The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

Learning to Learn
Author

Imad Dabbura

Published

May 1, 2026

🚧 Work in Progress

Content is incomplete and will be updated soon.

Introduction

  • Style can only be taught through examples of good and bad styles and demonstrating the differences as well as showing how u can move from bad to good style and improve it along the way
  • Studying successes is more efficient and better than studying failures. There are much more ways to fail than succeed -> Studying success would tell us what to do when we face similar conditions OR worst case it would act as a form of motivation/inspiration
  • A book or any education material is supposed to change our brain regardless if we agree or disagree with it
    • You get out of the education what you put in. Therefore, engage with the material and tear it down to its bases and derive things on your own to make it yours and see why each step was necessary and how they got here. Finally, see how you can apply it in different domains/scenarios and how specifically applies to you based on your personality and domain. This is where combining ideas from different domains shine and may lead to creative output OR even new theories and discoveries
  • Learnings:
    • Learn fundamentals
    • Imitate great scholars
    • Add your taste and own mix to arrive at your own style
  • Education is what, why, and when to do things while training is how to do it
  • I must prepare myself to my future contributions by looking 10-20 years ahead and predict how the state of sciences and engineering would be
  • Knowledge doubles roughly every 17 years -> more things to learn and more competition
    • Knowledge is measured in terms of the number of scientists and number of published books/papers
  • It is extremely important to do back of the envelope calculations to:
    • Get a feeling of the problem
    • Confront things you didn’t think about OR assumptions you need to make to make it work
    • Retain the results in your head as it was proved this would increase the likelihood of retaining information
    • Falsify the statement
  • Some knowledge becomes obsolete after n-years (half-life). Invest in knowledge that
    • Is fundamental
    • Open up (contribute) to more fields
    • Stood the test of time
    • Last longer
    • Examples: Linear Algebra, Probability, Optimization
  • You need to be relevant with the new trends in your field so you don’t be left behind.
    • Develop the ability to learn faster
    • Develop the ability to be selective and know what to learn among the many more things
    • DO NOT spend all ur time learning new things without any contribution
  • Invest in knowing enough engineering to be able to translate scientific ideas into something you can experiment with, test, and show to others
    • Remove the friction between the creator and the creating
    • Have a tight feedback loop
  • Importance of vision. If you take n steps
    • With no vision, \(\sqrt{n}\) from the origin and you will always be in reactive mode
    • With vision, you would be at distance proportional to n
    • Results in how far you move forward in your career
    • There are also many paths to greatness (NOT ONLY ONE) -> Do not worry about its accurateness and drifting/updating it in the future
  • Allocate 10% of your time for reflection and big thoughts
    • Science would tell u what is possible
    • Engineering would tell you what is likely to happen
    • Ethics and values would dictate why is desirable to happen
    • Therefore, we can engineer what would the future likely be through our vision and actions. Bottom line, do not be passive and let the society and others determine your future
  • I have ONLY ONE LIFE to live. I better strive for excellence and contribute to the maximum of my potential than get along and be comfortable
    • The Joy and rewards are based on the effort and the process NOT the achievement
    • The unexamined life is not worth living
      • There is a huge difference between existing in this life without any contribution and have fun/live comfortably VS striving for excellence and leaving legacy and contribute deeply and widely. It is hard and requires a lot of sacrifices BUT much better for this life and hereafter.

Mathematics

  • Sometimes the only way forward is to go backward and examine the fundamentals and what we take for granted
    • This may give us leap for new ideas OR even reinvent or contradict what was assumed to be true
    • Very few people even the very capable ones go back to the fundamentals and question things. They mostly assume it was figured out before us and it is true
  • Symbols have no intrinsic meaning and it is only understood from context and what we assign to it. Same symbol(s) could have different meanings and even contradictory ones such \(1 + 1 = 0\) for error-correction and not always \(2\)
  • For symbolic systems, it is sometimes hard to assign meaning without going circular
    • In language, you can NOT define a meaning of a word without using another word in the dictionary

Quantum Mechanics

  • It is claimed that all of sciences ONLY tell us how things work without any effort of why or sometimes define them
    • For example, we how gravity works without having any idea what it is OR why it works this way

Creativity

  • We use the words “creative”, “novel”, and “original” interchangeably even though there are minor differences between them
    • Not everything new or novel is worthy pursuing or celebrating. It has to add value to society
    • Keep in mind that some of the most important work in history were NOT celebrated until long time after it was created because it takes a long time for people to understand its value
  • Creativity doesn’t have to be hard or involve hard word. Combining ideas from different fields or relating things that were not considered related can lead to extraordinary results
  • It seems that giving ideas some time off was proven to let our subconscious do the work, connect the dots and come up with new approach(es). Useful tips for brainstorming solutions:
    • What would the solution look like
    • What would it involve
    • What factors are we considering
    • What assumptions are sufficient
    • Is there any symmetry with things we solved before
  • It is shown that having ONLY ONE idea on top of your mind is extremely useful for our subconscious to do the hard work; otherwise, it wouldn’t do anything meaningful
  • Having wide exposure to adjacent fields help in connecting the dots and see connections and make things more familiar. This would also help guide where/what to look for
    • This is only useful if we try to understand new ideas from different angles as well as in local and global contexts
    • Also understanding why each step is necessary would be helpful
    • We need to get to the fundamentals of the field/ideas to understand how things are related
    • Different people have different mental models, which mean they look at things differently and arrive at different conclusions of what is fundamental
    • Turn any new idea into as many hooks as u can considering where could apply (past) or where it might be useful (future)
    • All of this analogy and hooks building is to improve speedup of retrieving information so when we are faced with new challenges we would have easier time see cxns and related things
  • Age seems to be -ve correlated with achievements in the field
  • I must keep up with my field and learn new paradigms OR I will be left behind and drop out completely
  • We have to always keep the big picture and long term plan/outcome when pursuing any action in the short term and how would that help us in achieving the long term system plan
    • In education, what matters is the north star of our total education and how the courses/books/seminars/conferences help us achieve the “best” total
    • Always keep the overall system in mind and DO NOT fall into the trap of “local optimization” that won’t lead to overall system improvement
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