Science thoughts
Mar. 19th, 2005 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkNature has a supplement this week with a ‘Science from the Artist’s perspective’ reciprocal theme. In it AS Byatt writes about how she’s included scientists and scientific ideas in her books and mentions Lewis Wolpert’s contention that its not possible to understand science, or how scientists work, from general principles alone – to have any real feel for what it’s all about, you need to get down and dirty with the details (this is me paraphrasing from vague and distant memories, I may be completely misstating his argument).
To some extent that’s a truism about how it’s hard to understand other people but having got irritated by some of the ideas about science expressed in a couple of the other articles I’m inclined to agree. For example in the piece by Simon Mawer, the writer and biologist:-
”The inherited anlage was in Mendels’s mind, the uncertain particle was in Heisenberg’s, the universe is in Stephen Hawking’s. There is little difference between this and artistic vision. Yes, you’ve got to do the experiments but that is not the essence of it.”
Big ideas are all very well and they’re probably the part of science that’s of most interest to non-scientists. Or even other scientists who don’t happen to work in the same field. Ideas form the main substance of what gets taught right up through undergraduate level and ideas, from the beautiful double helical structure of DNA to the black humour of Schroedinger’s cat, are what draw people in initially.
And despite this, I find it’s the long hard slog, the daily tedium of actually doing the experiments that really keeps me there. It’s the experiments that give ideas form, let them play with the world, have conversations with it. To be honest, if I think about it, it wasn’t admiration for other people’s ideas that pulled me into science in the first place but simple curiosity. I wanted to know how things worked, to get inside their (metaphorical) heads. I wanted to know why the sky was blue and how bees flew and why the goslings that had imprinted on my brother and I abandoned us and teamed up with the other geese as soon as their voices broke.
Which is as good a point as any to introduce another quote from those Nature articles, this time from one by Alan Lightman on how the arts and sciences complement each other
”Compelling characters must retain a certain mystery and unfathomable depth, even for the author. Once we have seen to the bottom of their hearts, the novel is dead for us.”
Which made me think yes! That’s exactly how it is. If we really believed we were close to a grand unified answer to everything it just wouldn’t be fun any more. Only to read this in the very next paragraph:
”Scientists work on questions with answers. … At any moment each scientist is working on what is called a ‘well-posed problem’ – that is a problem of such a kind and stated with such clarity that it is certain to have a definite answer. …By contrast for artists the question is often more interesting than the answer and often an answer doesn’t exist.”
It’s true a well designed, a satisfyingly designed experiment can do just that. But no problem gets posed in isolation. In developmental neurobiology there’s a whole body of neat experiments that seek to answer the question of whether myelinating cells come from the dorsal or the ventral half of the spinal cord. Ironically, the most recent answer appears to be both and the really interesting conclusions have come from what’s been learnt along the way.
That aside some of the most significant experiments in scientific history, at least in genetics, pose extremely open-ended questions. Probably the best example of such an enquiry is this:
“What genes are necessary for embryonic development in fruit flies.”
The answers to that one hooked Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus the Nobel prize for medicine in 1995.
And finally, having babbled on about Science for quite long enough I’ll end with my younger autistic son’s big thoughts about Art.
”I don’t like art.
I like dinner.”
Philistine.
To some extent that’s a truism about how it’s hard to understand other people but having got irritated by some of the ideas about science expressed in a couple of the other articles I’m inclined to agree. For example in the piece by Simon Mawer, the writer and biologist:-
”The inherited anlage was in Mendels’s mind, the uncertain particle was in Heisenberg’s, the universe is in Stephen Hawking’s. There is little difference between this and artistic vision. Yes, you’ve got to do the experiments but that is not the essence of it.”
Big ideas are all very well and they’re probably the part of science that’s of most interest to non-scientists. Or even other scientists who don’t happen to work in the same field. Ideas form the main substance of what gets taught right up through undergraduate level and ideas, from the beautiful double helical structure of DNA to the black humour of Schroedinger’s cat, are what draw people in initially.
And despite this, I find it’s the long hard slog, the daily tedium of actually doing the experiments that really keeps me there. It’s the experiments that give ideas form, let them play with the world, have conversations with it. To be honest, if I think about it, it wasn’t admiration for other people’s ideas that pulled me into science in the first place but simple curiosity. I wanted to know how things worked, to get inside their (metaphorical) heads. I wanted to know why the sky was blue and how bees flew and why the goslings that had imprinted on my brother and I abandoned us and teamed up with the other geese as soon as their voices broke.
Which is as good a point as any to introduce another quote from those Nature articles, this time from one by Alan Lightman on how the arts and sciences complement each other
”Compelling characters must retain a certain mystery and unfathomable depth, even for the author. Once we have seen to the bottom of their hearts, the novel is dead for us.”
Which made me think yes! That’s exactly how it is. If we really believed we were close to a grand unified answer to everything it just wouldn’t be fun any more. Only to read this in the very next paragraph:
”Scientists work on questions with answers. … At any moment each scientist is working on what is called a ‘well-posed problem’ – that is a problem of such a kind and stated with such clarity that it is certain to have a definite answer. …By contrast for artists the question is often more interesting than the answer and often an answer doesn’t exist.”
It’s true a well designed, a satisfyingly designed experiment can do just that. But no problem gets posed in isolation. In developmental neurobiology there’s a whole body of neat experiments that seek to answer the question of whether myelinating cells come from the dorsal or the ventral half of the spinal cord. Ironically, the most recent answer appears to be both and the really interesting conclusions have come from what’s been learnt along the way.
That aside some of the most significant experiments in scientific history, at least in genetics, pose extremely open-ended questions. Probably the best example of such an enquiry is this:
“What genes are necessary for embryonic development in fruit flies.”
The answers to that one hooked Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus the Nobel prize for medicine in 1995.
And finally, having babbled on about Science for quite long enough I’ll end with my younger autistic son’s big thoughts about Art.
”I don’t like art.
I like dinner.”
Philistine.