When I think back to great meals I've had, my memory tends to spotlight small details: a forkful of mushrooms, maybe, or an especially sweet fig. For all who love science, 2009 is shaping up as a twelve-month feast. On the first day of this Year of Science, I can't predict what part of it will end up under my memory's spotlight. But I've already got a very strong contender. It's this picture.
This set of circles and arrows comes from a newly launched web site called Understanding Science. Created by a team of scientists and teachers, the site is a guided tour through the basic questions of what science is and how it works.
These questions may seem too abstract to bother with. We all know what science is, right? So why don't we just cut to the chase, and learn about black holes and viruses and everything in between? Pondering the nature of science is important, though, because understanding how science works lets us get much richer, deeper feel for what we do--and don't--know about the natural world.
For a lot of people, science seems like a short series of steps. 1. There's a mystery. 2. Scientists solve the mystery. 3. The rest of us learn what they figured out. End of story.
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But that's not how science works. It's more like the cycles within cycles in this picture. A simple question may lead a scientist to gather data, which may lead to a paper which leads to an application which unexpectedly leads to a new observation that leads that same scientist to come up with a hypothesis that does an even better job of explaining all of the results. There's no end to the paths through these cycles, just as scientists never stop finding new questions to ask, new ways to understand more about nature. (At the Understanding Science site, this picture comes to life, letting you dive into each part.)
As intricate as this diagram may be, it's actually a simplification of the process of science. On a given day, a scientist may check on several experiments all running at once, slip out to catch a seminar that reveals a way to improve one of those experiments, write up papers and realized in the process that the results actually point to a new, better hypothesis.
What's more, scientists do not work alone. They collaborate with overlapping teams of colleagues, and they engage in long-running debates with other scientists. (These days, some of those debates play out on blogs.) Scientists are influenced by their predecessors and mentors. And after they die, their studies may be reinterpreted in ways they could have never imagined. Make a picture of this picture in your mind, and then add thousands of other interlocking circles, each intersecting with many others. That's an even better picture of science. Unfortunately, it's beyond today's computer technology, so you'll have to rely on the laptop in your head.
So why do most of us not think of science this way? Part of the problem has to do with how we learn about it--in textbooks, magazines, newspapers, and the stories we tell each other. I think about this a lot, because I spend my days writing about science, not doing it. I am constantly reminded how mercilessly one-dimensional language is, a ribbon of words that spools out one sentence at a time. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. They are made up of series of steps. Steps like, "1. There is a mystery, 2., Scientists solve the mystery." The great temptation in writing about science is to take the easy way out, to claim that a single new study brings an entire field of scientific inquiry to a close in uttery certainty. At best, I think, stories about science can only be snapshots of small patches of science's cycles within cycles. It uses the one-dimensional medium of language to gesture towards science's mind-boggling multidimensionality. This picture from Understanding Science will help me remember to make that gesture, long after the Year of Science is over.