| My strongest memory from
three years of required high school science is of the moment
Mr. F, a pale and ineffectual chemistry teacher, poured something
into a beaker that already contained something he didn't
know about, with the consequence that about 30 of us boys
were showered with glass shards and acid that burned red dimes
into our skin and holes in our shirtsleeves.
Nor did college bequeath me substantive
scientific memories. Patching together a bachelor's
degree from courses picked up at six institutions of higher
education in two non-contiguous states, I dodged most of the
degree requirements that it seemed in my best interests to
dodge, including a laboratory science course. In fact, except
for a brief season of post-college employment as the most
disinterested laboratory-animal caretaker ever to hoist a
60-pound sack of Purina rat food or hoochie-coochie a frozen-thawed
white mouse in front of a sleepy milk snake, I have managed
to avoid firsthand encounters with research science literally
all my life.
And so it should come as no surprise
that to this date, my contributions to a deeper understanding
of our cosmos have been rather slim: a set of children who
actually do comprehend the stuff but don't care to explain
it to me yet again; a (shaky, admittedly) hypothesis in thermodynamics
(or something sort of like it) that explains why the left
knee on my jeans always gives way first; and the Unified Theory
of Little Guys, which postulates that just about everything
we encounter in the natural world is the work of guys we can't
see as they go about their business or mischief inside internal
combustion engines, gall bladders, and septic tanks, to name
three mysterious systems to which I've had occasion
to devote serious, systematic thought.
Some of my deficiencies as a scientist
are no doubt attributable to nurture: too many years spent
in schools staffed by bunglers like Mr. F. Some are the fault
of nature: a brain that won't sit still long enough
to get to know one thing really well.
But surely not all the blame falls on
Mr. F or my wiring. Science itself is a problem. In 1959,
the British novelist C.P. Snow published an essay that lamented
the gap that had developed between "the two cultures"
of science and literature, particularly as the former grew
more complex and specialized. That essay is famous and in
print (unlike all of Snow's novels) because science
since 1959 has grown even more complex, specialized, and troublesome.
I am not referring to the moral precipices
to which we've been driven again and again by technological
advances, or to the charge from some quarters that science,
by permitting itself an inherent principle of uncertainty
in all observation, has ultimately brought about Tarantino
movies, critical legal studies, and the general debasement
of reason. I'm referring only to the impossible intellectual
and language puzzles posed by contemporary science: the finding,
recently published in Nature, that the universe is "a
Poincaré dodecahedral space," or the related
theory, reported on in the New York Times, that the universe
"is a kind of hyper-doughnut, or so it would appear
to a four-dimensional being standing outside of creation and
viewing it whole"; or this sentence, from an article--attractively
titled "Just Say CO" --in Science, a journal
aimed at a literate lay audience: "[A]n enzyme called
CK2 can activate HO2 by sticking on a phosphate group. CK2,
in turn, is activated by protein kinase C, an enzyme that
is turned on whenever a neuron fires." Eureka.
There is no solution to the complexity
problem. Academic science has set up shop in a distant galaxy,
and it isn't coming back. Looking through our telescopes,
we can make out certain powerful or diverting signals: proposed
cancer cures, robot vacuum cleaners, amazing tooth whiteners,
and the Ig Nobel Prizes, which are annually awarded by the
Annals Of Improbable Research to honor scientific discoveries
that "cannot, or should not, be reproduced." The
2003 winners include a Dutch scientist who documented, for
the first time, homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks, and
a New York academic who has published more than 80 precise
studies of modern life's trivial annoyances, such as
the percent of people who violate supermarket express-checkout
restrictions on number of items. Unlike the Nobel Prize ceremonies,
this year's Ig Nobels were televised on cable to the
entire country.
Our story on the mysteries of science
in Higgins Hall begins here.
Ben Birnbaum
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