Alas! Things that we desire never match with the minimum level of practicality.
I suggest we rather live in today's practical world without the facility of time travel. It is too wild a world if one keeps living in her imagination. There aint no point thinking of what could be left behind and what better could have happened.
Be Practical !

I cannot agree less about the point you made about research. It is always difficult to strike a balance between how much literature survey you do and how much time you spend coming up with your own solution. But if given a choice I would not read any papers at all. That is what amazes me in academia. There is no stress on this aspect. Your advisor wants you to read papers. People want you to know all the math that is required for research. I mean you are so impressed with knowledge that your imagination cant breath free air. I think I better stop now because this is a sensitive topic and I disagree to a large extent how research is done .. but I am hoping that I get to be proved wrong.

Rugby Star, I completely disagree. This is just a thought experiment. Right from the get go we know this would never happen. It is interesting and fun nonetheless. It is stuff like this that makes this living in this otherwise highly practical and prosaic world a little fun.

Abhishek, you are right about reading stuff before you go full force into something. You do not want to spend a year and then realize what you came up with had already been done. What I meant was that when you encounter a problem, it is always better to think about it yourself instead of searching google without giving it a second thought. I myself do this often, and am trying to change this habit.

The Software industry is another place which I think would benifit greatly by this "restart from scratch" philosophy. I know most people would disagree with me, but I strongly support starting code from scratch every few years. And this is what causes me to dislike Object Oriented Prog, Extreme Prog (insert your fav buzzword). These things are great for a company where you get to reuse code, and save developer time. But reusable code forces software to only incrementally improve (and that too only till a point). It is very hard to "think outside the box" when you are stuch in such an environment.

I seriously think that in the long run (think centuries, not just years), it would be better for the society if we did away with backward compatibility every few years. Sure it sets you back by a few years, but this is what makes revolutions happen.

My concerns are not much with the software community then they are with the research community. As and when revolutionary ideas come from the research community software would be forced to start from scratch. Besides different dynamics effect software which make things more constraint. However, research is meant to be free from exactly those constraints. But the research community is full of a mathematicians, scholors, hard working, respectful people but not so many idea generators. Not so many dreamers. Not the creators but the followers. And I dont blame them bec I can almost feel the rigid ambience impressing me. I have never felt less creative then I do now. Never more suffocated. I asked many grad students who are rigourous academicians, are they able to start with an equation a b c and come with x y z and the beautiful typesetting in latex. And they cant! Mind cant come up with great ideas and obvious thoughts if burdened with integrals that have to converge. And that links to the fact that reading too many papers leads to stagnation of thoughts. I would conclude that read the seminal papers in a given area of research. Rather, even better read the text if any in that problem and then close it . Go for hibernation. Think Think Think! Dream Dream Dream.. come back and you would have content read for a publication!

Abhishek, that is EXACTLY what I am saying. Do NOT read everything. It will only prevent you from thinking new and fresh. You definitely have to do a literature syrvey sometime before you publish, but definitely not when you start!

Well, this talk about literature survey kinda seems interesting. The first thing your advisor says to you when you are looking for fresh / new research topics is to : look at what other people did. Needless to say, countless graduate students have pored through papers after papers looking for that "oh so elusive and great" research project. Was all that effort wasted ?

No, I don't think so. I think that literature survey is something that should be done at the very beginning. Not only to see what other people have done, but rather to see what other people haven't. Ok, maybe it depends a little bit on your area of research. I work in Computer Architecture / Systems. I'm sure you people must've heard of Amdahl's law (optimize the thing that matters most). The area of Systems is so rapidly changing everyday, that time and again, we need to evaluate what others have done, and whether it makes sense in the modern scenario or not. Countless many algorithms have been tested and discarded because performance at the time of initial research wasn't upto the mark. Things change. And so should good research learn from the past.

Thinking new and fresh is obviously the most important thing. But it is not *necessarily* limited by what you read. Rather your thought process should be guided by the papers you read, and not limited by it. Kinda like that thing we say ... "Do you see a glass half full of water ?". A good researcher (hungry to publish papers) should say "Well, I see that glass half empty !"

Ha ! Lots of fundas !!!

On a lighter note ....

What would I leave behind if I had the chance ?

A simple note that would say -

"Note down what came first, the chicken or the egg."

Sayantan, Really liked your chicken&egg; thingy. Maybe it is better than leaving nothing ;)

Interestingly, this thing about not reading others work right in the begining was told to me by a Professor in the area of Systems/Networking. I did a project under him, and once we had a vague idea of what we wanted to do, he encouraged us to think more. He strictly forbade us against looking at any papers in the area. In fact he himself did not tell us the stuff he knew about related work. I think this worked really well because once we started reading related work, we were in a better position to judge it. But more importantly our thinking was fresh and not influenced by other's experiences.

I guess it works differently for different people. Some people are super-smart and can think outside the box no matter what. Some can do so only if forced to. I guess I fall in the second category, and try to force myself to think before I read someone else's work.

With regards to this impressive topic in discussion, I guess I'd like to say that it is actually our previous studies that actually lead to the further development and research. For eg. A Litrate cant go about writting absolutely anything without even studying how to read and write the particular language. I am sure you dont expect him to be over smart to first of all invent his own script, then invent a language for the script and then start writting any text. Everybody is not Tolkein. Cementing my point further I'd like to say that No research is very useful without studying the research done on the particular topic till that point. If one starts researching what has already been researched, it shall mean nothing better than duplication of effort and a wastage of time, money and effort.
Linking this topic with one of my previous replies to your blog titled "What is Good Research?", let me tell you Sir, If I want to find the area of a circle, I will NOT go about the entire procedure of geometry of a circle, followed by the derivation of a formula to calculate the area and then getting into basics of calculating the value of Pi on the whole.

On this topic of guiding the civlization process ... I remember reading a book called "The Chariot of the Gods". It suggests that intellectually superior aliens guided the human civilization. They are infact what we consider to be Gods.

The author - Erich Von Daniken, does have some interesting incidents quoted, but sometimes he goes a little bit overboard and tries to read too much into small things. ... I think the first few chapters are worth a read.

geez.. you guys are all offbase..
i'll leave back a note asking everyone to crawl
back wherever they came from and forgo the whole evolving-into-an-"higher"-intelligent-thinggy
or even better
"dont any one ever support the Indian Cricket team
or the Red Sox unless you want a lifetime of wrist slashing"

All I will add is need we invent the wheel again and again?
No. But we need to look at the things as rightly said 'outside of the box' and that alone can give new innovative ideas. What is needed is to have the learnings from the past with ability to think outside the existing pradigm.

Rugby Star, do we know the wheel is right? Do we really need the wheel? How do you know we are not missing something here? Maybe we would have been far better off if the wheel was never discovered! Maybe we could have invented something far better than the wheel, but cannot do so now since the wheel seems so obviously and "correct" answer to us! A revolution requires a new way of thinking, which is almost impossible if a school of thought is imposed on everyone!

I would think I will leave behind info on how not to build temples and places of worship. If they didnt have religion, they just might grow up faster and better humans