Chapter 9: The Scientist’s World
Them/us – one of the simplest and potentially most devastating human classifications – is the topic of this chapter. Here we examine our relationships as scientists to various other groups, within and outside science.
Scientist and Lay Person
In what way -- if any -- are scientists unique? In the following passages, the difference between scientists and other people is described by Herbert Spencer, Annie Dillard, and William Shakespeare (though scientists were not the subject of Shakespeare’s thoughts). Yet Spencer’s perspective is laced with arrogance, Dillard’s with apparent envy, and Shakespeare’s with joy.
“Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? . . . Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found. Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the seaside are. Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena -- care not to understand the architecture of the Heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!” [Spencer, 1883]
“I cherish mental images I have of three perfectly happy people. One collects stones. Another -- an Englishman, say -- watches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater which he examines microscopically and mounts. But I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness.” [Dillard, 1974]
“And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.
I would not change it.”
[Shakespeare, 1600]
Many lay people hold a stereotypical view of scientists. We are perceived to be:
• very intelligent;
• myopic in interest, focusing on precise measurements of a tiny subject;
• objective in both measurements and interpretations;
• conservative, accepting no interpretation or conclusion unless it has been proved beyond doubt;
