The Virtues of Failure
Thank you, Professor Vigué, for your
most kind and generous introduction, so ample and magnificent that only my
mother would have wished that it were longer. I am truly grateful to be invited to
Université Paul Sabatier, this great and ancient university, to receive
an honorary degree and to be part of these most special ceremonies.
Your President has asked me to address you
in French despite my protestations that public humiliation should not be part
of the festivities. Alas, my
command of this language is poor, indeed, embarrassingly so. My knowledge of French is based on two
high-school courses taken more than forty years ago in Cleveland, Ohio. The
first course was taught by Mademoiselle Barr, who was young, vivacious, and
most curvaceous. I remember that
every boy in the class looked forward to Mademoiselle Barr, who delighted us in
wearing tight-fitting blouses and spoke with enthusiasm about the time she once
visited France and discovered the meaning of joie de vivre. The next year, my
second class in French was taught by a much older man who was a strict
disciplinarian. My interest in French declined markedly as this course
progressed.
Those of you familiar with the United States will recognize that the
Midwest is what we call linguistically challenged. By this I mean that American English is
spoken there almost exclusively, and frequently not well either. My studies of French allowed me to read
Alexander Dumas The Three Musketeers, and to learn by heart the phrase,
Le chat et le rat n sont pas amis. This last phrase has proved to be
useless to me. The occasions for using it have been until now
meager to nonexistent! Sad to say, since that time, my abilities to speak
French have deteriorated, largely through lack of use. I beg your indulgence while I
proceed. I can only promise you as
the English king Henry the Eighth said to each of his many wives, Our
time together will be short.
I have chosen for the title of my talk,
The Virtues of Failure.
You might be surprised that I wish to speak about failure today. First, failure is no stranger to
me. Second, I believe that
innovative research is a mix of many failures and few successes. This fact may not be apparent to those
of us outside science or to those students of the sciences who are just
beginning. We read in newspapers
and in scientific journals accounts that stress the accomplishments achieved.
These articles give the impression that successes vastly outnumber
failures. This false idea is often
reinforced by oral presentations in which the speaker makes the research
enterprise sound like it were effortless, consisting of one logical step after
another. But this impression is misleading, as every researcher knows. Real research is a comedy of errors in
which one thing goes wrong after another. To paraphrase Winston Churchill,
research progress consists of staggering from one failure to the next with
undiminished enthusiasm.
If research is truly innovative, then
little can be predicted ahead of time about what will happen and what will be
found out. Innovative research is
not an activity of filling in the blanks in some form or in extending the
boundaries of well-established knowledge.
Such activity also has its place, but I do not call it innovative. One of the most important lessons to be
learned by anyone beginning to do research is that experiments fail, and they
do that rather regularly. Experimentation is not like a laboratory exercise
that has been devised to work each time. No matter how well understood the
theories upon which an experiment is based or how well designed the
experimental plan, the results can often be nothing like what was first
imagined. Experimental science
delves into the unknown, so the planning beforehand is a best guess. Sometimes, these guesses turn out to be
totally ill-conceived and a series of experiments seems to yield nothing of
significance. Indeed, great
discoveries surprise us. Without some surprise these discoveries cannot be
considered to have altered the way we understand the world.
I
believe that these sentiments are shared in many other fields. I note that
writers of fiction often say, after the fact, that their characters took over
the story and drove the story in unexpected directions. Similarly, writers of nonfiction often
find as new facts tumble out that the story they thought they were telling
turns out to be different.
Getting beginning researchers to accept
failure and assume the risks of trying yet another approach is difficult but essential.
A more seasoned investigator knows that failures are part of the creative
process. What helps I find is to
develop an attitude of what I call a contented schizophrenic, an attitude in
which you are willing to believe in something and yet disbelieve in it, all at
same time. Simultaneously, to believe passionately and to question critically
appear to be contradictory activities, but such a mindset helps in seeking to
understand nature. You must put forth you best idea how something may behave
and then begin immediately to devise means of testing whether this idea about
nature s behavior has beguiled and blinded you to what is taking place.
Living with ambiguity is something that can be learned and even taught to
others.
Science at its core is a subversive
activity. We seem only capable of
disproving things that seemed established. Only by exhaustive efforts of failed disproof do we
gradually accept an assertion as likely to be so. That is the process that leads from hypothesis to theory to
scientific law. And as we become wiser and more reflective, we find that even
some of our most cherished laws only have limited scopes in which they are
valid. Experimental work is often
a series of failures punctuated by a few successes. A wise person learns from each failure and accepts that
failures are nature s way of guiding us to what really works. It is human nature to be disappointed
by these failures. But, learning from failure and learning to live with failure
are truly key elements in becoming a successful researcher. Without nearly
constant failure the few successes we experience would not be so sweet. The contented schizophrenic
accepts failure as the only way to create innovation of real value. Failure does have its special virtues
in encouraging us to unlock the mysteries of nature. In the research arena, failure is sure to be a nearly
constant companion. The smart researcher uses failure as a powerful but often
secret tool for finding success.
Let me thank you again for conferring upon
me this great honor.