In my experience, you really should have a closed mind to be an effective scientist [View all]

[Recursion]

Maybe "closed mind" is the wrong term, but something like it. Most scientists I've known have been very, very unwilling to give an hypothesis much credence without some pretty substantial evidence in its favor. Scientists should be -- must be -- by default very skeptical of every positive claim made, and should always be willing to accept (which also means formulate in the first place) a null hypothesis.

"But what about Einstein, or Galileo? They made bold leaps that were later proven right."

Sort of, but probably not like you think. Long before Einstein, physicists (including even Maxwell) had adopted a convention of a "local time" t0 for a charged particle moving in a magnetic field. Lorenz had shown the dilation and contraction that must take place but considered them artifacts of realizable measurement systems. Einstein's step was simply adopting those conventions as the way of addressing "reality".

Galileo was condemned by a Vatican that had long before accepted that the earth orbits the Sun (or at least adopted that model for the purpose of calculations), and was largely condemned because he was using his theory of ballistics to help the Florentine artillery shoot at Papal armies more effectively, plus being on the wrong side of several counter-Reformation political fights.

As James Burke points out so well, fundamental innovations in science and technology are exceedingly rare, and never created by lone researchers. Scientific progress is always collaborative, slow, and chaotic.

It's frustrating. I did some instrumentation programming for a biomedical lab that was working on an Alzheimer's treatment. The trials ran for three years and could never quite show that the drug did what people hoped it would do. And even the small confidence factor they had shrank with every repetition (this is apparently common enough that there have been studies of this effect). In the end, despite her strong hunch that the drug would be effective, the lead researcher had to go with the null hypothesis because that's where the evidence led.

Science is slow, frustrating, and fundamentally collaborative. Lone voices howling in the wilderness are usually there for a reason. Scientists have closed minds to anything that the evidence cannot demonstrate -- to the extent they don't, they are no longer scientists.