I've had great luck with cold emailing scientists with interesting questions or asking for code, I almost always got interesting and lengthy answers even from famous scientists in the field whom you'd expect to be super busy.
This is often the case but I would never expect a response. I used to work with some PhD CS / MD / IITians / TED speakers. By-and-large, top people tend to skew towards celebrity-like personalities: bifurcating into highly-socialized or misanthropic. Most are highly-socialized as it's academia.
My general rule-set is "impose as least as possible, ask something only they would know, and don't waste anyone's time."
I once emailed the cognitive linguist and author George Lakoff out of the blue to ask him what he thought about this obnoxious rhetorical convention of putting things into “buckets” and he replied, attaching a paper he’d written about buckets being an arbitrary metaphor. It was thrilling and very educational!
Writing/editing papers, grants, grant renewals, dealing with graduate students (mentoring, defenses/other events), post-docs (mentoring, job applications), meetings (with lab, department), consulting, occasional lecturing -- and that's only scratching the surface..
My rule of thumb is that anyone who is near the top of any field of human endeavor is going to be super-busy at all times. Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t be where they are.
> On a given Tuesday, are famous scientists in the field super-busy?
Not necessarily. It depends.
1) Scientific work is not linear like driving in a highway, it happens in bursts and is full of dead ends. It deals with complex problems that hadn't being solved before (or you don't know how to attack it), so there is a lot of try-miss. You can do more work in a day that in two months, specially if you work with alive organisms and must to respect its cycle life (Cetologists can't do much field work in winter for example). When I classified my first giant deep sea crustacean I lost several weeks trying in all the wrong groups, first locally and then worldwide search. After realizing my mistake and discarding all, solved it in ten minutes.
2) Researchers are often teachers also. Is not the same calling them in August than in May when they hide under a 50 cm high stack of tests and homework to review
3) Some really famous scientists, have a lot of non famous scientists doing the real work. They mostly build the team and design the experiment and then wait, check a few times and sign the result.
4) Journals take time to answer, is not uncommon to wait a couple of months to just being forced to resend the article to other journal.
So much this, when I learned this as a sysadmin under a scientist having to learn how to translate papers to implimentation, it opened lots of knowledge doors for me, and I'll always appreciate this lesson. Dont waste time, get to the point, get cool responses.
