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What Science Wants To Know

Stuart Firestein argues that science is driven more by ignorance than knowledge. While scientific discoveries have exponentially increased our factual knowledge, each new answer generates many new questions. Scientists cope with the ever-growing mountain of facts by specializing in narrow areas and largely ignoring information outside their expertise. What truly defines scientists is their cultivated ignorance - their awareness of what they don't know and the important questions that remain unanswered. Emphasizing ignorance makes science more accessible, interesting and fun for both scientists and the public.

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69 views1 page

What Science Wants To Know

Stuart Firestein argues that science is driven more by ignorance than knowledge. While scientific discoveries have exponentially increased our factual knowledge, each new answer generates many new questions. Scientists cope with the ever-growing mountain of facts by specializing in narrow areas and largely ignoring information outside their expertise. What truly defines scientists is their cultivated ignorance - their awareness of what they don't know and the important questions that remain unanswered. Emphasizing ignorance makes science more accessible, interesting and fun for both scientists and the public.

Uploaded by

spsarathy
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Forum by Stuart Firestein

Commentary on science in the news from the experts

Stuart Firestein is a professor and chair of biological sciences at Columbia University. He is


author of Ignorance: How It Drives Science, which
Oxford University Press is releasing this month.

What Science
Wants to Know
An impenetrable mountain of
facts can obscure
the deeper questions
Most scholars agree that Isaac Newton, while
formulating the laws of force and gravity and inventing the calculus in the late 1600s, probably
knew all the science there was to know at the
time. In the ensuing 350 years an estimated 50
million research papers and innumerable books
have been published in the natural sciences
and mathematics. The modern high school
student probably now possesses more scientific knowledge than Newton did, yet science to
many people seems to be an impenetrable mountain of facts.
One way scientists have tried to cope with this mountain is by
becoming more and more specialized, with limited success. As a
biologist, I wouldnt expect to get past the first two sentences of a
physics paper. Even papers in immunology or cell biology mystify meand so do some papers in my own field, neurobiology. Every day my expertise seems to get narrower. So scientists have
had to fall back on another strategy for coping with the mountain of information: we largely ignore it.
That shouldnt come as a surprise. Sure, you have to know a
lot to be a scientist, but knowing a lot is not what makes a scientist. What makes a scientist is ignorance. This may sound ridiculous, but for scientists the facts are just a starting place. In science, every new discovery raises 10 new questions, as playwright
George Bernard Shaw sardonically declared in a dinner toast to
Albert Einstein.
By this calculus, ignorance will always grow faster than
knowledge. Scientists and laypeople alike would agree that for
all we have come to know, there is far more we dont know. More
important, everyday there is far more we know we dont know.
One crucial outcome of scientific knowledge is to generate new
and better ways of being ignorant: not the kind of ignorance that
is associated with a lack of curiosity or education but rather a
cultivated, high-quality ignorance. This gets to the essence of
what scientists do: they make distinctions between qualities of
ignorance. They do it in grant proposals and over beers at meetings. As James Clerk Maxwell, probably the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, said, Thoroughly conscious ignorance ... is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge.
This perspective on sciencethat it is about the questions
more than the answersshould come as something of a relief. It

10 Scientific American, April 2012

sad0412Foru3p.indd 10

makes science less threatening and far more friendly and, in fact,
fun. Science becomes a series of elegant puzzles and puzzles
within puzzlesand who doesnt like puzzles? Questions are also
more accessible and often more interesting than answers; answers tend to be the end of the process, whereas questions have
you in the thick of things. I cant grasp much of immunology
even though I have a fancy Ph.D., but the wonderful thing is that
most immunologists cant eitherno one knows everything anymore. I can, however, understand the questions that drive immunology. And although I dont pretend to understand much about
quantum physics, I can appreciate how the questions in that
field arise and why they are so fundamental. Emphasizing ignorance is inclusive; it makes everyone feel more equal in the same
way the infinity of space pares everyone down to size.
Of late this side of science has taken a backseat in the pubic
mind to what I call the accumulation view of sciencethat it is a
pile of facts way too big for us to ever hope to conquer. But if scientists would talk about the questions rather than boring your
eyes out of their sockets with reams of jargon, and if the media
reported not only on new discoveries but the questions they answered and the new puzzles they created, and if educators
stopped trafficking in facts that are already available on Wikipediathen we might find a public once again engaged in this great
adventure that has been going on for the past 15 generations.
So if you meet a scientist, dont ask her what she knows, ask
her what she wants to know. Its a much better conversation
for both of you.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
Comment on this article at ScienticAmerican.com/apr2012

Illustration by Oliver Munday

2/15/12 2:39 PM

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