One way to think of science is of a lot of interesting little problems. Some scientists are driven by questions like “how does this weird cell work?” or “how accurately can I predict the chance these particles collide?” If the puzzles are fun enough and the questions are interesting enough, then that can be enough motivation on its own.

Another perspective thinks of science as pursuit of a few big problems. Physicists want to write down the laws of nature, to know where the universe came from, to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. Biologists want to understand how life works and manipulate it, psychologists want the same for the human mind. For some scientists, these big questions are at the heart of why they do science. Someone in my field once joked he can’t get up in the morning without telling himself “spacetime is doomed”.

Even if you care about the big questions, though, you can’t neglect the small ones. That’s because modern science is collaborative. A big change, like a new particle or a whole new theory of physics, requires confirmation. It’s not enough for one person to propose it. The ideas that last in science last because they crop up in many different places, with many different methods. They last because we check all the angles, compulsively, looking for any direction that might be screwed up.

In those checks, any and all science can be useful. We need the big conceptual leaps from people like Einstein and the careful and systematic measurements of Brahe. We need people who look for the wackiest ideas, not just because they might be true, but to rule them out when they’re false, to make us all the more confident we’re on the right path. We need people pushing tried-and-true theories to the next leap of precision, to show that nothing is hiding in the gaps and make it clearer when something is. We need many people pushing many different paths: all are necessary, and any one might be crucial.

Often, one of these paths gets the lion’s share of the glory: the press, the Nobel, the mention in the history books. But the other paths still matter: we wouldn’t be confident in the science if they didn’t exist. Most working scientists will be on those other paths, as a matter of course. But we still need them to get science done.