Science And Me, A Love Story

I don’t really think about why it is I love science so much. If you asked, a majority of scientists would probably tell you the love for discovery or the ultimate good of human ambition are the reasons. A great many would probably also add that the activity of science is a direct consequence of the evolution of life on earth. Don’t get me wrong, all that stuff’s true and great but, for me, it ends up coming to a very personal point that has more to do with being comfortable in my own skin than some grand philosophical/moral standpoint.

Simply put, I’m an extremely disorganized person with a few emotional health challenges who has had a comfortable American lifestyle. That lifestyle really separates us from nature’s own method for teaching its children their place in the world, something our ancestors and every other animal on Earth used (albeit unconsciously) to sustain and evolve itself. In nature, you get hungry and then you have to go find something to eat. Here, today, you get hungry and move your finger around a piece of glass and silicon and plastic for a few minutes (that’s what your phone is) and food shows up at your door. Point is, there ain’t nothin much challenging to do here for a lot of us, and I’m an anxious hyper-cognate dealing with depression who needs something not too abstract to hold onto but abstract enough that I won’t run out of stuff to do before I die.

So basically I like science because it’s hard. Or, really, because it’s a game nobody wins. What does that even mean, though, "winning" science? There’s a reason that sounds silly, and it’s pretty simple. Science is the pursuit and collection of knowledge, as well as the entire repertoire of things humans have learned over the eons. If you want to learn more about how scientists DO science, here’s a link to a fun video describing the scientific method!  To “win” science, you'd have to have all that knowledge and then also all the knowledge that will ever be discovered, which is impossible. I’m gonna paraphrase a video i saw a while back where I believe Michio Kaku, one of the great science communicators of our time, raises this issue in an interesting way.

As a person, you know what you know, and you know what you don’t know. You probably know you need to breathe air to survive, and you know you know that. On the other hand, you probably don’t know how to build a car from scratch, and you probably also know you don’t know that. You still have the opportunity to ask that question and gain that knowledge, though. The tricky thing is that there’s a whole expanse of knowledge you don’t even know you don’t know. Just within the realm of things somebody knows, you probably didn’t know you don’t know what a quantum operator is until you read about it here. Even further beyond that, we know that the universe is so large that there are places with things whose light will take longer than the lifespan of our galaxy to reach us. That’s LIGHT, the fastest thing around, the grand “cosmic speed limit.” Put simply, we just can’t see everything there is to know.

Many scientists will cite that science, and by extension technology, is a benevolent force of nature that works through humankind for the betterment of humankind. If you know our relationship with war and transportation, you know our actions in these realms often have consequences only our children and grandchildren will be around to see, so that’s not why I love science. I love science because it gives organization to the universe without putting it in a box. It’s a kind of endless question parade where every “answer" you find really turns out to be 10 new questions, and so the process repeats itself across generations of curiousity. Through this expansion we went from the philosophers and natural observers of the great ancient civilizations who asked and tried to answer what seemed to be all of the questions they had, to a modern world with more pathways of scientific inquiry than any one person could name, much less have full comprehension of. 

I couldn’t in good conscience claim science to be “good” by nature, but I’d argue that science is nature, and as much a part of our evolutionary tool kit as our opposable thumbs. And yes, we scientists may all just be hamsters running in a hamster wheel on an individual scale, hopelessly trying to find some conclusion to this story that might never exist; but ya know what? That’s cool by me, because it’s a process that helps me understand the other things I love, which makes it easier for me to do what gives me purpose. Don’t forget to be cool with what gives YOU purpose in this world, too. Whatever that is, get out and do something about it, or at least do what I’m doing right now and share something about it!