Citizen Science Column #29 by Jamie Zvirzdin

Discovering the Secret of the Rocky Road of Life

This is a true story, and it is mine. The secret, however, can also be yours.

One Saturday morning in the early 1990s, when I was around 8 years old, my father and I kept to our tradition: he, a runner, would jog next to my bike as we wandered through the suburban streets of Murray, Utah. As I became stronger and older, we started exploring farther and farther from home. I loved my bike: It was light blue with white pedals and a pink seat, and I felt important as we blew past my neighbors’ houses and started traversing new streets.

This particular Saturday morning, however, took us on a circuitous, tiring route that ended suddenly as we sought to return home. Before us stretched an unpaved road, slightly inclined and rough with chunky gravel. Some ways away, the other end of this rocky road connected back to our regular streets. Rather than retracing the long route back, we started down this rocky road, and I began complaining bitterly. This was entirely unlike the smooth, easy streets I was used to.

My clever father, instead of telling me to quit complaining, started a conversation that went something like this, as I recall it:

“Jamie, do you know what the name of this road is?”

“No!”

“It is called the Rocky Road of Life, and it has a secret.”

I loved secrets and puzzles (I had already consumed most of my library’s Nancy Drew books by this time), so I was immediately interested. My dad kept jogging, so I had to pedal hard through the gravel and keep up with him to ask what the secret was.

“I’m not allowed to tell you until we reach the end of the Rocky Road of Life,” he replied.

I kept badgering him, and he kept telling me to keep going so he could tell me the secret.

Before I knew it, we had reached the end of the rough patch and hit a smooth, paved path again. We stopped so I could catch my breath (because badgering and biking at the same time takes energy). I insisted he tell me the secret.

My dad congratulated me, and then his voice got slow and quiet and serious.

“The secret to the Rocky Road of Life is that it is short.”

It didn’t seem short at all while I was struggling to pedal through it, so I’m sure I had a deeply skeptical look on my 8-year-old face, but my father smiled and we started back home again. On the ride back I felt a renewed appreciation for the miracle of smooth roads and the construction workers who make them.

Nevertheless, the hard-earned Secret of the Rocky Road of Life imprinted something powerful on me. The older I became, the more I realized my father was right: That rough patch hadn’t lasted forever, and I would go on to push through many other rough patches far worse than a stretch of gravelly road on a blue and pink bike.

This year of “Citizen Science” is dedicated to developing Nancy Drew grit: to keep going when times get hard. And times are hard for many. This is also the year we’ve seen not just a disregard for science but a full-throated campaign to discredit it. The road is particularly rocky for scientists right now, when funding has been slashed or delayed, scientific data has been actively changed and censored, and so many have lost their jobs despite excellent records of service.

The end result is a dreadfully weakened scientific infrastructure. Evidence-based policy is actively being replaced by willful ignorance, wishful thinking, ideological extremism, and conspiracy theories. It can feel immensely discouraging to witness your own neighbors listening to snake-oil salesmen selling remedies you know are demonstrably false. Scientists aren’t asking for parades; they’re asking for the right to do their jobs without being harassed, fired, or treated with open hostility and performative cruelty.

We are also seeing a massive increase in AI-generated garbage science. This dishonest material, produced by anxious and/or lazy students and bad actors, further undermines our search for statistically significant answers and cures. Professors, researchers and science editors are overwhelmed with it.

It’s exhausting. I know. I personally know people who have been fired or who have had their funding delayed or withdrawn. I’ve given a workshop myself at the University of Delaware on how I can tell science papers are written with AI. I am concerned the public is being force-fed their deeply held convictions by their social media algorithms. Others give up or stop caring.

But this is when the Secret of the Rocky Road of Life matters the most.

The road is rocky because scientific truth is inconvenient for those who benefit from confusion and a controlled narrative. The road is rocky because good and honest research takes time, humility, and funding, and those things are in short supply when political performance is prized over public good. The road is rocky because we’re living in a moment when greed and a thirst for attention and power trump cooperation, compromise, and personal ethics.

But scientists—and citizen scientists—keep going. We document, we teach, we test. We protest. We protect the integrity of the process even when it’s misrepresented or ignored. We work not because the road is smooth but because we know where it leads: toward clean air and water and energy, hard-won cures, safer communities, greater knowledge of the universe, smarter policy, and a world anchored in honest evidence rather than ego. This is the world I want to give my own son as I help him traverse the rough patches in his own life.

So keep pedaling, and remember the Secret. Pass it on.

Jamie Zvirzdin researches cosmic rays with the Telescope Array Project, teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins University and is the author of “Subatomic Writing.”