“The importance of stupidity in scientific research” by Martin Schwartz is, in my opinion, worth reading for several reasons. First, a well-written essay is generally a beautiful sight, and this is certainly that. Second, he makes an important point about scientific research. More importantly,. Schwartz’s conclusion is more widely applicable than he states it is. (He may have known it was more widely applicable than just to PhD research in the sciences, but he doesn’t say so.)
The gist of the essay – and you really should read it, as I am not doing it justice – is that you can only properly conduct research when no one knows the answer. “Absolute stupidity,” where there is no one who knows more than you about a topic, is the starting point for interesting research. I’m not a scientist nor have I done PhD research, so I’ll take Schwartz’s word for that, although he certainly sounds convincing to me. But I think this idea can and should be extended to any profession-specific work. It’s called “research” in a lot of fields; it’s called “design” in engineering: creating something new using the tools of that trade. Not all work is interesting and not all work starts from a position of absolute stupidity, and I think those two statements are linked. The interesting work, and to limit it to engineering, the interesting designs, begin when you’re not copying an older design because you can’t because there is nothing appropriate to copy.
Here’s an example that I think illustrates my point almost as well as it illustrates how badly my handwriting has deteriorated after years of using a keyboard:
This was an early design sketch trying to solve a problem with an old tenement wall. The windows have a decorative surround consisting of header bricks, with the window frame mounted in the same plane as the innermost wythe of the three-brick-thick (12-inch) wall. The sketch above is my representation to myself of the problem: it’s a plan section showing the 8 inches of back-up masonry and 4 inches of veneer, with the header window jamb basically consisting of the veneer turning the corner at the window opening (on the right). It was failing in a very simple way: the headers were not held to the rest of the wall by anything other than whatever adhesive properties 100-year-old mortar has, so the entire window jamb, the stack of headers, was moving to the right and outward. If we took the jamb brick down and rebuilt it, it would be okay for a while but we’d be recreating the original flaw.
Ordinarily, structural design begins with defining a load path, but in this case load was not the issue. The wind load on the stack of header bricks, like their self-weight, was measured in the tens of pounds. Nothing was failing from overstress. It was failing from a lack of stability caused by poor connection. Masonry details are ordinarily based on load transfer, and the existing condition looks nothing like any modern masonry detail, so I was starting with a reasonably blank page.
My proposed solution, complete with intentionally-squiggly lines to indicate screw threads, was to use flexible pins to tie the headers, in their existing condition, to the back-up. I didn’t write here – because this was a note to myself and I don’t bother with things that are obvious to me – that those pins would have to go in mortar bed joints rather than through the bricks. I had another sketch from maybe two minutes earlier where I showed the pins parallel and perpendicular to the face of the wall, but I rejected that. The perpendicular pin would have to go through 8 inches of header to get embedment in less than the 4 inches of back-up behind, the back-up for the perpendicular pin is itself more fragile than the body of the wall, and the parallel pin would require the drill to be held immediately adjacent to the window.
This is a trivial issue compared to those Schwartz discusses, but the basics are the same. I had never seen this exact problem before and it’s rare enough that there’s no literature on it. (Maybe I was the first to come across it, but probably not.) So my design scribbles started from a position of stupidity. I did not know what to do or how to do it, so I did what I always do in that situation. I started sketching to see if looking at the pieces would lead to an answer spontaneously generating.
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