“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” – G. K. Chesterton

There is a truth that most people I know recognise, to be a good scientist you have to be a little bit crazy. I don’t mean crazy in the sense that you have entirely lost touch with reality but crazy nonetheless. To some extent scientists lose touch with the normality of the world and begin to see it from a different point of view. Taking great joy in the simplest things and trying to understand the question, why?

It is easy in life to except things as they are but the scientist has to know why! In many cases people would say that seeing something that nobody else around you can see is a sign of madness, but scientists train themselves to see patterns and relationships in the world, they search for answers to the questions that most people don’t even see. Driven by the excitement of finding something new, of describing how the world works or a tiny part of it at least. This is where the crazy comes into the equation, somebody choosing to spend a lifetime working on something so small it can never be observed by the naked eye, something so insignificant that we can never touch, hear or feel it occurring. It seems mad, to think that this thing that normally goes unnoticed could be worth spending a life exploring. Yet take the motion of atoms in a liquid as an example it is happening all around us all the time and even inside us, understanding it could contribute to medicine, energy and environmental projects. Yet most of us are unaware of it happening.

Scientists don’t always know what their work will lead to but as each one contributes their piece to the puzzle the human race moves closer to understanding the bigger picture.

It takes someone crazy to see what is really there, to put the pieces of information bombarding us daily into order and see the bigger picture. To work all night, forget to eat, find inspiration at the bottom of the sea or in the emptiness of space. To question an insect or to spend hundreds of hours making computer models of falling sticks. Scientists need to be persistent, observant and slightly obsessed. If you are lucky enough to know a scientist you will probably agree that they love their work, and in the end this is often all the proof we need to recognise that they are slightly crazy.

Loving something that rarely works, few people in the world actually care about and often results in going round in circles is a strange idea. In the end though it is the sum of these works that have brought humanity to where we are today, the obsessions of a few support and enable the discoveries needed to improve the lives of many.

“There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.” – Aristotle

No man can get the entire heavens into his head but to hold the equations that describe them in your mind is possible. Have patience if you know a scientist and recognise that their small idiosyncrasies are a sign of the genius within.

Cheers,
Daniel