Beliefs and research

Belief according to an online dictionary is “A state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing”. During my school days, I was fortunate to have a good physics teacher who often told us that there is no room for belief in science, science is a collection of facts that can be reasoned using logical arguments and verified by experiments. However, having a had a peek into the world of research, I find that, though beliefs have no place in science, they do play an important role in its formation i.e. they are a significant part of the feelings a scientist posses. I have now come to “believe” that beliefs play an important role in the way we tackle ‘real’ problems. Over the past year I have been trying to find a simple model for financial markets that is able to reproduce what are called stylized facts of the markets. As R. Cont puts it “Indeed, stylized facts are usually formulated in terms of qualitative properties of asset returns and may not be precise enough to distinguish among different parametric models. Nevertheless, we will see that, albeit qualitative, these stylized facts are so constraining that it is not easy to exhibit even an (ad hoc) stochastic process which possesses the same set of properties and one has to go to great lengths to reproduce them with a model.” (OK, if that does not make much sense, what Cont is trying to say is, it is not easy to create a model that captures these features). What was important through the process of this search was that I believed that there exists a model that is simpler than those that are already known (and the fact that my guide Dr. Sitabhra Sinha was very encouraging and shared this belief). I think, this feeling is what gives one the strength to keep at it even after failing the nth time. Although we do have reasons to believe in certain things, I think, it does, finally boil down to that ‘gut feeling’, which, I am referring to as belief.