I was an English major—until, that is, the time came for me to actually major in English. In college, I discovered that studying literature was less about enjoying words on the page and much more about dissecting them. Worse, dissection led to more complications, not fewer. If I was going to pull something lovely apart, I thought, I wanted to find answers. So I fled to the biology building—where I found a few answers, a lot more questions and a new way of understanding the world.
I like science because it is a process, a journey, as we writers like to say. It’s not a list of facts but a method, honed over centuries, of asking questions, testing possible answers and asking yet more questions. Scientists are trained to doubt and criticize, habits that can make their company difficult, but never dull. So in study after study, they observe and analyze and report, picking away at their uncertainties. If they’re lucky, they satisfy themselves and their colleagues and some part of the world at large, and finally arrive at something close to an answer. If not, they pass their questions on to the next generation, and the one after that. It’s a tradition of discovery that, bit by bit, adds up to knowledge. Like anything else practiced by fallible humans, science isn’t a perfect process, but it is a very powerful one—our clearest view of nature’s true complexity. I like science, but I’m not a scientist.
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I like science because it is a process, a journey, as we writers like to say. It’s not a list of facts but a method, honed over centuries, of asking questions, testing possible answers and asking yet more questions. Scientists are trained to doubt and criticize, habits that can make their company difficult, but never dull. So in study after study, they observe and analyze and report, picking away at their uncertainties. If they’re lucky, they satisfy themselves and their colleagues and some part of the world at large, and finally arrive at something close to an answer. If not, they pass their questions on to the next generation, and the one after that. It’s a tradition of discovery that, bit by bit, adds up to knowledge. Like anything else practiced by fallible humans, science isn’t a perfect process, but it is a very powerful one—our clearest view of nature’s true complexity. I like science, but I’m not a scientist.
- More Here
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