Ratiocination

I hadn't come across the term "ratiocination" until reading the following passage about Niels Bohr in Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The Merriam-Webster definition of ratiocination is "the process of exact thinking" or "a reasoned train of thought", but the book uses the term to explore Bohr's insecurities about his work.

Ratiocination... the term for what the young Bohr did as well-is a defense mechanism against anxiety... The mechanism is infinitely regressive because once the victim knows the trick, he can doubt anything, even doubt itself. Philosophically the phenomenon could be interesting, but as a practical matter ratiocination is a way of stalling. If work is never finished, its quality cannot be judged.

That passage relates to some of Bohr's earliest experimental work, on measuring the surface tension of liquids. This research was in the context of an annual challenge from the Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, with a two-year deadline to produce a paper on a specific theme.

It seems like Bohr kept finding new things to master or investigate which were at best secondary to the challenge at hand. It's a familiar feeling to me, particularly acute when I'm working on a hard problem. I feel like my foundation isn't good enough in a particular area and I keep finding new things to investigate and explore. Instead of going deep in the original problem, I go wide—at some point any other work or questions to answer become more compelling than the work at hand, although I'd probably use the term "yak shaving" to describe what Bohr was doing here:

To produce stable jets he decided to use drawn-out glass tubes... The tubes had to be flattened on the sides to make an oval cross section; that gave the jet of water the shape it needed to evolve braidlike waves. All the work of heating, softening and drawing out the tubes Bohr did himself; he found it hypnotic. Rosenfeld says Bohr "took such delight in this operation that, completely forgetting its original purpose, he spent hours passing tube after tube through the flame."

This blog is the product of that kind of compulsion. I was working on something else and wanted to post about it, but knew my site hadn't been updated in years and when I looked at it a bunch of JavaScript was no longer functional. So I rebuilt the site from scratch instead of working on the original problem.

In Bohr's case, it ultimately took an intervention by his father to "ship it" and produce an actual work which could be recognized.

Christian Bohr realized his son was procrastinating to the point where he might not finish his paper before the deadline. "The experiments had no end," Bohr told Rosenfeld some years later on a bicycle ride in the country; "I always noticed new details that I thought I had first to understand. At last my father sent me out here, away from the laboratory, and I had to write up the paper."

The paper won a gold medal from the academy and that acclaim led Bohr to his career in physics. Despite his obvious raw talent, it seems that this path was not assured. It took intervention from a mentor at the right time to help Bohr focus in the right way instead of spiraling into an infinite amount of other things to explore.