The nature of research.

88 remarks that each researcher is a “detective at the scene of a crime looking for the clues” that nature freely—but maybe not so readily— provides when the correct questions are asked and the appropriate facilities are available. Sometimes previous experiments by other scientists may have already provided the sought-for answers, but a researcher must be aware of these results and trust them. If the “alleged facts ... seem to be nonsense,” they may be, notes Webb; alternatively, another researcher may not understand the results. In some subjects, like high-energy physics, researchers watch a game played before them, and their task as researchers is to deduce the contest’s rules, learning how things operate so that the principles can be extrapolated to new situations. By contrast, in observational sciences like astronomy or geology, researchers are presented with the contest’s outcome, from which they must try to derive the rules (or break the code). Knowing how the universe has evolved, these scientists seek ultimately to infer the starting conditions that lead to the world in which we live today. Over the last half century, the science of biology has, at an accelerating pace, moved away from mere cataloging to studying processes with the most modern tools of the physical sciences and technology. Current wisdom is that the majority of this generation’s scientific breakthroughs will happen in the life sciences.