Great Throughts Treasury

"Another popular model is that science is busy unraveling things the way you unravel the peels of an onion. So peel by peel, you take away the layers of the onion to get at some fundamental kernel of truth. I don't think that's the way it works either. Another one, a kind of popular one, is the iceberg idea, that we only see the tip of the iceberg but underneath is where most of the iceberg is hidden. But all of these models are based on the idea of a large body of facts that we can somehow or another get completed. We can chip away at this iceberg and figure out what it is, or we could just wait for it to melt, I suppose, these days, but one way or another we could get to the whole iceberg. Right? Or make it manageable. But I don't think that's the case. I think what really happens in science is a model more like the magic well, where no matter how many buckets you take out, there's always another bucket of water to be had, or my particularly favorite one, with the effect and everything, the ripples on a pond. So if you think of knowledge being this ever-expanding ripple on a pond, the important thing to realize is that our ignorance, the circumference of this knowledge, also grows with knowledge. So the knowledge generates ignorance. This is really well said, I thought, by George Bernard Shaw. This is actually part of a toast that he delivered to celebrate Einstein at a dinner celebrating Einstein's work, in which he claims that science just creates more questions than it answers. ["Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more."]"

"Are we too enthralled with the answers these days? Are we afraid of questions, especially those that linger too long? We seem to have come to a phase in civilization marked by a voracious appetite for knowledge, in which the growth of information is exponential and, perhaps more important, its availability easier and faster than ever.*"

"Failure is also a test of dedication. It is a way to measure what you are passionate about and how deep that passion runs and how dependable it is. Science may seem methodical but it demands passion."

"Daniel Wolpert, of Cambridge University, is fond of pointing out that IBM?s Deep Blue supercomputer is capable of beating a grand master at the game of chess, but no computer has yet been developed that can move a chess piece from one square to another as well as a 3-year-old child."

"Erwin Schrodinger, a great quantum physicist and, I think, philosopher, points out how you have to "abide by ignorance for an indefinite period" of time. And it's this abiding by ignorance that I think we have to learn how to do."

"But so soon as I had achieved the entire course of study at the close of which one is usually received into the ranks of the learned, I entirely changed my opinion. For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance. ?Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, 1637"

"In other words, scientists don't concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but also miniscule, but rather on what they don't know. The one big fact is that science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it."

"Firestein, who chairs the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, stresses that beyond simply accumulating facts, scientists use them as raw material, not finished product. He cautions:"

"Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome."

"Failures provide a certain kind of feedback that is then used in a process we call error correction. With this simple loop in place, knowing that something doesn?t work can be as valuable as knowing that it does. Of course once again there are"

"George Bernard Shaw, in a toast at a dinner feting Albert Einstein, proclaimed, Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more. Isn?t that glorious? Science (and I think this applies to all kinds of research and scholarship) produces ignorance, possibly at a faster rate than it produces knowledge. Science, then, is not like the onion in the often used analogy of stripping away layer after layer to get at some core, central, fundamental truth. Rather it?s like the magic well: no matter how"

"Ignorance follows knowledge, not the other way around."

"Knowledge is a big subject. Ignorance is bigger. And it is more interesting."

"Perhaps the most important application of ignorance is in the sphere of education, particularly of scientists? We must ask ourselves how we should educate scientists in the age of Google and whatever will supersede it? The business model of our Universities, in place now for nearly a thousand years, will need to be revised."

"Now I use this word "ignorance," of course, to be at least in part intentionally provocative, because ignorance has a lot of bad connotations and I clearly don't mean any of those. So I don't mean stupidity, I don't mean a callow indifference to fact or reason or data. The ignorant are clearly unenlightened, unaware, uninformed, and present company today excepted, often occupy elected offices, it seems to me. That's another story, perhaps. I mean a different kind of ignorance. I mean a kind of ignorance that's less pejorative, a kind of ignorance that comes from a communal gap in our knowledge, something that's just not there to be known or isn't known well enough yet or we can't make predictions from, the kind of ignorance that's maybe best summed up in a statement by James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, who said, "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science." I think it's a wonderful idea: thoroughly conscious ignorance.?"

"Real science is a revision in progress, always. It proceeds in fits and starts of ignorance."

"Science produces ignorance, and ignorance fuels science. We have a quality scale for ignorance. We judge the value of science by the ignorance it defines. Ignorance can be big or small, tractable or challenging. Ignorance can be thought about in detail. Success in science, either doing it or understanding it, depends on developing comfort with the ignorance, something akin to Keats? negative capability."

"Instead of a system where the collection of facts is an end, where knowledge is equated with accumulation, where ignorance is rarely discussed, we will have to provide the Wiki-raised student with a taste of and for boundaries, the edge of the widening circle of ignorance, how the data, which are not unimportant, frames the unknown. We must teach students how to think in questions, how to manage ignorance. W. B. Yeats admonished that ?education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.?"

"The purpose of knowing a lot of stuff isn?t to know a lot of stuff, it?s to be able to frame thoughtful, interesting questions."

"Persistence in the face of failure is of course important, but it is not the same thing as dedication or passion. Persistence is a discipline that you learn; devotion is a dedication you can't ignore."

"Science, then, is not like the onion in the often used analogy of stripping away layer after layer to get at some core, central, fundamental truth. Rather it?s like the magic well: no matter how many buckets of water you remove, there?s always another one to be had. Or even better, it?s like the widening ripples on the surface of a pond, the ever larger circumference in touch with more and more of what?s outside the circle, the unknown. This growing forefront is where science occurs? It is a mistake to bob around in the circle of facts instead of riding the wave to the great expanse lying outside the circle."

"There are a lot of facts to be known in order to be a professional anything ? lawyer, doctor, engineer, accountant, teacher. But with science there is one important difference. The facts serve mainly to access the ignorance? Scientists don?t concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but minuscule, but rather on what they don?t know?. Science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it. Mucking about in the unknown is an adventure; doing it for a living is something most scientists consider a privilege."

"There are innumerable cases of important discoveries being made because the failed experiment revealed a new set of possibilities that you hadn?t even realized were there. This is sometimes mistaken for serendipity, a notion that, since it?s come up, I would like to take a moment to dispute."

"Working scientists don?t get bogged down in the factual swamp because they don?t care all that much for facts. It?s not that they discount or ignore them, but rather that they don?t see them as an end in themselves. They don?t stop at the facts; they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out. Facts are selected, by a process that is a kind of controlled neglect, for the questions they create, for the ignorance they point to."

"Understanding the raw material for the product is a subtle error but one that can have surprisingly far-reaching consequences. Understanding this error and its ramifications, and setting it straight, is crucial to understanding science."