Being a PhD student for almost three years now, a challenge I keep on running into is assessing the research projects I have done. What I mean by assessing is: judging what is new and interesting about the research. During my Master’s I thought science is all about discovering new physics. But new physics is hard to define. In optics, one may say that all physics is already in Maxwell’s equations. However, sometimes the system at hand is too complicated to solve Maxwell’s equations, in other cases it only provides complicated mathematics.

A way I tried to define new physics is by asking the question, is this result surprising? Then I quickly ran into the issue that senior colleagues, experts in the field, are hard to surprise. And if they see something new, their expertise allows them to analyze a problem with relative ease. Hence a new insight is quickly born, and therefore this insight may not seem that special or newsworthy for them. Hence that insight is often called “trivial”.

So, albeit the “trivial” insight was obtained with relative ease, it may still be valuable and new to a large community. And this is what I notice when talking to people from other groups in closely related fields. Giving talks, it is crucial to clearly explain these “trivial” insights. At these occasions I learned that those insights are very valuable for that particular audience. Moreover, it is actually these trivial insights that we struggle with in discussions with referees. So the things referees learn from our work, are often quite different from what we learned.

The problem of assessing research also appears when I read papers on my PhD topic, or the theme I did my Master Thesis on. For me, these experiments are relatively easy to understand, and often the results do not come as a big surprise. The amount of surprise seems inversely proportional to your knowledge about that topic. Once I even noticed that I might understand part of the paper better than the authors themselves. Then I ask myself the question, is it important that this work is published, is it newsworthy? Or are we just part of a system, dominated by H-indices, that pushes us to publish trivial thoughts in high impact journals?

My answer, for now, is that you should think mostly about people in related fields, who may read your work. How obvious is the result for them, and would it increase their understanding. Especially as an experimental scientist, I think that experiments are often about demonstrating and testing our understanding. Hence, experiments are often rewarded for their elegance, for me that means an experiment demonstrates the (new) physics in a clear and convincing manner. And this is, in my opinion, the hardest part of experimental physics: choosing a very clever experiment that undoubtedly proves or disproves a theory or thought.

And maybe, if your experiment is too convincing, it may almost seem trivial.

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