:D:p
Generally, scientists don’t know what they’re looking for. If we already knew, there’d be no point in looking for it. The reason we look for things is to see what they are once we find them.
I would dispute that quite strongly. Scientists are hardly ever fossicking about at random. They almost always have some sort of hypothesis in mind (definite or vague), that they are hoping to confirm or refute, or, at the least, some sort of problem that they are hoping to solve. Of course, what actually turns up turns up may sometimes be quite unexpected, and may point them in some other direction altogether, but that does not gainsay the fact that the search is almost always a directed one.
That depends on what you mean by “directed”. Obviously it’s not just a random walk. But to use an analogy, if you find a pair of glasses sitting on the kitchen countertop, there are two different searches you might have been doing. You might have been asking “Where did I leave my glasses?”, or you might have been asking “What’s on the kitchen countertop right now?”. Science is, for the most part, the latter kind of search: A scientist might have some a priori guesses for what might be on the countertop, but you never actually know what you’ll find until you look, and anything you find (or nothing) can be an interesting result.
If I remember Gleick’s biography of Feynman, his original work came from asking the simple question of how a beam of light knew to go straight. Which is an excellent example, since some of the most important questions are the obvious things that no one has ever questioned.
Other problems come from knowing the literature and finding things no one has looked at before or unanswered questions. Sometimes you get lucky - Penzias and Wilson were just looking for the source of the background noise which was mucking up microwave transmissions used in long distance telephony.
Science is all about answering the eternal question “Huh, I wonder why that happened?”
The way this is stated it implies that scientists perform research with the intent of developing applications. While there is a wide array of work performed under the moniker of “science” such as applied science and materials science that are indeed application-focused, basic research such as atomic theory, relativity, and quantum electrodynamics, was not performed to achieve applications but to better understand the basic principles of the fundamental nature of the world.
This fundamental approach to advancing our understanding of the world based upon a universal set of fundamental principles (literally called “universals”) that can be expressed in conceptual, geometric, or mathematical symmetries are as old as written history. This inductive approach of drafting abstraction concepts in a manner that models or predicts physical observations predates the modern application of the scientific method and was the foundation of the Pythagorean school that influenced the Platonic concept of celestial motion based upon the geometry of the regular polygons. Although Aristotle introduced the concept of empiricism and deductive, it was not until Johannes Kepler abandoned the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion in favor of an empirically based model (which demonstrated that the motion of celestial objects in orbit followed elliptical orbits, and more generally, the conic sections) that the empirical approach of observation, hypothesis, and falsification to develop a theory or model transcended the inductive approach. This was a paradigm shift from science based upon approved dogma validated by cherry-picking supporting observations to an evidence-based approach to science in which “natural philosophers” acknowledged that the inability of an inductive model to make predictions that correlate to experiment and observation invalidated the model. This was the beginning of the scientific revolution in the 16th century which should be considered the introduction of the modern scientific method as an essential approach to understanding nature.
Modern m-theory and n-dimensional membranes, and even competing theories such as quantum loop gravity are essentially untestable speculations approach esoteric cosmology, but this is nothing novel, and isn’t really considered “science” in the conventional sense by most physicists any more than interpretations of quantum mechanics or teleological explanations for life.
In fact, nearly every major turning point in scientific knowledge started out as a “What the…?” phenomenon or serious discrepancy with the predictions of the existing theory and evolved from there. The compiling and integrating of knowledge gets to periodic thresholds where we suddenly discover a new organizing principle, such as chemical elements, quantum mechanics, or the protein to protein nature of genetic inheritance, but it never starts with someone trying to find that principle in an order fashion; rather, it is a bunch of disparate observations that are woven together by many researchers until a pattern arises from the data.
Sadly, this is all too true. The amount of effort most investigators put into grant proposals overwhelms the amount of time they can actually spend doing research, and much of the work is delegated to graduate students and post-docs with limited mentoring. This inhibits the transfer of knowledge and technique which ultimately retards progress.
Stranger
From what I’ve seen much of Grant A is spent doing exploratory work so that when the investigator applies for Grant B he or she has lots of evidence for the validity of the research, and Grant B is spent on getting ready for Grant C, etc. Young investigator grants give the new researcher money to do grant A before applying for it.
From my daughter’s experience this has now extended back into grad school. Grad students are expected to apply for grants themselves. I suppose this shows that universities have started teaching what research is actually all about. No more free ride like I had when I was in grad school.
I think there’s an idea that research is necessarily done for some specific end goal, to develop a new technology or solve a specific problem. As was said upthread, I think the majority of scientific research is in that vein. As for the “hard scientists” they’re searching for something more nebulous, like a unifying theory, trying to fill holes in theories where they currently seem to break down. But, most of all, I think the idea that knowledge is a means to an end is fundamentally missing the mindset of the sort of people who do that sort of research. I think to them, knowledge is an end in and of itself.
That is, I don’t think someone like Einstein set out to develop the General Relativity knowing. I think he just saw an interesting problem and wanted to solve it. I imagine he’d be surprised that we’ve managed to use the implications of his theories in technology that is now as ubiquitous as a GPS device.
But anyway, I think that’s what those sort of phrases like “key to the universe” are intended to convey. How do you explain the true passion that these people have for knowledge in a way that those who don’t have it can understand it? Really, I don’t think it’s that unlike “to boldly go where no man has gone before” from Star Trek as a way of conveying that explorer’s spirit, just to see that most of their missions start out with routine scientific surveys and charting and crap like that.
Not to mention drumming, and cities with no proper vowels in their names :dubious:
Which has the advantage of introducing the graduate student to the realities and procedures of the grant writing and submission process in a forum where they have some support and guidance. It also had the disadvantage of further taking away the amount of time and effort a researcher can bring to bear on the technical aspects of research in the early part of his or her career when they are supposed to be learning the fundamentals of the field.
I read an article a few years ago regarding how onerous medical research grant proposals had become to the point that a PI would spend a full time level of effort writing, submitting, revising, and administrating grants, even with the support of a university administration. The competition for grants had become so steep that it was, in the author’s opinion, improbable that grants were even being evaluated on technical merit of the research, and were often truncated before promising research came to fruition. The author opined that it would be cheaper, easier, and ultimately more fair to have a lottery system for grants that randomly approved a certain number of grants that met threshold standards for quality and completeness. (This was based upon pilot programs in Canada that had done this kind of grant approval on a trial basis.) The amount of money saved in selection and administration would make more money available overall, and may even offset losses on unproductive research, aside from freeing researchers to go off and do actual research.
Actually, general relativity is one of the specific exceptions to this claim. While Einstein essentially tripped over special relativity, and the quantum nature of light was a giant elephant that one one really had their arms fully around despite the basic elements being in place from Planck’s eponymous postulate, he went very deliberately at a geometric theory of motion in a warped spacetime as a more generalized version of special relativity (hence, why it is “general”) and was very fortunate that the set of tools and mathematical models in differential geometry had developed sufficiently to describe the action of tensors on an arbitrary topology of spacetime. Einstein knew that the mechanic had to exist and the ultimate model for general relativity was the goal, although it was also the culmination of work by countless others who contributed enough bits and pieces to make relativity evident.
Stranger
Some of them go “oooooh.. shiny!”, then see what happens when you poke it with a stick. Those are research scientists 
Isaac Asimov once remarked
In simplest terms, they’re trying to answer the question “What’s really going on?”. In other words, what is the underlying reality. So you can see that this is really a non-ending search because there will always be more questions after the latest answers are gotten. But of course you can try to come up with a theory (which is essentially mathematics) that models the world and fits the observations and measurement that are made (and also accurately make predictions). I just finished Hawking’s The Grand Design (actually read it twice) and am squarely in the camp that there is no theory-independent concept of reality. There is only what Hawking and co-author Mlodinow call model-dependent realism. Therefore, what all the scientists are ultimately looking for is that ultimate theory. Appears that M-theory is the best candidate at this time.
They’re trying to one-up Cecil.
Two ants in an ant farm:
Ant A: What is this? Where are we?
Ant B: Just keep your head down and keep working. No use wondering about non-senses. We got babies feed and tunnels to dig.
Or to borrow Eddington’s quote, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
Thrown around by journalists who don’t understand or don’t think their readers will understand what is actually being looked for so they just stick something that sounds kinda Big and science-fiction-y in there. These words may also be thrown around by university publicists. IME not so much by scientists themselves.
OK, after getting entertained, then bored by previous answers, it comes REALLY down to this:
If you’ve ever raised a child until they reach first grade, you’ve been asked, incessantly, “But WHY?”
The same essential deal.
BUT, in THIS case, they’re LITERALLY trying to figure out how the ENTIRE universe works.
Down to the most minute of detail. Where there is NOTHING left unexplained at all.
Well, no individual scientist is trying to learn EVERYTHING-- There’s just too much of it. Each one focuses on some specific detail of reality.
That says it very well. Just a few weeks ago, I read somewhere that Asimov once said that the seminal moment is science is when someone says, “That’s funny.”