 We humans have an instinct to want to know. We want to know what the weather will be like tomorrow. We want to know what will happen when the smallest known particle is broken down. We want to know if that look across the room was meaningful. And we really want to know what will happen if this bright red button sitting under the warning sign is pushed. The instinct is hard-wired.
Kids are the best at this sort of thing - so are some adults. I like to believe that an essential part of that sub-community of Homo sapiens that people typically think of as wearing white coats, not having fun, wearing faded t-shirts and having just-electrocuted hairdos, is a kind of Peter Pan complex. For some things, some of us just never grow up.
Asking questions
A long, long time ago, I read a book that said it was good to ask questions. And alongside this nugget of wisdom was a cartoon that showed a field with a standard stile, a standard cow, and a little boy asking his mom, "Ma, why is a cow?"
At that time, it seemed more like a technical drawing than a cartoon; like those explanatory, labeled cross-sectional figures of flowers you find in biology textbooks. And I've followed the ask-questions injunction quite steadfastly into what is technically my adulthood. Because now I'm a licensed scientist, and I quite seriously believe that proper question-asking is key to being a good scientist. But I'm also convinced that good question asking is vehemently not only for scientists. One does not need a degree to ask a good question. But I discovered that finding good answers was a different beast altogether.
Finding Answers
The fundamental scientific stance is to say that any question can be answered. But there are no rules of engagement for tackling questions. The mind fishes around, looking for answers, and if doesn't find any, makes one up anyway. For example, for a pretty long time, I believed that anything liquid had to contain water. It took a while to appreciate the idea that being liquid was a state that, in theory, any matter can take, if the conditions are right.
Therefore, seriously good answers also have to square with reality. The mind, hidden away inside the cranium, keeps making up pretty little stories. If you and your brother were called Grimm, you would keep in the fairies and the dragons, and fax off your work to your publisher. But if you and your brother were called Wright, you would wonder what kind of wings would keep a giant (optionally fire-breathing) reptilian beast up in the sky, and test scaled models in home-brewed wind tunnels.
So, the scientist has to deal with what Thomas Huxley called the "great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." In return, a good hypothesis offers technology. The optical drive sitting inside my PowerBook relies on hypotheses about, amongst other things, the nature of light and of certain semiconductors. But how do you get to the answers in the first place? When I was at school, I was told that finding answers was easy. All you had to do was follow the Scientific Method.
The Scientific Method
There is nothing like the Scientific Method. There is a method for making Champagne, and if you don't follow this méthode champenoise, it's not Champagne. There's no corresponding méthode scientifique that tells you how to do science. Just like there is no painting method, even if there are impressionists and cubists and the guys from Penny Arcade, there is no single scientific method, but there are schools of thought like the structuralists, the connectionists and the rationalists. As in art, each stands for a particular way of looking at the world.
Of course, scientists, being what they are, have asked - is there a scientific method? Some have insisted that there is, while others have said that there is no such monolithic notion. Personally, I'm pretty much on the fuzzy side.
So, let us, for the moment, say that there is a black box, called the scientific method. Its outcome is, typically, a model. For example, in the western tradition, Claudius Ptolemy the Greek had a model in which the earth was at the center (geocentric), while the sun swung around it. This makes complete sense; after all, we see the sun rise and set, and this is a good explanation why this is so. But the geocentric model could not satisfactorily account for several observations, like the motion of other planets, or the fact (observed by Galileo) that the planet Venus shows phases like the moon. And so Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler came up with the heliocentric (centered around the sun) model.
Of course, logically, the blatant evidence of the eyes – that the sun is seen to rise and set – is compatible both with the idea that (a) the earth is at the center and the sun runs laps around it, and (b) the sun is stationary and the earth pirouettes on her toes. In fact, the Indian astronomer Aryabhatta (476 – 550 AD) had proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system, which was influential in the western heliocentric model, championed by the likes of Copernicus in the 16th and the 17th centuries.
So scientists build models. These models are simplified versions of the actual things; they are coherent systems that capture and explain the observations. However, the models themselves are imaginary; they are essentially mental constructs. Think of the schoolbook version of the atom, with the central nucleus and electrons spinning around in their orbits. The model was made up by guys like Bohr and Rutherford, who themselves had never actually seen anything like an atom.
Models also make predictions. Imagine you made a clockwork model of the solar system. In fact, you don't have to make one, you can just go buy an orrery, which is just that. So suppose you found an orrery on ebay, you set it up, and configured it to how the solar system looks today. By running the clockwork, you can see what happens tomorrow, or the day after. Errors and mechanical failures aside, you will be able to predict the position of the various members of the solar system with sufficient accuracy.
In fact, the better your orrery, the better your prediction of what will happen be. Therein lies one practical and prosaic way of evaluating the model that the scientific process produces - it makes good predictions. And therein also lies the seed of advancement. For sometimes, someone finds a little piece of data that doesn't quite fit. So they try to fix their model - better gears, titanium cam shafts and the odd thump on the side like we do when the TV goes all jagged and whiny. And while they're fixing their models, along comes someone who not only thinks that the older model is crap, but also comes up with a better, shinier, sleeker and more efficient model. Rather like going from an IBM-XT to a MacBook Pro.
Heterodoxy: Not conforming with standard beliefs
Big changes in science often start as the heretical mutterings of the fringe crowds. It is the refusal to take someone's word for it. A classic example is the spiral-staircase structure of DNA. When Jim Watson and F. Crick started thinking about the structure of DNA, the prevalent model was one by the very famous chemist, Linus Pauling. Skipping the details, Watson and Crick, essentially outsiders to the DNA community, simply put together existing pieces of the puzzle into a new model that not just accounted for most of the available structural and chemical data, but also suggested an elegant way in which DNA could replicate.
So, some scientific revolutions are based on heterodoxy, since they ask questions and propose answers that are in odds with the establishment. As an adult, whether as a parent, as an educator, or merely as someone who interacts with a child, you count as establishment.
Adults, as a group, lack the mental flexibility of children. Adults might be racist, but it's hard to imagine that the week-old baby is as well. What drives the development of prejudices of any kind in the unprejudiced child? More generally, what underlies the loss of flexibility in adulthood? Intuitively, this flexibility appears to have a biological basis. We know, for example, that even physically, kids appear to heal better and quicker. Kids are also little geniuses at picking up languages. Several investigators across the world are beginning to unravel the story behind how the wetware (as the biological machinery is called) evolves over the lifetime of an individual.
Science Is Not Just A Subject in School
Nor is art, or history or anything else. The divisions are just smudged lines that sometimes go so far into the other territory that the more staid might wag their fingers and call in the cavalry to maintain the LoC.
This introductory piece is intended to chart out, in very broad strokes, a certain attitude. At a personal level, I find this attitude most closely resembles a scientific attitude. But more and more I find, and we will explore, that the essentials of this attitude are not proprietary of the scientific domain. The high-voltage hairstyle is optional. The desired end state of this attitude, the way I see it at least, is to help create a social atmosphere.
In the words of Tagore that we learnt at school, such a Shangrila would be one where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; where knowledge is free; where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; and where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.
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