We were driving along the side of Loch Ken today when The Boy suddenly asked "What makes the earth go around the sun?" Although there's a perfectly good answer to the "around the sun" bit, there really isn't - or at least, not at four-year-old-level - to the first half. It's a good example of a Wrong Question, or rather of a questions which reveals an underlying false assumption. In this case, that assumption was that something must be making the earth move.
Ever since Newton (and for a long time before him too, if you asked the right people) we've known that "moving" is actually as natural a state as "not moving". It doesn't take any external force, agency or power supply to keep things moving in a straight line. Changing direction requires force but no power and only a change of speed requires some energy transfer.
Scientific enquiry is very largely the art of asking the right questions, and learning to recognize preconceptions in our questioning is a fundamental scientific skill. It's a hard one, too, because it requires us to ask questions about ourselves, our motives and our beliefs ... and that doesn't always come easily when we often think that science is a dispassionate, objective process.
I think that's one of the keys to Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. Most of us spent our entire careers diligently preparing, testing, answering and refining questions within a framework of belief about the universe which we may and need only dimly comprehend.
I remember years ago watching a documentary about the discovery of High Tc superconductivity. After Bednorz and Müller made it clear that High Tc ceramic superconductors were theoretically possible, research groups around the world raced to produce the first specimen, spurred on by the prospects of a paper in Nature and a Nobel Prize. One group produced what may well have been the first sample, but didn't test it because it was green, and the boss knew that superconductors have to be shiny metallic. Whoops. Bednorz and Müller got the Nobel (saving a lot of squabbling, and they deserved it) but there went the Nature citation and the line in the history books.
Back to The Boy's question, though, and it struck me that he made precisely the same error made by Intelligent Designers (those who are sincere and not just lying about their Creationist beliefs - isn't there a commandment against that? He knows the earth moves, and assumes that something must be making it move. They see the world change and assume that something must be making it change. It's not like that. The evolutionary process is as natural, unstoppable and ungoverned as the movement of the earth.
At the Bang! roadshows this summer, one of the most common questions in our final Q&A sessions was "When did you first become interested in science?" That's a Wrong Question too, because it assumes that scientific interest starts. Watch a baby. Watch a toddler. From birth, or at least from the first ability to manipulate the world around them, they do experiments. What happens if I smile at that human being? What happens if I cry? What happens if I pour water over that book? How many bricks can I stack up? How far can I lean over without falling? How fast can I run?
They do them repeatedly, refining the experiment as results come in. They follow side tracks. They build up models of the universe and when contradictory information comes in they demolish these models and start again.
Everyone is interested in science, at first. Let's ask why so many people lose that interest. That's a Really Good Question.
No comments:
Post a Comment