When starting one’s private intellectual journey the question often come up: what shall I study? Sometimes it isn’t even clear which subject area a person wants to pursue. Generalists like Your Humble Correspondent find this a persistent, nagging, and fiendishly frustrating issue.

Add to this puzzle the otherwise sage and sound advice of P. B. Medawar who, in his wonderful little volume Advice to a Young Scientist, insists that the budding seeker of knowledge spend his or her time on problems that matter. I confess some discord with this advice–not that I disagree with it–as someone who has published two academic papers on word play in Ugaritic incantations and Babylonian liver omens respectively. Useless knowledge? Depends. It certainly makes the world more interesting for a few people, and perhaps that is enough. The point of taking this tangent so early in the post is to propose that we do not set too high a threshold for deciding “what matters.”

But back to matters at hand. I have long loved science, but I’ve never really been able to settle on one area. This makes for scattered and undisciplined research that does not address problems that matter. But, ah! What are those problems? I once raised the point to a group of amateur scientists that people starting out have no idea what the interesting problems are. How can they find them? It was broad daylight, but in the silence that followed I could almost hear the crickets.

Today we have Google. Search on the phrase “unsolved problems in science” and you will find several web sites that list the big, thus far intractable problems. A theory of everything, quantum gravity, a string of mathematical conjectures to be proven or disproven, and so on. Science and math have the advantage of being able to state problems clearly, with nice, neat lines drawn around them and clear criteria for success or failure. The humanities have no such luxury, as googling (god, what an ugly “verb” that is) “unsolved problems in humanities” will demonstrate. You get lots of links to lists of unsolved problems in science.

The problem with these problems, however, is that they are definitely not for beginners. The ambition to solve them is beholden to a period in which one works to acquire the expertise needed to participate in solving the problem. By the time you’re ready, the problem might be solved. I recall reading about when the four-color map problem was solved, and later Fermat’s Theorem.

Focusing on problems makes sense from the standpoint of the beginner because if you are going to pursue the life of the mind, then you are committing yourself to expanding the body of human knowledge. This means that you are going to discover something that was not known before. That’s right. You.

Vicarious experience has demonstrated a shorter path to making an original discovery in science. Pick something you are passionately interested in (sometimes easier said than done; grist for a future post), and spend lots of time watching and recording observations associated with that interest. If you are persistent, you will eventually make an original discovery. It may not be the cure for cancer, but you will enjoy the matchless pleasure of knowing something that no one else on the planet knows. That may sound like intellectual snake oil, making such a claim, but I’ve seen it happen.

Then, when you are comfortable with your field, and feel some sense of confidence, take a run at the big problems if you wish.