Professional curiosity?
Just a mention of a recent article I wrote for the website lablit where I discuss what I think is a problem with modern-day curiosity: that asking questions and seeking answers about how the world around us works has become the province of experts, scientists--professionals of curiosity if you will. Of course, it may always have been this way... unless you count people like Faraday and Dalton; or the botanist Robert Brown, and all the amateur botanists and naturalists who around the end of the 18th/beginning of the 19th centuries laid the groundwork for Darwin's theory of natural selection.
These people put together a database not conceptually different from the Human Genome Project: most of them without formal training or qualifications. What they lacked in university certificates they made up for in the willingness to investigate, examine and question the nature of the world around them.
Do people do this anymore? Perhaps we know our world too well now for "ordinary" people (i.e. without the backing of vast laboratories, funds and high-spec equipment) to find out anything new about it?
Actually I don't think so--there are umpteen basic everyday phenomena that we are really still very puzzled by, and research papers are frequently published in top journals based on rather simple observations--the simpler the more striking, it often seems. There is still a lot of stuff out there that simple careful observations and intelligent thought can throw light on.
One place that the modern version of 'amateurs of botany' might profitably go to do a bit of 'phenomenon-botanizing' is the computer: the astounding power available even in cheap computers these days means that calculations, simulations and investigations of very complex phenomena are relatively easy. Witness such simple models such as 'cellular automata' and the complex behaviour they can reproduce... (Nothing new: games like chess and go have been generating huge complexities out of simple rules for centuries...)
Academic literature, however, still presents a problem, perhaps the major stumbling block to amateurs of curiosity contributing to the way we understand the world. How can a non-expert know what is the 'state of understanding' of any phenomenon when science is almost invariably described in terms comprehensible only to the bare minimum of specialists?
In the media we hear phrases such as 'scientists think such-and-such' as if we all belong to a club and go around mentally juggling the same ideas. In reality there is no such thing as this kind of generic scientist anymore (if there ever was). Most of us, when ill-advised enough to take a short hop outside our research speciality, are quickly lost--not by the impossibility of understanding, but by the impenetrability of jargon. (This problem is certainly not confined to science of course...)
This ought to be where 'popular science' comes in... But more on that story later, as they say.
These people put together a database not conceptually different from the Human Genome Project: most of them without formal training or qualifications. What they lacked in university certificates they made up for in the willingness to investigate, examine and question the nature of the world around them.
Do people do this anymore? Perhaps we know our world too well now for "ordinary" people (i.e. without the backing of vast laboratories, funds and high-spec equipment) to find out anything new about it?
Actually I don't think so--there are umpteen basic everyday phenomena that we are really still very puzzled by, and research papers are frequently published in top journals based on rather simple observations--the simpler the more striking, it often seems. There is still a lot of stuff out there that simple careful observations and intelligent thought can throw light on.
One place that the modern version of 'amateurs of botany' might profitably go to do a bit of 'phenomenon-botanizing' is the computer: the astounding power available even in cheap computers these days means that calculations, simulations and investigations of very complex phenomena are relatively easy. Witness such simple models such as 'cellular automata' and the complex behaviour they can reproduce... (Nothing new: games like chess and go have been generating huge complexities out of simple rules for centuries...)
Academic literature, however, still presents a problem, perhaps the major stumbling block to amateurs of curiosity contributing to the way we understand the world. How can a non-expert know what is the 'state of understanding' of any phenomenon when science is almost invariably described in terms comprehensible only to the bare minimum of specialists?
In the media we hear phrases such as 'scientists think such-and-such' as if we all belong to a club and go around mentally juggling the same ideas. In reality there is no such thing as this kind of generic scientist anymore (if there ever was). Most of us, when ill-advised enough to take a short hop outside our research speciality, are quickly lost--not by the impossibility of understanding, but by the impenetrability of jargon. (This problem is certainly not confined to science of course...)
This ought to be where 'popular science' comes in... But more on that story later, as they say.
posted by mark haw at 2:48 pm
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