Many years of scientific training so far have reached two stages to summarize the secret of doing real science. Maybe more decades of doing science will give me more thoughts, but so far two.
First stage not surprisingly, is to see more details or information while others can not. This stage seems to be consistent with the public expectation on scientists, at least consistent with mine when I was not in this field. To see more, years of learning and using scientific theories can basically give you this ability, which is common in any other fields.
The second stage, surprisingly, is a challenge and reflects the core of scientific spirits. This challenge of doing real science is to answer questions with the simplest answer but not a more complicated answer. Counterintuitively, it is much easier for scientists to come up with complicated answers than simple answers. It is much easier to speculate a more complicated and broader picture than to raise testable hypotheses.
We all have imaginations, thus the scientific training is to train young scientists to control their imagination before they gained the skills to raise testable hypotheses to answer realistic small questions in the simplest way.
—Negentropist.Z
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