Even the smartest scientists were not as competent at the beginning of their careers as they are now. The concept of science is quite simple and understandable. If you want to learn something about the universe, you must turn to experiments, measure, and reach conclusions supported by results. If you are aware of this, you can improve your understanding and approach phenomena you have not yet encountered with more accurate predictions, enabling you to comprehend them better. Sooner or later, your predictions will align with reality. This is where your idea or hypothesis reaches validity.

However, if your predictions do not match reality, things get interesting because you may face the collapse of your current idea or hypothesis. This is where the boundaries of science are found and where the potential for scientific progress is highest.

It goes without saying, but we will repeat it anyway: being a good scientist in any field requires skills developed over many years. Here are four important lessons every aspiring scientist needs to learn to excel in their work.

First Lesson

You probably hold many misconceptions. You need to be open-minded and work on correcting and undoing these misconceptions!

When we first learn about a phenomenon, our brain does something quite interesting. It creates a story that explains the phenomenon in the context of what we already know. Sometimes, when new information is very similar to what we already understand, we grasp it correctly. Students who know Newton’s law of gravity, for instance, have no trouble learning Coulomb’s law of electrostatic attraction and repulsion.

At other times, new information challenges our background ideas that were either taught to us or were misunderstood. Students who know Newton’s laws of motion are often baffled by the seemingly illogical new rules of special relativity. Those who know Newton’s gravity struggle with the new concepts of general relativity, while those who understand deterministic classical physics grapple with probabilistic quantum physics.

Those who have successfully completed their doctorates have had to face and correct numerous misconceptions developed along the way. Many of us had to overcome misconceptions about the ether or the theoretical medium through which light passes. We even had to fight our intuitions that wanted to cling to pre-relativity ideas about space and time or pre-quantum ideas about qualities like position, energy, or angular momentum.

Not only do we need to learn the advanced concepts that are the foundations of modern science, but we also need to unlearn the misconceptions we acquired along the way, and this is possible through personal effort. This personal effort needs to be continuous because when we try to hold on to ideas that lie outside the validity ranges of today’s consensus, we may find ourselves stuck in wrong thinking again. The peripheries of science are filled with conspiracy theories and unfeasible ideas from which no one has ever successfully escaped. To be successful in science, we need to constantly identify and review our misconceptions.

Second Lesson

Until you have a strong enough foundation in a particular field, you should be aware that you might misinterpret current or foundational studies!

Most of us, especially thanks to the information age, have direct access to scientific papers. However, very few people, including those who have ventured outside their area of expertise, have the scientific background to understand what this access can lead to. The reason is very simple: we may not have the strong foundation needed to fully grasp the field in which the research is conducted.

When we are curious about a scientific topic, we usually research it and view the information we reach through the lens shaped by our current knowledge. If you do a little research on claims like the Big Bang never happened, fluoride lowers our IQ, or traditional Chinese remedies are sufficient for COVID-19, you can find many articles or books with positive answers to these claims.

Although you may be convinced when you read these publications and articles, convincing science is not that easy. An uninformed person can fall into big misconceptions without a basic understanding of the Big Bang, the vital role of fluoride in tooth and bone development through calcium absorption, or the common issues in uncontrolled and fraudulent studies of traditional Chinese remedies. Even a person researching these topics, if they lack a solid foundation, may encounter major errors when their research is completed.

When we step outside our expertise, we face a universal problem. Not only do we not know many things, but we also do not realize what we do not know. The best thing to do in this situation is to consult an expert or experts with deep and broad scientific knowledge and foundation in the relevant field. At the same time, staying humble and being able to confront and combat the misconceptions we may encounter on the path to answers is an important virtue.

There is nothing to be ashamed of in ignorance, but choosing to remain ignorant when scientific truth is before our eyes is indeed shameful.

Third Lesson

Most ideas that were once accepted by “consensus” are now considered invalid and even wrong!

Chasing after the questions of “How?” and “Why?” is extremely important. This may be one of the most misunderstood points of scientific endeavors. Scientists are often unjustly and incorrectly seen as shallow thinkers who have memorized massive tomes of information, but this is not quite accurate. Science; at its core, consists not only of tomes of information but also of processes.

A scientist must simultaneously hold a series of competing ideas and hypotheses in their mind and continuously evaluate and examine them against a constantly evolving body of evidence. Every time new evidence is obtained, all hypotheses should be reevaluated. Some that were previously consistent may lose their validity. Some speculative ideas may gain support, while others lose the support they had. And some previously proposed ideas may be reevaluated and revived because they can explain certain phenomena better than the currently accepted ones.

A rarely recognized universal example is the twinkling of stars. If you have ever examined the depths of the night sky on a dark night, you would have seen stars twinkle, except for a few bright dots that represent planets. But why do planets not twinkle while stars do?

At one time, there were two prevailing ideas about this:

1. The Earth’s atmosphere was flawed, with turbulent airflows affecting the light path of distant point-like stars but not the closer disk-like planets.

2. Or the Earth’s atmosphere was problematic, and irregular air currents were distorting the light of distant stars but not of the closer planets.

Both ideas remained valid until the advent of the space age. Of course, this changed with observations made through cameras and various devices, and the observation of stars from space revealed the culprit to be our atmosphere. However, interstellar dust clouds became a symbol of the importance of combating misconceptions for many astronomical phenomena. Learning old ideas like Einstein’s cosmological constant helped guide us in understanding surprising and new findings like the dim supernovas that led to the modern discovery of dark energy.

Observing supernovas far from us enabled us not only to discover the existence of dark energy but also to distinguish it from various alternatives like “gray dust.”

Fourth Lesson

Among speculative ideas and hypotheses, some will seem much closer to you. However, this closeness does not mean they are correct. You need to remain objective!

Perhaps the most difficult part of being a scientist is this. Often, we do not know what lies beyond the established and well-tested parts of our fields. From epigenetics to antimatter, many of the craziest ideas in established science today were considered unfounded hypotheses when first proposed. It turned out that some seemingly simple and understandable ideas, like the idea that our DNA contributes equally from both sets of grandparents, and therefore both sets of grandparents have a 25% say in our genes, were not at all as they seemed.

Today, we come across a series of speculative ideas that attract public attention but lack experimental or observational evidence. Many theorists dedicate their lives to various approaches to quantum gravity, such as primordial black holes, supersymmetry, grand unified theories, cosmic strings, string theory, and loop quantum gravity, and non-constant dark energy models. All are intriguing in their own way. Nevertheless, as scientific history shows, we can predict that many of them may lead us to wrong conclusions.

One of the most frightening traps a scientist can face is the conviction that a particular idea or set of ideas in their field is infallible. When it comes to speculative hypotheses, getting swept away by their effects is probably the worst thing we can do. This blinds us to all contradictions, erodes our ability to objectively evaluate competing ideas, and leaves us driven by a motivation-based logic. This motivation leads us to a pursuit that is inherently unscientific.

This is why Johannes Kepler’s scientific advancements are still so impressive more than 400 years later. Kepler had a beautiful, compelling, and original idea about the solar system. He thought that planets orbited the Sun on a series of nested spheres he called “Mysterium Cosmographicum.” But when the data did not match his predictions, he did the most admirable thing he could do: he discarded his model completely and sought a new approach. Years later, the result was the theory of planets orbiting the Sun in elliptical paths. It was found to fit the data better than previous interpretations and is still used today to model planetary motion.

Even among scientists, some dangerous myths persist. We may believe that the best scientists never make mistakes, that changing your mind about something is a sign of weakness, or that when alternative ideas fall out of favor, it signifies a “consensus” and should therefore be considered valid.

However, the truth is that an important step in becoming a scientist is making mistakes. Changing your mind about something comes from being willing to evaluate new information and review its implications. This often requires discarding ideas that were once popular but have now run their course.