 Print
The Wonderful "How" of Science
12-03-2014
In the last column we explored the value of spending time wondering instead of searching the Internet for quick superficial answers. We are surrounded by everyday miracles that reveal God’s majesty and magnitude. When we take time to see and celebrate the beauty inherent in everything we nurture our sense of awe and appreciation while strengthening our faith.
Although we live in what is termed the “Information Age” and have access to more facts and figures than ever before, there is still a great deal of things we simply don’t know. Author Bill Bryson reminds us “We live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distance we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.” What’s more, much of what is “known” is simply the best guesses of experts based on how they interpret the limited data available. The world’s collective body of knowledge is constantly being reviewed and revised. We’re all familiar with the fallacies once accepted as true such as the earth being flat or the sun rotating around the earth. Coming to know is a long and complicated process. It involves asking an “unknown-information seeking question” that has not yet been answered and then searching for a way to gather data from which to extrapolate a reasonable answer, which exists tentatively until someone asks a deeper “unknown-information seeking question” about that particular answer reviving the search.
Bryson’s book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" traces the path of how some of the most fascinating answers about our world have developed and continue to develop. It’s a history of science that reads like a travelogue through time, stopping at the most intriguing topics and revealing their momentous breakthroughs. He does this in a highly entertaining and personal way through introducing the reader to what can be thought of as the “local inhabitants” of the scientific community. He cleverly wraps the seriousness and significance of complicated concepts and theories around the often quirky personalities of the people involved. Bryson shows us that scientific discoveries are usually the result of insatiable curiosity mixed with stubborn persistence and a bit of well-timed luck.
Bryson is not a scientist. He’s a travel writer who felt embarrassed by his shallow understanding of science. He became fixated on the idea of “How do they know that?” The process of discovery held the mystery. How do you weigh a mountain? Calculate the circumference of the earth? Measure the depth of an ocean canyon? Determine the speed of light? Discover an element? Describe the structure and behaviour of atoms? Unlock a protein? Unravel DNA? How do we even think? Bryson set out to discover the "how" behind the "what".
Thankfully, Bryson has a witty and relatively easy way of explaining how we know what we know. This is not a tedious textbook. The theories and complexities are accessibly framed in stories and examples that a nonscientist can understand. Reading “A Short History of Nearly Everything” is not about impressing others by memorizing an array of facts, figures, dates and names, it’s about seeing the world in new ways and acknowledging that moving from not knowing to knowing is an ongoing journey. It’s about realizing that what we know is incredibly wondrous and what we don’t know even more so. It's about wondering and contemplating and experimenting. It's about being unsure, following a hunch and starting over if you go down a wrong path. It's about discovery.
What we know now, the big ideas, taken for granted laws of physics and views of how things work are simply the accumulated information we have available to us at the present time. Our knowledge is limited and always in flux. As we refine our tools and instruments, and revise our ways of interpreting and understanding, we replace old "truths" with new theories. Being scientifically educated isn't about stuffing ourselves with information, it's having a willingness to work at understanding the process so far, being insatiably curious, stubbornly persistent and always hopeful that God will provide a bit of well-timed luck.
Bill Bryson is a popular author. You can read more about him and his work at http://www.billbryson.co.uk Zainab Dhanani can be reached at z_dhanani@yahoo.ca.
Footnotes:
|