A Curious Mind Knows No Limit

A Curious Mind Knows No Limit

The Age

Saturday October 27, 2007

Natalie Angier

Why must science appreciation be the preserve of the young and the restless? There are great cosmic challenges and mysteries to behold way beyond the age of 13.

WHEN the second of her two children turned 13, my sister decided that it finally was time to let their membership lapse in two familiar family haunts: the science museum and the zoo. These were kiddie places, she told me. Her children now had more mature tastes. They liked refined forms of entertainment - art museums, the theatre, ballet. Isn't that something? My sister's children's bodies were lengthening, and so were their attention spans. They could sit for hours at a performance of Macbeth without so much as checking the seat bottom for fossilised wads of gum.

No more of this mad pinball pinging from one hands-on science exhibit to the next, pounding on knobs to make artificial earthquakes, or cranking gears to see Newton's laws in motion, or something like that; who bothers to read the explanatory placards anyway? And, oops, hmm, hey, Mum, this thing seems to have stopped working! No more aping the gorillas or arguing over the structural basis of a polar bear's white coat or wondering about the weird goatee of drool gathering on the dromedary's chin. Sigh. How winged are the slippers of time, how immutably forward point their dainty steel-tipped toe boxes. And how common is this middle-class rite of passage into adulthood: from mangabeys to Modigliani, T. rex to Oedipus Rex.

The differential acoustics tell the story. Zoos and museums of science and natural history are loud and bouncy and notably enriched with the upper registers of the audio scale. Theatres and art museums murmur in a courteous baritone, and if your cell phone should bleat out a little Beethoven chime during a performance, and especially should you be so barbaric as to answer it, other members of the audience have been instructed to garrotte you with a rolled-up playbill. Science appreciation is for the young, the restless, the Ritalined. It's the holding-pattern fun you have while your gonads are busy ripening, and the day that an exhibit of Matisse versus Picasso in Paris exerts greater pull than an Omnimax movie about spiders is the debutante's ball for your brain. Here I am! Come and get me! And don't forget your Proust!

Naturally enough, I used the occasion of my sister's revelation about lapsing memberships to scold her. Whaddya talking about, giving up on science just because your kids have pubesced? Are you saying that's it for learning about nature? They know everything they need to know about the universe, the cell, the atom, electromagnetism, geodes, trilobites, chromosomes, and Foucault pendulums, which even Stephen Jay Gould once told me he had trouble understanding? How about those shrewdly coquettish optical illusions that will let you see either a vase or two faces in profile, but never, ever two faces and a vase, no matter how hard you concentrate or relax or dart your eyes or squint like Humphrey Bogart or command your perceptual field to stop being so archaically serial and instead learn to multi-task? Are your kids really ready to leave these great cosmic challenges and mysteries behind? I demanded. Are you?

My voice hit a shrill note, as it does when I'm being self-righteous, and my sister is used to this and replied with her usual shrug of commonsense. The membership is expensive, she said, her kids study plenty of science in school, and one of them has talked of becoming a marine biologist. As for her own needs, my sister said, there's always the Public Broadcasting Service. Why was I taking this so personally?

Because I'm awake, I muttered. Give me a chance, and I'll take the jet stream personally.

My bristletail notwithstanding, I couldn't fault my sister for deciding to sever one of the few connections she had to the domain of human affairs designated science. Good though the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry may be, it is undeniably geared towards visitors young enough to appreciate such offerings as the wildly popular "Grossology" show, a tour through the wacky world of bodily fluids and functions.

Childhood, then, is the one time of life when all members of an age cohort are expected to appreciate science. Once junior high school begins, so too does the great winnowing, the relentless tweezing away of feather, fur, fun, the hilarity of the digestive tract, until science becomes the forbidding province of a small priesthood - and a poorly dressed one at that.

I have been a science writer for a quarter of a century, and I love science, but I have also learned and learned and not forgotten but have nevertheless been forced to relearn just how unintegrated science is into the rest of human affairs, how stubbornly apart from the world it remains, and how persistent is the image of the rare nerd, the idea that an appreciation of science is something to be outgrown by all but those with, oddly enough, overgrown brains.

Nobody wants to feel irrelevant or marginal. Nobody wants to feel that she's failed, unless she's in a high school chemistry class, in which case everybody does. Yet I'll admit it. I feel that I've failed any time I hear somebody say, who cares, or who knows, or I just don't get it. When a character on the otherwise richly drawn television series Six Feet Under announces that she's planning to take a course in "biogenetics" and her boyfriend replies, Bo-o-ring. Why on earth are you doing that? I take it personally.

Scientists are quick to claim mea culpas, to acknowledge that they bear some responsibility for the public allergy towards their profession. We've failed, they say. We've been terrible at communicating our work to the masses, and we're pathetic when it comes to educating our nation's youth. We've been too busy with our own work. We have to publish papers. We have to write grant proposals. We're punished by "the system", the implacable academic track that rewards scientists for focusing on research to the exclusion of everything else, including teaching or public outreach or writing popular books. All of which amounts to: guilty as charged. We haven't done our part to enlighten the laity.

A fair question to interject here is: need we do anything at all? Does it matter if the great majority of people know little or nothing about science or the scientific mindset? If the average Joe or Sophie doesn't know the name of the closest star (the sun), or whether tomatoes have genes (they do), or why your hand can't go through a tabletop (because the electrons in each repel each other), what difference does it make?

Let the specialists specialise. A heart surgeon knows how to repair an artery, a biologist knows how to run a gel, a jet pilot knows how to illuminate the fasten seat belt sign at the exact moment you've decided to get up and go to the bathroom. Why can't the rest of us clip our coupons and calories in peace?

The arguments for greater scientific awareness and a more comfortable relationship with scientific reasoning are legion, and many have been flogged so often they're beginning to wheeze. A favourite thesis has it that people should know more about science because many of the vital issues of the day have a scientific component: think global warming, alternative energy, embryonic stem cell research, missile defence, the tragic limitations of the dry cleaning industry. Hence, a more scientifically sophisticated citizenry would be expected to cast comparatively wiser votes for Socratically wise politicians. They would demand that their elected representatives know the differences between a blastocyst, a foetus, and an orthodontist, and that one is a five-day-old, hollow ball of cells from which coveted stem cells can be extracted and theoretically inveigled to grow into the body tissue or organ of choice; the next is a developing prenate that has implanted in the mother's uterus; and the third is never covered by your company's dental plan.

Others propose that a scientifically astute public would be relatively shielded against superstitious, wishful thinking, flim-flammery, and fraud. They would realise that the premise behind astrology was ludicrous, and that the doctor or midwife or taxi driver who helped deliver you exerted a greater gravitational pull on you at your moment of birth than did the sun, moon, or any of the planets. They would calculate their odds of winning the lottery, see how ridiculously tiny they were, and decide to stop buying lottery tickets.

Scientists are hardly alone in their conviction that America's scientific eminence is one of our greatest sources of strength. Science and engineering have given us the integrated circuit, the Internet, protease inhibitors, statins, Velcro, Viagra, glow-in-the-dark slime, a childhood vaccine syllabus that has left slacker students with no better excuse for not coming to class than a "persistent Harry Potter headache", computer devices named after fruits or fruit parts, and advanced weapons systems named after stinging arthropods or Native American tribes.

Yet the future of our scientific eminence depends not so much on any cleverness in applied science as on a willingness to support basic research, the pi-in-the-sky investigations that may take decades to yield publishable results, marketable goodies, employable graduate students. Scientists and their boosters propose that if the public were more versed in the subtleties of science, it would gladly support generous annual increases in the federal science budget; long-term, open-ended research grants; and sufficient investment in infrastructure, especially better laboratory snack machines. They would recognise that the basic researchers of today help generate the prosperity of tomorrow, not to mention elucidating the mysteries of life and the universe, and that you can't put a price tag on genius and serendipity, except to say it's much bigger than Congress' science allotment for the current fiscal year.

I'm not sure that knowing about science will turn you into a better citizen, or win you a more challenging job, or prevent the occasional loss of mental faculties culminating in the unfortunate purchase of a pair of white leather pants. I'm not a pragmatist, and I can't make practical arguments of the broccoli and flossing kind. If you're an adult non-scientist, even the most profound mid-life crisis is unlikely to turn you into a practising scientist; and unless you're a scientist, you don't need to know about science. You also don't need to go to museums or listen to Bach or read a single slyly honied Shakespeare sonnet. You don't need to visit a foreign country or hike a desert canyon or go out on a cloudless, moonless night and get drunk on star champagne. How many friends do you need?

In place of civic need, why not neural greed? Of course you should know about science, as much as you've got the synaptic space to fit. Science is not just one thing, one line of reasoning or a boxable body of scholarship, like, say, the history of the Ottoman Empire. Science is huge, a great ocean of human experience; it's the product and point of having the most deeply corrugated brain of any species this planet has spawned. If you never learn to swim, you'll surely regret it; and the sea is so big, it won't let you forget it.

Of course you should know about science, for the same reason Dr Seuss counsels his readers to sing with a Ying or play Ring the Gack: these things are fun, and fun is good. There's a reason why science museums are fun, and why kids like science. Science is fun. Not just gee-whizbang "watch me dip this rose into liquid nitrogen and then shatter it on the floor" fun, although it's that, too. It's fun the way rich ideas are fun, the way seeing beneath the skin of something is fun. Understanding how things work feels good. Look no further - there's your should.

This is an edited extract from The Canon: a whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science by Natalie Angier. It will be published in Australia in November by Scribe. RRP: $32.95