Between Creativity and Imitation part 1

Be Creative!

"These days, students get used to using others' program and do not know internal functions!"

This sentence was told by my previous advisor, who made a three-dimentional numerical model of hydrothermal system 20 years ago.

If you want to be a good scientist, you need to be "creative". However, "creativity" is often used in a wrong way and it is often misunderstood by people who are not acquainted with research.

Voyage to my own research topic

When I was a junior high school student, I met a lot of cool or genies students*1. They looks like find some interesting ideas from zero. As I was interested in history of science, I read a lot of biographies. The pioneers in the books also create something from zero. I thought that the science is like making something from zero. That made me devastated because I was not a genies and have difficulty in finding problems in science. However, my despair began to change two years ago. What happened to me?

In Japan, freedom of graduate students are guaranteed though they are not funded. On the other hand, they are often required to decide detail of their research topics. I need to read a lot of paper in order to think research topics. The more you read, the more I lost your confidence. Most of important things have already studied. On the other hand, I notice some important things.

History of Science

Human beings, society, everything has a history. Science or technologies have, too. The process of finding research topics for me was the process to know the process of science. My research area was "magmatic-hydrothermal systems in Japan". Though I belonged to an engineering department, the topic was close to science. Therefore, I need to read a lot of scientific paper about hydrothermal systems.
When I was looking for some papers about numerical modeling of hydrothermal systems, I noticed that the start point of my research is two paper published almost 30 years ago.
That was a simple fact. However, the advancement of science is based on publications. Some pioneering papers are cited by successive researches.

Awareness of creator, and creativity

When I was a master student, I was also interested in seismology because my research was based on the exploration by seismologist (a PhD student) of Kyoto University. Currently, seismology is the only way to interpret the subsurface structure around "magmas".
I noticed that the seismology advanced rapidly especially from 60's. In addition, a Japanese seismologist (later, he become a US citizen) contributed the establishment of basic part of seismology. Of course, a lot of seismologists worked for the advancement of seismology at the age. However, his contribution was still outstanding and he can be called as "a creator of modern seismology". His name is Kei Aki.

What he did in his research career is the process of interpretation of seismology. At his age, mechanism of earthquake was big question for earth scientists. "Earthquake is fault" is famous(?) sentence which he declared in a academic meeting in Japan.

He and his colleagues defined the movement of earthquake in quantitate way. Their works resulted in the advancement of "seismic moment", which describe the magnitude of earthquake based on sizes of fault moved in earthquakes. When his theory and data from earthquake showed agreements, relationship between earthquakes and faults was proved. The science does not based on commonsense but on theories and careful observations.

Quantitative Seismology

One of the most important his job was publication of "Quantitative seismology". He established the most important scientific achievement about seismology in this book. I learned that the science took process which require dedicated works. Learning advancement of seismology remind me of the basic , important aspect of science which sometimes misunderstood by people.

I had to say my understanding and quality of reading paper are limited and my current adviser need to teach me a lot*2. However, my interests and study on seismology significantly changed the image of science at all. Advancement of science based on the works of pioneers. Our current research and advancement of science comes from previous studies, which sometimes are not cited anymore. What we can do for science is not so huge, but we can stand on the shoulders of giants.

*1:I was not a good student, but my junior high school is the second high school in southern Japan

*2:I am sorry....