Academic research is an interesting activity to perform. I figured that out while working on my Master’s thesis, and it’s one of those things that make you feel uncomfortable about your lack of knowledge but you keep going into it anyway because there’s more to know and it’s difficult to stop and say “That’s enough for now”. The knowledge paradox summarizes this quite well, and it’s debatable if this trend is healthy or not. But in any case, I didn’t know that I would continue with some academic stuff even after my thesis was complete, and least of all in a field very different from what I had been trained in.

I have been working on a research project for the past few weeks, and that’s involved grasping some really interesting yet completely unfamiliar concepts, in a domain nearly alien to me. At the outset, though it was evident that I didn’t know a thing about it, after taking a look at the problem statement and trying to figure out what exactly was being performed, it was clear that there were some contributions that I could make from a control engineering perspective to this project. Additionally, having played around with LabVIEW for quite a while as a result of its use in previous projects, and its having a significant role in this project too, there was a gap I could potentially fill. And thus started something new.

It’s been an interesting experience, to say the least, learning some intricacies of this field, playing around with various kinds of equipment that I didn’t know even existed, and seeing how concepts from seemingly disparate domains also have some overlap when it comes to certain common first principles. It’s really fascinating to extend this concept further and learn more deeply about various technical fields that would otherwise be understood only up to a certain superficial level.

But going deeper into newer unknowns also amplifies the effect of the knowledge paradox. As a certain Paul Hewson put it in quite possibly a very different and unrelated context, the more you see, the less you know, the less you find out as you go.