In research, both problem finding and problem solving are important. Surprisingly often, problem finding is more important than problem solving.
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I've seen and heard lots of discussion of field founding, usually in a Sanger-like context: figuring out how to make progress on big problems that are more or less obvious to everyone.
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But I've heard very, very little about field finding. And I believe field finders are (a) incredibly valuable for science; and (b) dramatically undervalued by existing institutions.
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It's surprisingly hard to think of a field finding paper that was supported by a grant. It's a case where you by definition _can't_ make a strong prior argument for the work; in fact, the whole job is to figure out the basic concepts that will make such an argument even possible
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Eg you can't motivate the founding paper of computer science by referring to some prior notion of how important computers are; you're actually trying to invent the notion of computers, & argue for its importance.
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When such papers were supported by a grant, it was always for something very different, AFAIK.
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Such papers often argue on very fundamental grounds. Consider this line of argument, which, taken sufficiently seriously, leads to quantum computers (and, possibly, other notions of computation). From
@DavidDeutschOxf's https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantum_theory.pdf …pic.twitter.com/ONMdskU3Iy
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It's striking that very, very few later papers on quantum computing take these questions seriously. They instead take the notion of quantum computing as given, and ask questions about that notion. But that wasn't possible in the early 1980s.
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What's even more striking is that many funders are very, very keen on field founding. And yet they adhere to policies which make field finding actually impossible for them to fund.
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I think these different trajectories often result from different motivations. When starting out many people focus on the problems relevant to some existing community. Indeed lots of pressure gets put on them to do so. When stars align right that leads to great problem solving.
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When people avoid this and instead focus on trying to understand the world for themselves and consequently focus on *their own* problems with that understanding that (when the stars align right) leads to field finding.
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How would you categorize Edmonds' work on matching that first articulated the idea of polynomial time? Granted Gödel had alluded to it earlier but ....
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I don't know the context well enough to have a strong opinion. The stories I've heard suggest it's ambiguous. Cook-Levin are perhaps clearer examples of field finding.
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