My point is just that you have to have your own research program, with your own interesting ideas, which have to be sufficiently different from other people's that they're interesting. In some cases that can be because it goes against what many other people think (if you manage to turn up evidence for it, or for related ideas, or whatever), and in others it can just be because you propose ideas that no one else has thought of.
I think this is not necessarily the case--but even it if were, I think the use of contrarian to mean "having your own new ideas that nobody has thought of before" (rather than "opposing the consensus") is a bit of a stretch.
You often have to be creative to be a good scientist, but that doesn't mean you have to be a contrarian.
But sadly, a lot of times you don't even have to be that creative. For example, in experimental science, often you just have to be the one to go out and get a grant to purchase equipment and set it up, and perform the tests that nobody has performed yet, but that everyone pretty much agrees is the right "next step" for a given research program. For example, if the fine structure constant is known to 12 decimal places, someone might apply for a grant to do some tests to try to measure the 13th decimal place. Now granted, if it's something like that it's not likely to have a terribly interesting or surprising result, so you're probably not going to go down in any history books. But occasionally there are also times were someone did the obvious next step, and then it happened to be surprising, and they do end up getting fame and recognition for it.
no subject
My point is just that you have to have your own research program, with your own interesting ideas, which have to be sufficiently different from other people's that they're interesting. In some cases that can be because it goes against what many other people think (if you manage to turn up evidence for it, or for related ideas, or whatever), and in others it can just be because you propose ideas that no one else has thought of.
I think this is not necessarily the case--but even it if were, I think the use of contrarian to mean "having your own new ideas that nobody has thought of before" (rather than "opposing the consensus") is a bit of a stretch.
You often have to be creative to be a good scientist, but that doesn't mean you have to be a contrarian.
But sadly, a lot of times you don't even have to be that creative. For example, in experimental science, often you just have to be the one to go out and get a grant to purchase equipment and set it up, and perform the tests that nobody has performed yet, but that everyone pretty much agrees is the right "next step" for a given research program. For example, if the fine structure constant is known to 12 decimal places, someone might apply for a grant to do some tests to try to measure the 13th decimal place. Now granted, if it's something like that it's not likely to have a terribly interesting or surprising result, so you're probably not going to go down in any history books. But occasionally there are also times were someone did the obvious next step, and then it happened to be surprising, and they do end up getting fame and recognition for it.