This week, our newly minted Doctor Innanen presents an essay in defence of the generalist. Once upon a time, all scientists were generalists, "natural philosophers," as they often styled themselves. Isaac Newton (pictured above examining the dispersal of light into the colours of the rainbow in John Adam Houston's illustration from 1870) was such a scientist, making contributions to mathematics, gravitation and optics, amongst other fields. But as knowledge accumulated, scientists became more and more specialized within increasingly narrow fields. Something I greatly enjoy about Planetary Science is that ours is an interdisciplinary field, borrowing and mixing from many different silos of science.
By Dr. Alex Innanen
We sometimes joke in PVL that when you come to the lab you will get a ton of projects thrown at you just to see what sticks. Sometimes, this will happen to you multiple times during your time here. Many of these projects stick, which is how you might end up like me – recently defending a PhD dissertation that included five (5) different projects.
This is not always the way of doing things – you’ll often hear of PhD students with one large project or one specific area that they drill down into. Not so much in the PVL. We tend to end up more as jacks-of-all-trades. I certainly did – my dissertation ranged from martian clouds to analysing images of Newfoundland fogs to studying methane in the Canadian arctic. At least I (mostly) stuck to one planet (even my Earth-based work was used as a martian analogue). Some students in the lab end up defending on multiple planets in (or even outside of) the solar system.
For me, this gels with the way I like to work. There has been many a time when I’ve grown frustrated with the project I’m working on and have set it aside to chip away at another project. It also helps to keep things interesting. Getting bored of methane? Look at some clouds! Not the cloudy season? Plot eight Mars years’ worth of MCS temperature retrievals.
I am like this outside of work too. I have many varied hobbies – knitting, gardening, baking, reading – that I tend to flip between depending on how I’m feeling. This is where I feel the jack of all trades, master of none adage really fits me. With all my hobbies and interests I feel like I know just enough to be dangerous. I’ll never be baking complex pastry creations or feeding myself entirely on the veggies I grow in my garden, but at least I have plenty to keep myself occupied and to relax with.
This, I think, is where having a broad knowledge base can be useful. Even if I am not a master of all my areas of knowledge, those are still areas where I know things I may not have if I had just focused on a single area. In my work, I have a broader appreciation for and understanding of the martian atmosphere as a whole than if I had just, for instance, focused on clouds. I can also apply the deep knowledge that I do have in certain areas to others where my knowledge may be a little more surface level. This was certainly the case when I picked up Charissa’s work (linked above) analysing images of laser beams in the fog and in a laboratory setup. Because of my work looking at the scattering properties of martian clouds, I already had a lot of the baseline knowledge to pick up that project.
But I do still have my knowledge gaps. There are things about martian clouds that I can’t tell you – for instance, I don’t really know much about the scattering properties of carbon dioxide clouds, except for in broad strokes. With methane, while I know much more now about plume variability, I don’t know a lot about methane transport within the martian atmosphere. A skill that I do feel I’ve gained from being a bit of a generalist, though, is how to find out what I need to know. Having covered such broad topics means I’ve also delved broadly into the literature and have had the opportunity to speak and work with a broad range of colleagues. I know who I’d go to if I needed to learn about methane transport in the martian atmosphere. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to answer my question, but they would likely be able to point me in the right direction.
Part of this is certainly helped by my work on the Curiosity rover. As a member of the environmental science theme group on the rover, I’m working with other scientists who study everything from dust devils to oxygen abundance. We often share our results with each other, so I get to learn a bit of what everyone does. And I need to understand at least a bit of the science rationale behind our different observations, so that I can advocate properly for them when I’m adding them to a rover plan.
I often joke that planetary science is five different sciences in a trench coat. Five may even be too low, with the amount of ground planetary science covers. Even just within PVL we dip into so many fields: molecular dynamics, seismology, atmospheric chemistry, astrobiology… Planetary science is a broad field, so even with my own broad background I’ve only sampled a small sliver of it. But that just means there’s plenty more out there to learn about!
