What is science for?
What does science mean to scientists, and how can their motivations translate to society at large?
I believe that science provides our culture with both inspiration at the natural world and a worldview that can enrich our daily experiences.
“Scientists are like car mechanics — I’m glad they exist, but I don’t feel the need to know how they do what they do.”
This was the reaction of a friend and humanities scholar when I asked him what he thought science was for.
As a scientist, I’m often confronted with frustration against the belief in the hegemony of science when it comes to the two cultures of western society. And yet while people are quick to express with delight that they just don’t “get” science, or to recount 6th grade stories about the moment they decided mathematics was lost on them, I doubt many would admit an ignorance of Shakespeare or Joyce with the same indignation. How is it that more than fifty years after C.P. Snow’s work on the two cultures we as society are still ensconced in the same reality?
To me, the joy, passion and awe for the world that science brings are all too self-evident. Willful ignorance of the beauty science provides us seems to me to be limiting one’s ability to fully appreciate the world we live in.
As it is easiest to start close to home, it makes sense to define what scientists (in my case, what physicists) get from their scientific study. I see science as having two distinct sides. The craft of science brings its own deep satisfaction in much the same way as the unraveling of a complicated knot does. The ability to piece together seemingly disconnected facts into a coherent whole is balanced by the slow simplification of a problem that seems at first glance too disparate to have one underlying solution. We work on the small details as well as the big picture. One often hears of the “Eureka!” moments in science, but these are too few and far between to be the raison d’etre for most scientists. Strange as it may sound, it is the slow, comforting knocking of your head against the firmament that really brings deep reward. You only have to look at the recent coverage of female scientists engaged in their work and see the palpable delight on their faces to know what I’m talking about.
But this craft would really mean nothing without the underlying belief that our universe actually is indeed underpinned by some set of physical and mathematical laws that describe natural phenomena. Modern science as I execute it rests on the fact that it can be explained by those laws and those laws have predictive power. While Daston and Galison inform us that there is ‘nothing inevitable about the emergence of objectivity’ in science, this objectivity is central to the ethos of all scientists, and something that gives us all the motivation to continue in the field.
You need only to ask a physicist to describe the dispersion of light or the double-slit experiment to see them beam (excuse the pun) at you with excitement.
Simple expressions suffice to explain incredibly complex results. Just describing them makes the hairs on my arm stand up: it is this sense of wonder physics can give society.
This sense of wonder is sustaining over a long timescale. The experiment I work on, namely the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) on is just one example of that. It started as an idea between friends and colleagues about measuring the fluctuations in the temperature of the nascent light of the universe — the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.
The radiation had been predicted in the late 40s and discovered rather serendipitously by Penzias and Wilson in the 60s, not too far away from where I write this in Princeton, New Jersey. By the time ACT was conceived we had already sent two satellites into space to measure not only the temperature of this radiation, but to measure how the temperature varied on the sky relative to its mean; these temperature anisotropies. ACT was designed to measure these anisotropies with an incredibly fine angular resolution.
As a theorist I marvel at the fact that not only were my colleagues bold enough to dream up this telescope which sits over 5000m above sea level, and whose detectors are cooled to within a third of a degree of absolute zero (if you need to take a moment to fully appreciate just how incredible that is, I understand — it leaves me weak at the knees), but that we build and operated ACT successfully and manage to learn incredible things about the universe through it. And we aren’t stopping yet. This delight and wonder at the universe and what she was revealing to us through ACT led us to upgrade the telescope to enable it to measure the polarisation of the CMB light. Through the data we gather in Chile, we look back in time to 380000 years after the Big Bang, and can tell you something out the initial conditions of the universe. What a privilege it is to do so!
Throughout the field of physics there are people who design, research and implement experiments that may not even be completed during their academic tenure. They devote hours to understanding exactly how things will fail, how much they will cost and where we can improve, in the hope that our intuition about the physics of the universe will be borne out.
And theorists sometimes struggle with the same problem for most of their careers, wedded to the idea that there is an underlying solution. One of my favourite moments is in the BBC documentary about Andrew Wiles and how he solved Fermat’s last theorem (while at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton) was when he was asked by the question of what was next on his list of things to do. He looked at the interviewer and said that nothing in his life would be the same again. It wasn’t merely the goal he was after. He was in love with his craft.
The moment you first think of an idea for a paper, but before you know if it is going to work out often feels like an awkward first date (or that tense scene in any episode of MacGyver) — you are nervous but excited. Those first few ‘back of the envelope’ calculations help a bit: will you see a signal? Will it be detectable? Will it be relevant? After checking things a bit perhaps you ask a colleague to join you in the project, always hoping that you might be on to something, but being vigilant to make sure you don’t protect a failing idea blindly.
Then comes the hours of slog and heartache as you work through the details. Sometimes this makes you wonder why you started in the first place — science is hard and is a great way to make you feel less intelligent than the universe at large, especially when she is being elusive. Slowly but surely though, you see the light and there is intense pleasure when you make the final push, describing your results, writing the text that describes all this work. Imagining and making that figure that will perfectly highlight why it all matters, why your colleagues should care. And then comes the wait for the input and criticism of your colleagues, only to start again on something new.
While physics isn’t unique in its ability to inspire, it provides wonder with momentum: without the possibility of explanation, scientific phenomena would not be fulfilling. Indeed, science generates the desire and possibility not only of understanding the world as we see it now, but also in understanding its past and future.
The ability of science to explain our observable universe generates scientific abstraction. This takes us beyond the realm of even the current universe, and allows us to ask tangible questions about what lies beyond our observed boundaries of the universe. For example, through physics we can ask questions like: do we live in a multiverse containing many copies of ourselves? What happened in the first moments of the life of the universe?
No discussion about the practice of science would be complete without a scientific analogy. A concept that I use on a regular basis as a cosmologist is that of the power spectrum. Simply put, it answers the question of how much of a certain scientific observable or signal occurs at a specific scale. For example, if you filled a room with the same volume of sand or of pebbles, they would have different power spectra, since in the case of the pebbles, the distance between the centers of mass of each individual pebble occurs on larger scales than for the grains of sand. We use the concept of a power spectrum when understanding how much of the matter density of the universe is made up of stars, or of galaxies, or of clusters or galaxies.
What science provides us with is the ability to change the power spectrum of thought by adding power on the largest (and smallest) scales. It complements the work of the humanities, which asks us to think of our place in the world and of the meaning of our existence. The difference however lies in the fact that science is more concerned with the “where are we” and “how are we” questions than the “why are we” and “how should we” questions. It provides us with call to transcendence. It focuses on how we would test and evaluate theories of the universe, our place in it and what it contains, both theoretically and statistically.
The of analogy that I used in the power spectrum example above is one that we rely on constantly as physicists.
Our descriptions of complicated phenomena are simplified and broken down until they are composed of building blocks of well-understood principles and cases that we can interpolate between.
The key ideas behind this scientific reductionism is not only the causality that underpins them, but also that we can predict the outcomes of (real or thought) experiments based on the smaller components that will lead us to falsifiable null tests.
As Feynman put it: “we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress”.
Often the bane of my existence as a scientist is identifying that one variable or phenomenon that I can control and use to falsify my own theory, which leads me to slowly re-introduce complexity to the theory until it does describe the situation or data that I need to fit. As Feynman again tells us in his “Character of Physical Law”, if your model is too complicated, you end up getting out largely what you put in. Occam’s Razor lies at the heart of many a scientific argument in my field, and to quote another science heavyweight (no article on what science can give to society would be complete without quotes by both Einstein and Feynman): “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. It is this balance between simplification and complexity,complexity; driven by the predictive power of a theory or idea , that science can naturally imbue our culture with.
The balance is made more complicated by the fact that our scientific intuition (both natural and learned), which is informed by analogy, doesn’t always hold up to rigid philosophies of reductionism and/or positivism: the scientific method is malleable.
Of course, what one needs to guard against is the possibility of science generating scientism, an affliction that aggravates scientists and those in the humanities alike. The appearance of scientific principles does nothing to increase the value of a piece of research, and here the strategy of Elon Musk (who grew up in my home town) rings true for me. By asking someone to explain the struggle they had with a certain problem, you test their understanding and break through the thin veneer of respectability that scientism provides. Given that my research builds on several different mathematical and statistical concepts, there is often a struggle to make concepts understandable in my writing and science communication. In trying to have scientific integrity (when analogies break down they can confuse the public, something that makes me lose sleep at night) one can veer too far in the other direction, and using too much scientific jargon provides fuel to the scientism fire. While in general we hold ourselves to this ‘simple, not simpler’ standard, I think scientists could do much more to speak out against scientism, rather than ignoring it.
The universe is an incredible place, and I have (hopefully) convinced you to renew your interest in the physics that governs it. Maybe you have started staring at light patterns in waves. Maybe you now exclaiming wonder at the fact that the universe will end in a cold heat death billions of years from now. However, one might ask why more people outside of science don’t feel like this already.
Why does the image of scientists in their ivory towers persist? Why are scientists still portrayed as wild, crazy and often with malintent in the popular media?
Here I think the gauntlet lies at the door of science. Science communication and outreach is something that is central to my view of my role as a scientist in our culture. Science communication is able to change perceptions of who a scientist is, which is still an issue today. In my experience David Wade Chambers’ “Draw a scientist” experiment still holds true today; I often get asked if I wear a lab coat (I don’t work with chemicals or biological material, so NOPE). These perceptions often hinder people’s desire to get into the field of science, and rob us of a generation of talented people.
Hopefully effective science communication gives us the opportunity to explain scientific concepts and our wonder about them to society at large — and inspire young people to become scientists.
The time of C.P. Snow might have been a low point in the science communication history of the world (and one might argue that the science salons of the Victorian age were a highlight, but that is a topic for another time). Indeed, there have always been pioneers in science communication, but the Internet age means that it is possible for a greater number of scientists to reach the public.
Science communication is not, however, always valued within the field of science.
As someone who is very active giving talks, writing blogs and organising events, I’ve had to justify the energy I spend doing science communication, as it takes a non-zero amount of time away from normal ‘research hours’ (thank goodness for evenings). I was once told by a colleague to do outreach but not be visible doing outreach, as this would make me seem less serious as a scientist to my peers.
But should we be doing more as a field? The National Science Foundation of the United States has a ‘Broader Impacts’ requirement of all grants that it awards, something I feel is vital if we are to see the impact of our scientific endeavour in the larger community. While not everyone in the field may feel called to engage in the same way (we don’t all have the charm of Neil deGrasse Tyson) I think the onus should be on scientists to show the world who they are and why they do what they do.
Because if the fact that I can measure light that has been travelling through the universe since shortly after the big bang doesn’t make you a heady mix of excited, scared and amazed, then I’m doing this all wrong.
