In today’s world, where scientific research is impossible without funding and research outcomes are evaluated by the quantity and quality of papers, which ensure further research through reinvestment, we ponder the question:

“What are the qualities of a field scientist?”

Let’s set aside political skills and the ability to manage researchers, and focus on qualities more intrinsic to a scientist. We might say it’s the “ability to provide decisive evidence for what has happened.”

There is a 2016 film, The Invisible Guest (directed by Oriol Paulo), in which viewers see how snapshots of a single incident are reconfigured differently depending on the speaker in the film. Apart from the two individuals directly involved, the audience can only approach the truth through these snapshots, which are intertwined with falsehood, and the director doesn’t reveal “the truth of the incident” until the final five minutes.

As each snapshot is labeled true or false, peeling back layers like an onion, it moves toward the center, only to retreat again into emptiness, completing a cycle that concludes with a “twist,” revealing the truth by deceiving and misleading.

What is our issue then?

The fundamental challenge lies in the fact that most research objects do not “speak for themselves.” So, who can declare whether knowledge is true or false? No one!

Thus, scientific research is a pursuit of probability, not certainty, and any utterance reflects not the object itself but the researchers encountering it.

Space, as a research field for studying objects, is perceived up to three dimensions. However, the dynamic nature of time, particularly as an event not reducible to visual knowledge, is not fully perceived. In other words, no modern observation technology can perceive “the entirety of a moving event.” We can only infer “the event” through causal reconstructions of time slices and spatial fragments. The truth remains hidden from our view.

Recognizing this, scientists understand that “movement, not stillness, is the measure of reality,” making the credibility of a paper tied to the decisiveness of its snapshots—evidence A, B, C, etc.—and the plausibility of its causality. This hierarchical knowledge then defines the level of assertion in a paper: “Isn’t it so?”, “It is,” or “Show me an alternative conclusion!”

The appropriateness of this evaluation lies with authoritative figures within each scientific community, making the narrative and the rationality of evidence inherently subjective yet genuinely objective. This explains why science cannot be separated from philosophy or sociology.

In summary, the growth of one’s scientific prowess reflects the ability to persuade authoritative figures and provide compelling evidence of “what has happened.” It’s about presenting a variety of convincing evidence and being able to state, “How can it not be so? Try to refute it!”

This is not a debate about realism or objectivism, but rather acknowledging that scientific knowledge’s validity can only be discussed within “human conditions.”

I believe the idea of a depersonalized pure science is a myth. Even if true, such truth can only be declared by a human voice.

So, what are the qualities of a scientist today?

It’s the ability to confidently assert their position before peers. This is based on constructing narratives from “decisive evidence,” choosing experimental techniques to generate such evidence, performing experiments technically, aligning results, and verifying them statistically.

This, I believe, is not a philosophical debate on rationalism and historicism, but the reality of a scientist in the lab: the qualities of a field scientist.