There are two equal and opposite faults here. One is assuming that you have some special kind of genius to see the answer to a problem which others have tried and failed to answer.
The opposite mistake is thinking that everything has been tried before—that there is nothing new under the sun. There are quite a lot of old and obvious questions still out there in plain sight which nobody has answered, and which aren’t actually all that hard. There are also many easy questions out there where the given answer is wrong, and the right one can be given quite easily. The world of science is still very new, and lots of things have not yet been sorted out.
In my experience, the dumbest thing that’s often done is answering a question that’s already been answered before. It’s tempting because often it isn’t that hard to do, and a very large proportion of scientific research seems to do it. It’s another good reason to research your field.
Part of the reason this happens is simple isolation. Another group is using different jargon, different techniques and so on, and because search relies on words, you never find the work that’s been done before. It really isn’t easy to know if nobody has asked your question before, unless there’s an answer too.
There are two equal and opposite faults here. One is assuming that you have some special kind of genius to see the answer to a problem which others have tried and failed to answer.
The opposite mistake is thinking that everything has been tried before—that there is nothing new under the sun. There are quite a lot of old and obvious questions still out there in plain sight which nobody has answered, and which aren’t actually all that hard. There are also many easy questions out there where the given answer is wrong, and the right one can be given quite easily. The world of science is still very new, and lots of things have not yet been sorted out.
In my experience, the dumbest thing that’s often done is answering a question that’s already been answered before. It’s tempting because often it isn’t that hard to do, and a very large proportion of scientific research seems to do it. It’s another good reason to research your field.
Part of the reason this happens is simple isolation. Another group is using different jargon, different techniques and so on, and because search relies on words, you never find the work that’s been done before. It really isn’t easy to know if nobody has asked your question before, unless there’s an answer too.