"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." I stumbled upon this George Bernard Shaw quote recently and, while I believe it holds true to any human being, not just men, it has not left me since. Probably because I have been watching my four-year-olds negotiate bedtime over the holidays.
They are spectacularly unreasonable. They do not accept "because I said so" or "because most people do eat with cutlery and not their hands" as an explanation. They ask why until you run out of answers. It is exhausting. But if I am being honest, it is also exactly what I hope the PhD candidates I work with will do.
Being a scientist means being unreasonable. Spending years on questions most people never ask. Insisting on evidence when intuition feels easier. Pushing into territory where you will probably fail, and doing it anyway.
Look at our own backyard. ASML exists because Dutch engineers refused to accept that extreme ultraviolet lithography was impossible. They spent decades on technology the industry had written off. Here in Maastricht, Mosa Meat grew the first cultured hamburger while the world laughed. And right now, Limburg is hoping to win a bid to build the Einstein Telescope, an underground observatory to measure ripples in spacetime that Einstein himself thought unmeasurable. Unreasonable, all of them.
And yet our universities seem increasingly designed to produce reasonable people. We reward those who optimize for teaching evaluations, chase publication KPIs, follow the path of least resistance to the next grant. We reward students who game the system, who figured out that complaining about grades sometimes works, who optimize for credits rather than curiosity. We are breeding lambs when we need wolves.
Universities should be greenhouses for unreasonable scientists. Places where someone can spend a decade on an idea that might not work. Where failure is data, not career death. Where we protect the stubborn, the obsessed, the ones who refuse to stop asking why.
Shaw was onto something: adaptation is not always a virtue. Sometimes the system is just wrong.
So here is my wish for 2026. Let us be a bit more like four-year-olds. Keep asking why until someone runs out of answers.
Jonas Heller, assistant professor Marketing & director SBE DEXLab