Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [116]
There is also the problem of methodology: science teaching methods and curricula have also been a victim of the cover-up. Children have, by and large, been taught the letter but not the spirit of science. As the philosopher Rousseau suggested, we should not teach children the sciences, but give them an appetite for them.
It is open to question, for instance, whether students really need to learn all of the scientific information on the science curriculum. For most, it is an experience that seems to destroy any interest in science. And anyone who has done a school science practical will know how hard it can be to get results that the textbooks say they should. Why is this seen as a failing? Imagine if teachers were then allowed to use this experience to explain the challenges and rewards involved in making breakthroughs and discoveries, rather than having to press on to the point where the student’s notebook contains the ‘right’ answer. Science teachers have been unwittingly co-opted into the effort to conceal the true nature and spirit of science.
Setting the anarchists free will certainly be difficult while such mindsets prevail. One result has been that many of those who survive their education with sufficient interest in science to pursue it further are of a personality type that perpetuate the problem. They are drawn to science as it has been portrayed: staid and comfortable.
This is a problem that Stanford Ovshinsky, the scientist without a college degree, understands better than most. Traditional forms of education, he says, can hamper scientific creativity in students: ‘All the time they’re being treated in a “giving of information to you” kind of way, and then when they get out of school they say, “Okay, now you’re on your own, think, be creative.” After all those years of trying to kill it.’ Kary Mullis also worries about the scientists that the post-war growth of the science establishment is continuing to produce. Out of the investment ‘came a lot of scientists who were in it for the money because it was suddenly available’, he says. These scientists, he observes, were not, like him, ‘the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air’.
An interesting question to consider is what kind of science such scientists produce. Surely, if we flood the universities with visionless scientists, it is inevitable that much of science will become boring. Take a 2008 paper by the GEM particle physics collaboration as an arbitrary example. It stretches over twenty pages, has thirty-one authors, and relates to the minutiae of whether a particular kind of subatomic particle called a meson forms a ‘bound state’ within an atomic nucleus – two decades previously, a couple of physicists had suggested that it might. Unfortunately, the data presented proved nothing; as the last line of the paper states, ‘Further data are clearly needed.’ It is difficult to tell who would care even if further data weren’t needed. It is an example of the over-specialised result, a natural inclination of science, and one that has to be resisted where at all possible.
The problem was identified as long ago as 1930, by a Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset. In order to make progress, science demands that its workers become ever more specialised. The result, Ortega said, is that the majority of scientists are ‘shut up in the narrow cell of their laboratory, like the bee in the cell of its hive’. This type of scientist ‘is familiar only with one particular science … in which he himself is engaged in research’. The result, according to Ortega, is a succession of mediocre, tedious advances, not Nobel Prize-winning breakthroughs. And that was pre-war; in the post-war environment things got worse.
In 1950, the German physicist Erwin Schrödinger reprised Ortega’s lament. He worried that specialisation creates a societal ennui that could eventually kill the scientific endeavour. ‘Never lose sight of the role your particular subject has within the great performance