Work and Well-Being in Science

Apparently they haven't met many scientists. Yeah, no, really, that's that's the yeah, I think that's that's really the stereotype we're trying to dispel. And yeah, so so we found actually the the a little bit about how this started, because a number of years ago I was doing another massive international study of scientists, and I was on a team with a number of other sociologists, and we were looking at the social context of science, everything from

family life, ethics, religion, those sorts of things. And at the end of these long interviews we did about 600 interviews. Towards the end of the interviews we heard scientists telling us about the the many sacrifices they were making for the sake of their work. They're giving up their

sometimes their health. Sometimes, you know, prestigious jobs in industry, etc. We were mainly studying academic scientists, bench scientists, and and we asked them, Why do you do it? Then? A lot of them would say, because it's beautiful. And so I was really struck by the use that word it kept coming up so often. So I really want to understand. What do they mean by this word.

And and so it means different things to to scientists in different fields. I I study physicists and biologists, and there's some

some commonalities and some differences. And so so we find that there aren't there aren't an infinite number of things. We people say beauty in the eye of the beholder. It's not exactly true. We find that you know, in those like initial interviews that we did, we? We were asking hundreds of scientists, You know. What do you encounter beauty in your work, and what does that mean to you?

We found that it only came to about 8 or 10 things. We were always talking about symmetry or simplicity, or elegance, or a sense of harmony, or a sense of fit, or the hidden order, or the inner logic of systems. And so it was a range of things

that kept coming up over and over again, and and sometimes they were referring to experiences of all when they were pulled out of themselves, feeling a sense of vastness, sometimes a sense of wonder, and they use that as a as beauty. But we find that that for physicists Beauty often means symmetry and simplicity. and so symmetry in the sense of the symmetry of theories and laws. You know translation across space, translation across time a law that is

true here on earth is also true on Mars, and any of those sorts of of of symmetries. and and then simplicity, in the sense that they want to reduce things to the fundamentals. There's there's a lot of a drive towards developing a unified field theory, for instance, right trying to find a single model, or at least a model that would fit on a coffee mug or a t-shirt that explains all the fundamental forces of reality. So that's a you know. A lot of the physicists find that beautiful

biologists Don't find those things beautiful. They they really seem to gravitate towards complexity. and they want to understand a system in all of its intricacies. They want to understand. You know how a particular mechanism is activated in some context, and not in others. And and so there's much more resistance actually towards simplification, and then wanting to understand things with with adequate complexity. And there's also more of a preference, for.

you know, visual beauty and biology. So the kinds of patterns that you see, and under the microscope, and you know, seeing life unfold. And there's a lot of visual beauty there. and elegance means something different to biologists. It seems then, to physicists a lot of physicists talk about the elegance of theories whereas biologists talk about elegance in terms of experimental design. so those are the differences that we see largely. But there there are also similarities primarily in terms of

the hidden order. That is, you know what is the what are the sort of deeper structures of reality underlying the the chaos that we see, what is the underlying pattern, so describing that hidden order uncovering that hidden order is equally beautiful to both business and biologists. And and then the in our logic of systems that the you know causal mechanisms that drive these these different structures that explain how reality works. That's also equally beautiful to physicists and biologists.

and and i'm saying this, by the way, because Sometimes some of your scientific brethren Don't, give as much respect to sociology and psychology as they might. but they are, you know they are. They are deep disciplines all the same. And you know, this this notion of beauty is certainly been available to everybody, as maybe as a as a lay person, as it were not an expert in it, but they they see it all the time.

In fact, I just noticed the the the latest newsletter from bite size. Bio came out, and it this is not. I did not have any conversations with the editor about this. Something just showed up The end of the newsletter is some paintings of somebody who's making paintings of electron microscope images, and you know, to make them as scientifically accurate as possible. And of course they're gorgeous.

And you. You can't not be compelled by that kind of thing, and some of the things you just mentioned to like like elegance is Elegance is a mathematical concept, I think, is, I think, is beautiful. and and it's now I've I've mentioned that before, and some of the other things you've talked about. I mentioned before in the podcast. because. you know, biology is made of chemistry. Chemistry is made of physics. Physics is made of math that's just made of metric, you know.

but but they're all. They all touch each other eventually, you know. So so now you mentioned at the beginning the name of your study did not have the word beauty in it. It was about wellness and well being for scientists. So so what's the connection there between beauty and and well being?

for scientific progress. So we decided to figure out a way to make this this sort of potential selection bias go away, and we thought of well-being as being sort of a neutral and and important area. There's a lot of research suggesting a a looming mental health crisis, or even a a crisis in in progress in in the side of the community, particularly coming out of the Uk.

High rates of burnout and high rates of depression, particularly among postgraduate students and postdocs. So early career scientists seem to have a lot of mental health challenges these days, and you know, partly it has to do with the precariousness of the job Market partly has to do with. The pressure is related to the sort of increasing.

you know, emphasis on on publish or parish, and and metrics for success, and so forth funding cuts, all sorts of factors institutionally that are affecting this. And so we really thought it's important to understand how scientists are doing, and we thought that that I mean it really was a question for us as to whether aesthetic experience these kinds of encounters with beauty or experience of on wonder were related at all to to well being among scientists. So that was what we

wanted to find out. One of them even want to find out what duty meant, and then then sort of its distribution, and the scientific population, the different types of beauty, and so forth. But also it's it's impact. And so so we decided to focus on well, being a sort of the main theme of the study. And we did find actually that aesthetic experience is strongly associated

with well-being, and so we have a one of our. We have a couple of different measures of well being we use for positive well being something called the Harvard flourishing index. And that's a global measure of things like life, satisfaction, physical health, mental health, a sense of purpose, close social relationships, and so on and and so so on, that count scientists who encounter a aesthetic experiences more and more often in their work. So

feeling you know the various we we didn't ask them directly about, you know. Do you contribute in your work? It wasn't just that we gave them a number of things like, how frequently do you find yourself pleased by encountering symmetries in in your, in in the whether the equations or the objects you're studying, or how frequently do you find yourself being surprised by the discovery of a hidden order, or you know. So so we we would break it down into those kinds of components.

How often were you? Did Did you find yourself feeling a sense of gratitude for learning something new? Or did you feel? How often did you feel so pulled it pulled out of yourself.

or or feel a sense of of vastness in the face of what you were studying. So we had a number of indicators of that sort, and so the more frequently they had those experiences the better their overall. Well being on this, on this flourishing index net of all kinds of controls for country gender discipline, even the effects of the pandemic. So it's it's suggest that there's there really a strong relationship between between beauty and well being

You know you don't ruin your health to make it as scientist. You don't ruin your relationships to make it as a scientist. not if you want to do it properly. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about the the the structure of the study, you know. Did How did you choose? So you interviewed? How many people did you interview. How did you conduct your your data collection? How did that All work?

and and these countries had the highest response rates in that previous study, so we thought there would be a higher chance of success. We also had established research networks in each of these countries.

so we had a team on the ground. We had interesting differences in in relation to say the R. And D. Infrastructure that that was dedicated towards you know the the the proportion of of the Gdp of each of these countries, dedicated, to which science had some interesting differences, you know, with the Us. And Uk being the highest, and then and giving the lowest, and it also some interesting differences in aesthetic cultures. So we were, you know, curious to know whether there might be some

national differences because of the value of things like the arts across these countries. So so we selected those countries, and then we restricted ourselves, as I said to these Phd. Granting institutions. partly because that would allow us to get a sampling frame, which is a list of all the people we could sample from.

and so we could guarantee that for our Phd. Granting institutions, there would be enough information on the websites about all of the scientific members of the side of the communities. And these organizations right? So all the graduate students, post Docs faculty, etc. And so we could scrape all those websites. compile a list, and then and then sample from that.

And so the the you know. In these countries the the vast amount of scientists. Actually the the largest proportion is from the Us. So we had to stratify that sample. We couldn't take everybody, otherwise we'd end up just getting more us scientists, so we to restrict ourselves to a smaller number of us scientists. and then we we took the rest in the other countries without having to stratify. And so we there. We got a list of about 22,000 scientists from from this from this population.

and and they we invited all them to to the survey. We got a completion rate of about 3,500 scientists. So that's 15% completion rate. We had a higher response rates. The number of scientists who started the survey were about 6,000, something like that. But there were a lot of issues we we came across. Some of the institutions blocked our study because they thought it was as it was a scam.

So so we had. We had a whole bunch of challenges. We tried to do everything we could to increase the response rate we put out ads in nature. We we had a massive advisory board of of really renowned scientists across all these countries. We had written to department chairs. We had

a number of ipads raffle that we had. Every every participant got a gift card, and the amount of about $20. So we did a lot of things, but but a lot of people were suspicious that you know we academics get out, You know. The scientists get a ton of emails.

you know, inviting you to like scammy conferences that aren't real, and you know. So we did have a lot of queries saying, how do I know this is really legitimate studies? So a lot of people weren't convinced. So unfortunately the best we could do was to get this 15% rate. and we were able to. Fortunately, since we had the population parameters, we could correct for any selection bias, at least along the lines of country discipline to some extent gender

and and position, you know. So so if if you know, we did have more Indian scientists compared to the to the proportion in in the population who took our survey, and we had to wait them lower and then wait the Us. Scientists higher, for instance. so we could do those kinds of corrections. So that was the survey.

and then I after the survey, we we, you know, we had these 3,500. We asked them if if they wanted to participate in a follow up in depth interview, which would be about an hour or 2 an hour and a half long. and and that was done over Zoom, and we had about a 1,000 scientists who agree to be part of that. And so from that sample we took about 200, and, and, you know, wanted some diversity across discipline, gender and position, and so on. and we did some in-depth interviews as well.

there's been for the last century or so a lot of discussion around whether beautiful equations are a reliable guide to the truth or not, and and it seems that for the first half of the twentieth century a lot of prominent scientists were insistent that if you, if you just go with beauty, you will turn out to be right. So so people like Dirac, for instance, was very famous for stating that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than for them to fit experiment

because your experiments could be wrong. But but if you're you know, if your if your equations are are elegant, and if they're if there's beauty in them, you can probably account on experiments eventually validating them. There are others like Marie Gilman. you know, Brenda Heisenberg, many of them who who thought that beauty was was a was a guide, reliable guide to the truth. the challenges. After the 1960 S. And particularly in the last few decades.

a lot of physicists have been saying that, you know we relied on the beautiful math to invest a ton of money in things like large Hadron, Collider. and very expensive experiments that Haven't really produced much new understanding, you know. So the the discovery, Higgs Boson, for instance, about 10 years ago.

simply validated theories that were develop in the sixties, but they haven't really produced anything new, and that that's the only real major discovery that's come from that. The you know that you know, a lot of scientists are saying that that some of these other kinds of beauty driven theories like super symmetry and super string theory, and so on. There's there's really no empirical evidence for them, and it's not even clear how one would empirically

assess those theories right? So how do you? How do you assess, like multi versus like, how do you empirically validate that? So? Some scientists are arguing that this sort of beauty driven science is not. It's not science. It's fairy tale, physics, or or it's not even wrong. We don't even know what to call it, but it's still sort of science fiction that designs so that's one kind of complaint.

and and the the physicist Sabina Hassenfelder has has is particularly then vocal about this, and she or she wrote a really great book called Lost in Math. For anyone who is interested in this topic. and the subtitle is how beauty leads physics astray.

and we haven't heard any any similar complaints among biologists. The lot of the biologists we talked to would say that you know beauty is, you know it's good to have. I mean it's it's a motivator, you know it. It draws you in to become a scientist or

or it's important to have actually beauty as a heuristic or or or a guide in experimentation, because you you don't want a messy experiment. You want your experiment to be designed in a way that's elegant. You don't want to communicate science in a way that's messy. You want to communicate in a way that's aesthetically pleasing. So So that's you know. At least on the biology side. There seems to be less of a concern about this cognitive bias. The other concern that's come up, though, is, is that

the insistence that that science is about the pursuit of beauty could be used to exploit scientists. And so we've heard from a few of the scientists. We study that the expectation that you should love what you do, you should be glad that someone is even paying you to do what what you you know ought to be pursuing as a hobby, or just for the sake of love. Don't ask for promotions, you know. Why are you? Why are you asking for more pay?

And so women scientists in particular have have told us that they've heard this narrative of science as a vocation or or science, as as something you should do for the sake of love being used as a a a justification for denying them promotion or or tenure, or, you know, paying. you know, junior faculty, or or even contingent faculty, you know, adequately. So that's a big problem. You don't want beauty to be used as a sort of

you know, tool for exploiting people. So that. That's the other kind of concern that we've seen.

We pay you, you work and the story, I mean, that's no kind of life. It's no kind of career. So. And and I love this Another another thing, that at least from my vantage point, is a new thing in the toolbox. It's adding beauty to the toolb. So we've already talked a lot about about well being a on a happy scientist. And and by the time that is really focused on helping people advance in their careers, and sometimes. That's by

learning how to do a Western block, or i'm learning how to read your full Sightometry results, but sometimes it's something more esoteric, and and there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes that word even gets used as a as a pejorative. It's a character isn't bad it's it's another world. and you know one of the things to you you brought up, and I I like the the fact that there are

physicists and biologists in your study, because they they really have some different strengths. and I've been reading several really interesting books of late that are coming from physicists that everybody should read, and you know biologists. but everybody. You're like our mathematical universe by Max Tegm are fantastic or another one. So i'm looking at my kindle here. So the case against reality. What a great button. Yeah.

And it's talking about the biology of why we perceive the world away. We do. And you know the perceptions. our how we find beauty. Now, some people find beauty and those like electron microscope images some people will find beauty in. but in things that aren't visual. Maybe maybe it's sound. you know. And you think about. You know biologists that are studying animals, and they care about the sounds these animals make. And yeah. you know it's all it's all part and parcel.

And so I I recently interviewed I mean I have a podcast called Beauty at work, and I and I recently interviewed a a virologist who was telling me. you know. Yeah, when I look into the microscope they're pretty images and so on. But that's not really that interesting to me where I really find beauty and what we talk about amongst ourselves as beautiful is the beauty of understanding. So so all of those other forms of beauty. The sensory forms of beauty

are really valuable only in as much as they contribute to understanding, shedding new light on something we use. So that's where those those themes of of grasping the hidden order or inner logic of things really seem to resonate for most of the scientists. In fact, close to 80% of scientists said that that was what beauty meant to them. Either the the hidden or discovering they had an order or the inner logic of of of things.

So we see that as the Orienting force, in fact, we want to argue that science is a quest for the beauty of understanding. That's the business of science. But if you're not in that business you're gonna burn out it's. You know you're You're kind of you're you're in it for other things, you know. Maybe you're in it because it's a nice career. It's a comfortable job, etc. But then you may decide that there are other things that could meet those goals for you better.

But primarily those those who seem to be committed to doing science. The vast majority of them say they're they're really in it to have that experience of of the beauty of understanding.

this. This is some interesting stuff here, so I want to call out again. You just mentioned. You have a podcast, and it's called. It's called Beauty at work beauty at work, so that might be one that you folks want to check out it. It's funny. And in the podcast world I I find there's not really that much competition. It's. It's easy to say listen to ours. But listen to his, too, you know, because just we we want to get information in from all directions. So I see the information more like data.

It's data from all directions which we then turn into information because we start to see connections between the data that we pick up in different places. You like this study. I wouldn't. I wouldn't have looked for a study like yours out there. I wouldn't have thought it existed. So you know your people reached out to us, and we we do appreciate that because because it fits well into what we're trying to accomplish here, too. We want have happy scientists out there.

Well being it's gonna matter to them every way they can get it. I want them to have it, and and beauty always struck me, in fact, that you know, in between the time we first contacted and and recording this. I I immediately thought of a microscopist that I thought you guys got to talk. This is yeah, he's. He's constantly posting beautiful pictures on and on linkedin. And and he's an interesting guy, but I knew you'd be an interesting guy, too, from our our introductory Conference conversations.

But you know when else what we expect a sociologist to talk to a microscopist. I mean, yeah, you're not normally gonna interact with each other. You're not. You're probably not even at the same conferences. You know. Oh, definitely not. Yeah. But you know, science is such a big world. and 2 people outside it.

You know it All scientists, scientists, you know. Every biologist knows chemistry, right biologists, and and it's funny how there's a hierarchy of some respect some things more than others depending on where they started from. Yeah, but you know it all. It all keeps branching out, and it all keeps crossing over. And this notion of elegance, I think, comes from mathematics originally, and and I. I like what you said earlier, talking about how biologists have more of an interesting complexity.

And but there's a reason why life is complex and that complexity. You can't boil it down some stuff. Isn't that simple. There is a minimum. you minimum reduction, and after that it's it's just all

delighted to to to learn more from people who are interested. We also have a forthcoming article in the Journal of Bio sciences on beauty and biology that should be out sometime in the next few months.

Lawyers believe it or not. There's beauty in the law, and so some doing that those sorts of conversations I I've been hosting a series of salon dinners. bringing people together from different backgrounds, scientists as well as others.

to talk about what beauty means to them in the work that they do, which has been really a a fascinating experience, because it a lot of people find themselves reinvigorated by discovering aspects of their work that they didn't realize we're motivating and and worthwhile and meaningful. And and so that's that's that's another sort of expanding project. The other sort of thing I've been trying to do is you know the this sort of the concept of the beauty of understanding that we find

we really think that the world has something to learn from what the scientific community has to offer here. So one of the puzzles in our study was, you know, we When we set out to do this work. we thought that scientists might might think that communicating the beauty of science would help build public trust in science, because particularly in fields like, you know, when it comes to climate change and so on. There, there's there's a.

You know, complaint that the way in which science is communicated tends to be very dogmatic, moralistic kind of finger wagging, you know. Listen to us. We're the experts we know better. So so we thought, you know. Maybe maybe scientists would would see beauty as a as a you know better way to communicate science and more attractive way.

But when we asked scientists this question in our interviews, a lot of them said, No, that's that's really naive. This people are going to come to whatever set of facts you bring them, no matter how beautiful they're going to come to those facts with their own political priors. And so if if your facts reinforce those prize, they'd be happy to support your science and of your facts

Threaten those priors, then then they'll they'll reject you, and and no matter how beautiful your science is, it's not going to to come through.

So it's very old. Actually. Hobbes made this argument some 350 years ago, and it's a scientists seem very hobs in. But but we think it's not the beauty of facts, but rather the beauty of understanding, so that ability to grasp the inner logic of things that that you know it requires intellectual humility. It requires a willingness to be wrong, even a sense of delight in being wrong, because you can learn something new.

So we're wondering like, how do we harness that? And and because we think that our polarized society needs to develop that sort of a virtue. So we try to figure out how that can be done. We've been trying to bring together some scientists and science, educators and and science philanthropists. And so we're trying to to, to, to to have some conversations around that to see how this particular

you know process that's cultivated in the scientific community, not perfectly because science has its own internal politics, and so on, but but at least I don't think that's going to be a surprised any of the listeners. Yeah, yeah. So we don't want to be naive about. You know about the problems in the scientific world. But the very least. There's this, this idea that there, there's this ideal

that isn't even there in the in the public. And so we want to figure out. How do we expand that make that happen? And And yeah, more generally, i'm interested. I'm I my, I've applied for another grant to to to look at meaningfulness and scientific work more broadly. And so so we'll see if that comes through. But yeah, there's some some other, you know, projects on them down the road, and and hopefully come through

And we all do that to a certain extent. But but I don't believe everybody does that all the time. Yeah. So we got to take advantage of those moments. So if if beauty will help with that fabulous, and it's gonna make for happier scientists. They do that. Yeah, it it's. We want to. Everybody wants to do their work. and, you know, not be bothered. But they they would also love for it to be appreciated. and especially if people are working in really periodite fields really highly focused.

it's hard for them to get appreciation for the outside world, because the outside world doesn't understand anything they do, you know. Yeah. So learning to communicate, not just among your peers, but but with the wider world, it's also something that we really we really promote it to happy scientists because it's going to make for a better career for you. You know better day to day, too.

because it's One thing is like, you know, if your mother just like oh, well, my son and I he's he's some big shot Scientist: that. Yeah. Great, that feels good. But you'd like them to have a little more understanding. What wouldn't it be great for Mom to understand? Have a little more grasp what you're doing. No, maybe your mother's a scientist, too. I don't know, but I I remember a time when I remember in eighth grade I came home with

my geometry homework. and my mother said to me for the first time, ever. I can't help you with your homework. I don't understand it. Yeah, you know that was when I was. you know, 13 years old. Yeah, I see what what it's like now for somebody who's now 23 or 24. Now. They they can't even talk to their their favorite people in the world, and you know, unless they're their friends in the same field, you know. So every every little thing that can make that easier.

You know I, if you can go home and say, look at this beautiful thing as I saw today. I remember going home. Yeah, I'm: a computer programmer from way back. I've I remember going home to tell my wife I wrote this really great algorithm today. and fortunately she was willing to sit through that. And okay, tell me about it. We didn't understand, you know. And finally, it's like, you know what i'm just pestering you. I got to find a better way to tell you what I do. And

so then it moved into Well, here's the impact. Here's why that's that's good. Why, it's great that this is this is finished and being used, and it's it's made it into this product there into this service. Yeah so the same thing happens in science is, and people doing biology, and especially if they're doing basic research. And then I say, basic, I don't mean like symbol. I mean fundamental research that people don't see it at at the drugstore people. Don't see it at the grocery store.

but it impacts that those areas. You know it. It touches it touches the world that we live in. Hmm. It's just it. It touched it several steps before you know we encountered. Yeah, yeah, that's right. You know, I think, communicating the video, that kind of work is really important. I think I think learning how to.

and you may not be able to share with your spouse to that degree. But but but then also, I think, communicating to the public is really important, even if, for you know very pragmatic reasons, which is, if you want there to be more funding for basic science, it's important for the public to understand why that's valuable, even if there's not any kind of immediate utility.

Who knows what you know? The implications might be down the road? But then there's also look at the understanding we gain into how reality works, and that's valuable for its own sake.

and a lot of validation in the social world is just. I validate that coming from your perspective, that probably looks right. Yeah, that's not so strong, you know.

That's true for a lot of scientists in a lot of different areas. and and it crosses over, and there can be. We can learn from from adjacent industries or adjacent disciplines. If you found something that's working. Maybe a biologist can use it, or physicists can use it. and and and they could go in the other direction, too. So and in industry there's plenty of things that have been

already done in industry. They have been proven to work that I'm. Sometimes amazed how how naive some scientific version organizations can be even companies. The the commercial side is like all that's just commercial. It's like You're just You're just a sociologist. No, he's a Phd, you know. Get it straight. This is this is a a deep discipline, and it's got high value. and and we can learn from it so. But I will.

I will ask you now, is there anything else you'd like to add, because I I I loved everything I heard today, so it's really useful. But there may be something I didn't didn't think to ask you about what do you have to say? Yeah, no. I don't think so. I think we covered yeah a lot of the the heart of the work we've done. So yeah, I I would really welcome any feedback on this project. You know anything that that struck your listeners. I'd love to hear from you all.

So on that note we will sign off now on this episode of the happy scientist.