It’s only when the facts fail that scientists really put on their thinking caps

Here is an interesting book review from To Advance, Search for a Black Cat in a Dark Room by Sandra Blakeslee.

The book being reviewed touches on some themes I have been mulling and discussing lately. One is the knowledge frontier - our reluctance to acknowledge when we have approached the border where certainty gives way to uncertainty, when predictability gives way to guesses.

I am currently browsing What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Uncertainty edited by John Brockman which also explores this boundary between knowing and not knowing.

Finally, I have also been discussing and wondering whether one of the issues in education today might not be an absence of boredom and ignorance. I'll post on that separately.

From the article:

Working scientists don’t get bogged down in factual swamps, he says, because they don’t care all that much for facts. Facts are not what science is all about. It’s only when the facts fail that scientists really put on their thinking caps.

Scientists, Dr. Firestein says, are driven by ignorance.

In this sense, ignorance is not stupidity. Rather, it is a particular condition of knowledge: the absence of fact, understanding, insight or clarity about something. It is a case where data don’t exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don’t make sense.

[snip]

Dr. Firestein, by contrast, celebrates a tolerance for uncertainty, the pleasures of scientific mystery and the cultivation of doubt. If more people embraced the seductive appeal of uncertainty, he says, it might take some acrimony out of our public debates.

[snip]

“When I sit down with colleagues over a beer at a meeting, we don’t go over facts,” Dr. Firestein writes. “We don’t talk about what’s known. We talk about what we’d like to figure out, about what needs to be done.”

He realized he was failing to teach ignorance, the most critical part of the scientific enterprise, which led to the creation of a course titled “SNC3429 Ignorance.”Dr. Firestein likes to tease students in the class about what kind of grade they want: Is it better to get an A or an F in ignorance?

In his book, Dr. Firestein writes that conducting science is something like searching for a black cat in a dark room — very difficult, especially when, as is often the case, it turns out there is no cat.

To explore scientific groping in the dark, Dr. Firestein invites university colleagues from various disciplines to talk to his students about what they don’t know.

“They come and tell us about what they would like to know, what they think is critical to know, how they might get to know it, what will happen if they do find this or that thing out, what might happen if they don’t, about what they didn’t know 10 or 20 years ago and know now, or still don’t know,” he writes. “They talk about the current state of their ignorance.”