it. I think that the joy of discovery would be better than making a good deal of money answering to a superior and designing products for a company.
The movie showed the graduate students' experiences in the lab quite well. Seeing them being frustrated because their experiment didn't yield any results time and time again put things into perspective. It seems that in order to succeed in grad school, you don't only need to know the subject matter, you need to have extreme patience. Judging from what I've heard from my professors and what I saw in the film, the end result when you finish getting your PhD is quite rewarding. While the film was rather intimidating, I still am eager as ever to get to grad school.
My research experience for this course so far has been very positive. The independence in my research is a great new experience. I am finding answers to things that I don't already have an answer for. The fact that I am making conclusions about something that is over 90 light-years away from me, something I can most likely never reach in my lifetime, is thrilling. I don't think any other job in the field of science would fit me as well as research will. From what I've seen, with a good mentor and PI for my research, grad school will be a great experience.
There seem to be a lot of burdens to carry that come from going into grad school, but I knew from  the start it wouldn't be easy. I am hoping to do things that no one has ever done before. With time and hard work I may achieve that. If I don't try to achieve my dreams, no matter how unlikely they are, I will have absolutely no chance to achieve them. I plan to give it my all and hope for the best.

My Future in Research

Recently for my intensive research course, I was asked to read two articles, "The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research" and "How to Succeed in Science: A Concise Guide for Young Biomedical Scientists". Although my research is physics based, both were useful in giving me an idea of what research as a career would have in store for me.
The first article mentioned that the author's graduate studies and research in general made her feel "stupid". I don't think this is an entirely accurate word to describe that. While we may not know the answer to a given question that we are researching, we are trying to come up with an explanation for it. A better word would be "uninformed". Seeking knowledge isn't a stupid thing, hence the saying "There's no such thing as a stupid question". Many students may still be discouraged from research because they feel too stupid for it, but I don't intend to give up so easily. It seems like my generation is plagued by not wanting to strive for anything extraordinary. They are happy enough simply with what is easily within reach. I want to break away from that and try to do something with my life that will actually matter. This is why I decided on trying to be a theoretical physicist. It won't be easy, but it will sure as hell be interesting. Attempting to answer the seemingly unanswerable questions interests me greatly.
Which brings me to the next article, "How to Succeed in Science". While this is more focused on the research experience of biological scientists, it did still apply to me. The author mentioned that research in graduate school and beyond will take up quite a bit of my time. I knew when I decided to work towards a PhD that this would be the case. Hard work isn't "work" if you don't dread doing it everyday, so long hours probably won't bother me.
Along with the long hours, I won't have someone to hold my hand every step of the way. Sometimes, the research you are doing will never have been done before. You can't go to a professor to get help all the time, since they might not have an answer for you. Coming up with my own answers seems rather daunting, but we'd already know the answers to a lot of things if research were a cakewalk.
The article also mentioned it may be years before you become a successful researcher and start getting grants. Perseverance will be a must, so I must be prepared to spend several years without being very economically successful. There is always the possibility of that, but I'm not in it for the money. Discovery and speculation are more valuable to me than any amount of money I could have. Physical things can only get you so far in life.
In summary, if I choose to be a researcher, I will be working long hours for relatively low pay most likely for several years. This won't be a problem when the work I will be doing won't numb my mind like some jobs I have had in the past. I'm shooting for the top, and I don't intend to give up until I get there.

Sources:
Schwartz, MA. The importance of stupidity in scientific research. J Cell Sci. 2008 Jun 1;121(Pt 11):1771.

Yewdell, JW. How to succeed in science: a concise guide for young biomedical scientists. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol. 2008 May; 9(5):413-6.

Thoughts on Intensive Research

As you may or may not know, I have been doing intensive science research for a three week course this January. I am researching a eclipsing binary star system(two stars that orbit each other and eclipse each other from our perspective). The research involves analyzing photometry (star magnitude or brightness) and spectroscopy (wavelength of light from the star) images taken over last semester with my physics professor. So far, there has been a lot of repetition with calibrating and analyzing the over 150 images we took of the star. Oddly enough, this hasn't deterred me from wanting to do more research. If anything, I am more interested than ever in it.

Light Curve

My analysis of these images is actually beginning to get me some results. For example, I recently finished analyzing my photometry images. With the magnitudes I extracted, I created a light curve. The image to the right is an example of a light curve for a binary star. This isn't the light curve I have, since mine wasn't the right format to upload to this blog. The light curve tells me how much less light gets to us when one star eclipses the other. When the hotter, brighter star is eclipsed, you see the larger dip in the brightness. When I compared my light curve to other light curves from different studies, the change in magnitude during the minima agreed, so I didn't do all that work for nothing.
Soon, I will begin analyzing the spectrometry images. This is the meat of the data. When I get the wavelengths of light emitted at different points in the period of the star, I will be able to determine many things, such as the mass of each star, how far away it is, and possibly how hot each star is. Actually accomplishing something with my research is something I haven't done before, and I really enjoy it.
If I were to make a career out of research, which is what I fully intend to do, it would mean that I would actually have job satisfaction. I had a job at a grocery store in high school, which was a horribly dull job. That gave me extra incentive to find an interesting career to avoid working a mentally degrading job like that ever again. At this point, I don't really care how much I'll get paid when I get through with education, as long as my job isn't "a long story filled with sighs and regrets" as Scott Pilgrim might say.
I plan to go to graduate school for theoretical physics, so this experience will really help me when I get to graduate school. I also am applying for internships in physics and astronomy, including a theoretical astrophysics internship using a supercomputer to simulate black holes. This course has helped me know, at least in part, what might be in store for me this summer and during graduate school. I really hope that I can achieve my goal to become a theoretical physicist. This is more of a speculative science than what I am doing now, but there is still quite a bit of math involved. Instead of working with graphs and spreadsheets, I might look at some occurrence in the universe and come up with a hypothesis, possibly based on physical laws already developed, to explain that phenomenon. Examples of theoretical physicists in the past are Newton, Einstein, Galileo, and Niels Bohr. Contemplating things we don't know is a passion of mine, so this would probably be my ideal career. If I do reach that goal, I will most likely be working for a college or university as a professor, although, the possibilities are endless. I am excited to see what my future holds for me.

A Different Perspective

For my science research course I am taking this semester, one of our assignments was to shadow someone else doing a different type of experiment. I had a lot of choices, since no one else was doing physics or astronomy research like me. The course is mainly aimed at biology and chemistry majors. The person I shadowed was doing research about GMO (genetically modified) foods. Specifically, she was trying to find a way to determine whether or not a food was GMO or not.

Electrophoresis Gel

Finished Gel

The way she went about her research was very different from what I do. My project involved gathering images over the fall semester. I am now analyzing and gathering data from these images and putting the data into a spreadsheet and graphing it. Her project involved setting up an electrophoresis gel and putting DNA from different types of GMO and non-GMO foods as well as a "ladder" which would help her measure the length of a base pair. I had some experience with electrophoresis in high school, but it wasn't very in depth, so this was still pretty new for me. She told me she had been having some trouble getting it to work, so she had to try setting it up in different ways. She added some chemicals to create a gel to use and let it harden to a jello-y sort of substance. She then added all the DNA and the ladder. She ran an electric charge through it and let it sit for about half an hour, so I went back to my own research. When I came back, it was done, and it seemed to work better than previous gels she had done. The end result looked sort of like the picture to the right, but with a lot less lines. The column on the left is the ladder, which is used like a ruler to determine the length of the base pair of DNA. The shorter base pairs travel further and end up closer to the bottom. She was looking for which food had a longer base pair. She knew which ones were GMO so her goal was to make sure that the experiment was working before doing real tests.
The research she was doing was a lot more hands on than my research. For my research, my professor and I used machines for everything. We took pictures of a particular star with cameras built into the telescope, I used a computer program to calibrate (remove the static and noise) the images and to extract data, I put all the data into spreadsheet and graphed it with another computer program, and analyzed that. For her experiment, it seemed she had to set up a new gel every day if the previous one didn't work. She compared the lengths of base pairs to see whether or not a food was genetically modified. It seemed that there was a lot less numbers involved with her experiments. Another thing, my images were taken over one period of time and whether or not we got images depended on the whether. If we found out we got bad data, we'd have to wait until summer or fall for the star to come out again. If her experiment didn't work, she would just have to try things a different way tomorrow.
Overall, it was interesting to see how a different type of scientist performs research. My research was almost completely incomparable to hers. When her electrophoresis was done, she could know right away whether or not it worked and what it meant. My research takes much longer to get to that point, but it is still very enjoyable.

Researching a Binary Star

Binary Star

This January, I am researching a binary star system. A binary star is two stars orbiting each other. To the right is an artists rendition of what they look like. Often, a more massive star, in this case the blue star, will draw matter from the other star. My professor and I are currently studying a binary star system that goes by the name Algol, or Beta-Perseus. It is called Beta-Perseus because it is the second brightest star in the Perseus constellation. It has been observed for a long time that Algol varies in brightness. The ancient Persians named it Algol, which means 'The Demon Star', because of that fact. I plan to gather data about Algol's magnitude (brightness) at different points in its approximately three day period, the mass of the binary system, the chemical composition of the stars, their temperatures, and more. Once that is determined, time permitting, I will compare this to other data on binary stars.

Image of Algol taken by my professor and I in September.

There are  two types of images that my professor and I took over the fall semester: photometry and spectroscopy. These photos had to be taken over three months to provide a conclusive light curve, more on that later. I been spending the past few days calibrating the images and extracting magnitude data. Images are calibrated with flat images and dark frames. Flat images are taken once a season usually and are done by taking pictures of a white surface and averaging several of these and subtracting the dark images. Dark images are pictures taken with the camera's shutter closed. These are taken every night for every group of pictures you take. These images are averaged to create a master dark. You subtract this from each image and divide the flat frames. This removes the "noise" in the image, providing a cleaner image that gives more accurate data.
After a couple of days of calibrating images, I moved on to extracting magnitude data from images. This is even more tedious than calibrating the over 150 images I have. Once I get all the magnitude data, I will determine what point in the period each picture is and create a light curve. This will show us the difference in magnitude when the stars eclipse each other. That is going to be my main focus for tomorrow. There's a long road ahead of me, here's to hoping for results.

Reflection on the History of Hypothesis

                Throughout secondary education, I had been told to have hypotheses for each experiment I ran. I never really thought anything of it, other than complaining that I had to do more work. Experimentation without a hypothesis was never taught to me before college. The teachers aren’t to blame for this, though. Most of the experiments we ran were learning experiences trying to use what we learned to predict what would happen and see the concepts we were being taught in action. It would be unreasonable to expect a fifth grader to do intensive research projects that professors, scientists, and college students are often involved in. For one, they most likely wouldn’t be able to grasp what was going on. Secondly, they probably wouldn’t have the attention span to make it even worth attempting.

Image of Algol taken by my professor and I on the night of 9/03/2010.

                Whether or not you will have a hypothesis really depends on what type of research you are doing. Hypotheses are still quite useful in most experiments, such as attempting to validate a result from experiments similar to the one you are running. There are other times when a hypothesis is useless, such as mapping the human genome. There are so many possibilities for the genome that making a hypothesis would be impossible. In the research I am performing on a variable star, I am attempting to find values such as the mass of the binary star system and its distance from us. There is no use for a prediction or hypothesis in that instance. 

                As mentioned in the article “A Brief History of Hypothesis”₁, hypotheses can also cause a bias when attempting to perform an experiment. For instance, there was recently a group that claimed that vaccines were the cause of the development of autism in children. Studies were performed that found no correlation between vaccines and autism. The group then claimed that the studies were biased. So more studies were done, and there was still no proof. Long story short, the group didn’t accept any study that didn’t agree with their idea. As you can see, such a bias would cause a lot of difficulties when performing a study like that. It is also a large waste of resources. Science should ideally be unbiased, but humans by nature are biased creatures. This is the root of many of our problems, not only the scientific ones.

                For the type of research I want to do when I finish my graduate studies, hypotheses will be a must. My ultimate goal with education is to become a theoretical physicist, like Carl Sagan, Einstein, or Stephen Hawking. The goal of a theoretical physicist is to come up with explanations for happenings in the universe that we don’t understand. Sometimes these theories become widely accepted laws or ideas. Examples of these are the Big Bang theory, gravity, black holes, and relativity. But even laws are only strong hypotheses based on what we’ve experienced in our region of space and time. Theoretically, everything could change tomorrow. Gravity could start pushing instead of pulling and time could stop, but that is extremely unlikely, which is why gravity and relativity are not questioned.

                The usefulness of hypotheses really depends on the research you are doing. If your question could be answered by a numerical value or a sequence of proteins, etc, then a hypothesis would most likely do you no good whatsoever. If, however, you are predicting the outcome of adding a certain chemical to a compound, then a hypothesis would be useful.

Sources

1.       Glass, David J., and Ned Hall. "A Brief History of the Hypothesis." Cell. 134. (2008): 378-381. Print.