Some Lessons from Sixty Years of Theorizing

Abstract

It gives me great pleasure that so many distinguished colleagues, many of you old friends, have gathered here for a conference associated with my near-centennial, my reaching the age of fourscore years. It is a pleasure to see all of you and to listen to what you have to say. I have been asked to make some remarks too, and I thought hard about what would be appropriate. The result was a decision not to present a paper on some of the research that I'm carrying out, but rather to mention a few of the things I have learned about doing research in theoretical science, things I wish someone had explained to me around 60 years ago. The one I should like to emphasize particularly has to do with the frequently encountered need to go against certain received ideas. Sometimes these ideas are taken for granted all over the world and sometimes they prevail only in some broad region or in certain institutions. Often they have a negative character and they amount to prohibitions of thinking along certain lines. Now we know that most challenges to scientific orthodoxy are wrong and many are crank. Now and then, however, the only way to make progress is to defy one of those prohibitions that are uncritically accepted without good reason.

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