Tuesday, April 17, 2012

On What We Don't Know

In the new book Ignorance: How it drives science, university lecturer Stuart Firestein is dedicating his class to what we don't know.

"To demonstrate the crucial role of this type of informed ignorance, Firestein highlights two well-known examples. The first, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, asserts that we cannot know the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously. That is, the more we home in on one property, the less accurately we can determine the other. His second example is Gödel's incompleteness theorems. These state that there is no entirely self-consistent logical framework for mathematics. In essence, they show that you can always formulate logical statements for which there will be no clear true or false answer. Firestein underscores how, instead of leading us to dead ends, both of these discoveries answered some questions and, importantly, positioned scientists to ask more.

Firestein also includes more modern examples of productive ignorance. As part of his course, he invites fellow scientists to come and talk about the limits of knowledge within their particular fields. For example, psychologist and animal-behaviour researcher Irene Pepperberg discussed the question of whether animals possess consciousness. Pepperberg studied her famous parrot Alex for 30 years - until he died aged 31 - and taught the bird 100 words, which he used in simple phrases. Her research, she says, gave us "a glimpse of his brain". We may not have an answer to the wrong-headed question of whether birds possess true language, but Alex inspired new questions about how we understand animal minds."

No comments: