What motivates you to be a scientist?

[The post assumes you are either a scientist or a student on the way of becoming one. This applies both for the hard or 'natural' sciences, as well as the softer sciences which overlap with humanities.]

Other than superficial motivations like money and fame, I submit there are two key motivations for being a scientist-

1. Understanding reality better. This involves deepening and/or widening our knowledge about the universe. People studying chemical evolution, paleontology, cosmology, or other 'historical' sciences would almost exclusively see this as their primary motivation.

2. Helping people or other forms of life, or the environment at large. Especially clinical practitioners would think in these terms.

Now I understand there are overlaps between these two motivations, but still- one would usually have one of these as the primary focus.

As a budding molecular biologist myself, I must say while there are clinical applications for the basic research that I do, my key motivation for doing science is understanding reality better. Biology at the sub-cellular level is filled with a bewildering degree of chaos and complexity. We are just starting to break new ground and understand the contours of this world in some detail. Can we even form a coherent picture of biology reducible to a few fundamental laws and mechanisms? I want to know what that picture would look like.

So, I've been meaning to ask- what motivates you to be a scientist?

This is a very interesting question and one which I'm glad to be asked - it's not something I've ever really given much thought to whilst I've been studying science my whole life and I think it's important to reflect on this kind of thing sometimes. I've always been very interested in science, specifically chemistry and biology, so much so that I recently graduated from a 4 year long Masters course in Chemistry. I mostly specialised in analytical chemistry as this was most interesting to me and I found inorganic chemistry much more interesting than organic which I hated; based on this information alone it's pretty reasonable to conclude that I don't really care too much about helping people (organic would be more for pharmaceuticals and useful polymers etc) and that I'm more interested in understanding how things work and why they are what they are. Therefore I think I relate a lot to this quote:

Shamol said:

1. Understanding reality better. This involves deepening and/or widening our knowledge about the universe. People studying chemical evolution, paleontology, cosmology, or other 'historical' sciences would almost exclusively see this as their primary motivation.

Click to expand...

I think for me this is definitely the primary motivation to study science. Chemistry is a very analytical subject in terms of how it acts to dissect the world and find out how each tiny part of it works to the smallest scale you can possibly manage and that's what I find so fascinating about it. I absolutely love being able to see something as simple as a light changing colours and understand the reasons behind it and the feeling of being able to apply this understanding to so many other occurrences just feels really wonderful to me. Whilst helping people is something I'd love to do with my research, it definitely does come second after my own personal interests in the world.

Nothing. Which is why I'm happily not a scientist.

To be honest though, 1. and 2. would both motivate me but I'm more so interested in solving problems vs. answering questions (if you get my drift) and I fear having to hunt for funding. I'm more than happy to leave the science-doing to someone else - I appreciate scientist-ing but not so much that I must do it myself.

Oh man that allusion to funding was a gut-punch, lol. That's really the major downside to being a scientific researcher. That just goes to show that scientists these days need to have something of an entrepreneurial spirit, they need to be savvy about which doors to knock on and which public sentiment to appeal to. Like literally every conversation I've had with every professor recently has turned into discussions on funding.

This unfortunately has even messier consequences. I'm not a scientific anti-realist by any means, but one can see what Thomas Kuhn meant when he said scientific paradigms are set in place due to sociological, rather than evidential, reasons. I don't agree to that completely, but it still shows the amount of research that happens in a particular field would, to some extent, be affected by the cash flow.

Understanding the world better, definitely. I tried studying Law for a year, but felt my brain go to sleep and as if I was pausing life for a bit. Studying biology and chemistry gives me the knowlede and tools to make sense of the world around me and keep me fascinated forever.

Maths and physics were always a bit too abstract for me, but biology and chemistry is more hands-on I guess? At least that's what I like about it. Things can be observed and measured, and then explained.