This is a really cool and succinct explanation/description of what a PhD is/how it feels. I really like how it’s more emotional and intuitive than using words. The graphics are very simple and effective.
What do I think?
I think it’s right, but I’d modify it a bit to reflect “no more ideas” and the importance of synthesis. I think this is right relative to yourself and your own knowledge, but the “pushing against the edge” bit is simplistic.
Imagine a whole field of circles. And let’s make them spheres so there’s more surface; and now they’re like bubbles. Imagine a space full of bubbles. Each one represents a person, and contains the sum of all knowledge that they could learn. Each person fills a small but important part of their bubble.
At first glance, it seems like the bubbles are disjoint and everyone is floating past each other, and everbody is pushing to expand their own bubble ever so slightly, but if you look more closely then there’s more going on between the bubbles.
If you’re doing a PhD. (and the analogy also applies to skills-based things like idk, learning pottery/lathework from the best practitioner in town, let’s not gatekeep “learning” to The Academy) then you’ll have a supervisor. Their bubble is probably near to yours in space, and they’ve probably filled a very similar region to it as you have; you’re in the same field after all (or will be).
(If we want to get weird, let’s say that all the bubbles represent the sum of all knowledge, such that we can imagine what you know as a region of your bubble, but let’s also say the space the bubbles are within also represents the sum of all human knowledge. Now where your bubble is represents your interest(s) as they relate to other bubbles, but the area of your bubble that you’ve filled is still your own coverage of human knowledge. I should try and draw this. Can probably do a good zoom out from a bubble to lots of bubbles in a bubble).
There are forces between the bubbles. The thing you don’t know is just outside your bubble, beyond everybody’s bubble. You push at the edge of your bubble, but you also tug and pull at the edges of the bubbles around you. You take the work other people have done and join it up, put a twist in, apply it in a new way, improve a bound. You see, if anybody’s bubble overlaps the new area of space, then suddenly everybody’s bubble expands a little bit. It all joins up!
Tl;dr
- Your bubble represents the sum of human knowledge accessible to you (which would ideally be all of it!)
- Everybody’s bubble exists in a bigger bubble, which is the sum of all human knowledge.
- Your research group’s members bubbles are clustered around a point on the circumference of the big bubble; the thing you don’t know; the problem you are working on.
- Once one bubble expands to overlap this point, that dent is propagated onto the bigger bubble, and also found in all the smaller bubbles. They’re all self-similar.
- The expansion can be accomplished by pushing out from your own bubble, and by pulling on the outsides of other peoples’ bubbles.
But!
A lot of PhD. work isn’t necesserily new knowledge about the world. e.g., medical physics. We know how MRI works, we mostly know what we’re going to find in the body. Problems of application aren’t problems of discovery, except discovery of the solution to a technical problem. They aren’t epistemic. This sort of work is better thought of in terms of synthesis and twist, rather than wholescale innovation.
Tl;dr2
An orientable circle. We know which way is up. This represents the sum of human knowledge, and the circumference is the border of what we do/don’t know. This circle is filled with identical, orientable circles. Each of these represents the human knowledge relative to a particular person. The outer circle and inner circle are self-similar. If one expands, they all do. (But not rotation, they can rotate independently).
A research group has a bunch of circles clustered aroud a point on the circumferenc. Furthermore, all the research group’s circles are oriented so that for each one, the point on their circumference corresponding to the point on the outer circumference is near to that point on every other inner cicle.
Now you can push from inside your own circle, or pull on the outsides of the circles around you. They do the same thing, they have the same result.
Extensions:
- Include finite speed of propagation
- Better define the outside of the bubble relative to technical/non-epistemic problems