When doing research in physics, I often find myself wondering: when is it okay to look up known results, and when should I “work it out all by myself”?

This question used to bother me a lot as a junior researcher (I am still a junior researcher but I have done this for a few years so i can see patterns in how reseacrh is done). Early on, I felt that to truly understand something, I had to rederive every piece of theory and calculation from scratch. But over the past few years, I’ve come to see that the real point of research isn’t to constantly test my own abilities or to rehearse every skill I’ve learned—it’s to build new and relevant knowledge.

Research, after all, is not a self-evaluation exercise. It’s about extending the frontier of understanding, often by using existing results and improving upon them. My skills still matter, of course, but their main purpose is to help me check, interpret, and ask meaningful questions about what I’m doing. The central question shifts from “Can I do this on my own?” to “What can I add or clarify?”

This change of perspective is freeing. It releases mental energy that might otherwise be spent rederiving well-known results or repeating the “manual labor” of analysis. Instead, I can lean on references, computational tools, and symbolic solvers—while maintaining a clear, critical understanding of what’s going on beneath the surface.

 I think the urge to redo everything comes from the habits we develop while doing homework. Coursework trains us to solve problems independently as a way of learning. Research, in contrast, trains us to use what’s already known as a foundation for creating.

That doesn’t mean skill-building ends. Far from it. I still make time every day for “learning practice”—working through advanced textbook problems or tricky derivations, much like a pianist running scales to keep their technique alive. But now, that practice has its own place, separate from the main creative work of research.