Joy, fun, and love in open science | Bruce Caron on Medium

PLEASE NOTE: This is a draft of a bit of the Open Scientist Handbook. There are references/links to other parts of this work-in-progress that do not link here in this blog. Sorry. But you can also see what the Handbook will be offering soon.

Start here with joy

While writing this handbook, it became clear that, as a life-way — as a career that is also an avocation — science today needs to rekindle the internal emotional goods that have long been wellsprings for creativity and innovation across the lifetime of the scientist. Science is the hardest thing humans can do, in terms of the challenges it faces, and the obstacles to resolve these. There is no shortage of hard work, long hours, and disappointments available to the scientist. These have been with science since the time of Francis Bacon.

Science is serious. We can take that as given. Science faces many of the hardest and most meaningful questions humans have managed to ask themselves and the universe. What is the origin of life? What is matter made from? Why must we die as we do? But science was never only “serious” in its practice. Scientists get to play the infinite game (See: Learning to play the infinite game), a pursuit that opens up to awe and wonder — and joy — at any time. “Joy has a component, if not of morality, then at least of seriousness. It signifies a happiness which is a serious business. And it seems to me the wholly appropriate name for the sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger in us, which may well be the most serious business of all” (McCarthy, 2015). Yes, science is serious, but so too is joy.

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