Chapter 1: Introduction
Overview
Consider the dance of science -- the dance that obsesses us so.
It’s said that in viewing the night sky, the present is illusion. The stars are so distant that I see them as they were millions or billions of years ago, when their light rays began the voyage to my eye. It’s said that I am infinitesimally small and transient; the stars will not miss the light my eyes have stolen. They will not notice that they have joined me in the dance.
Technique and style are the framework of dance. Techniques of science are generally the easy part; many are deliberately and systematically taught. For example, throughout our many years of schooling we refine skills such as fact gathering and mathematical analysis. We learn other scientific techniques -- such as statistics, deductive logic, and inductive logic -- in classes that lack the perspective of scientists’ needs.
Some techniques are more intangible: critical thinking and analysis, pattern recognition, and troubleshooting of experimental technique. Scientists are not merely technicians; an equally crucial part of the dance is style: how do scientists combine rationality and insight, or skepticism and innovation; how do scientists interact, and what motivates their obsession? These skills seldom are taught explicitly. Instead, they are implicit in the scientific apprenticeship, an excellent but often incomplete educational process.
Who of us has mastered all of the techniques of science? I certainly have not; researching and writing this book have shown me that. Of course, when I recognize that an aspect of my scientific methods is deficient, I am enough of a professional to seek a remedy. More often, I, like Konrad Lorenz’s [1962] water-shrew, am not even aware of what is missing:
The water shrew dashes through its territory at incredible speed, by following the familiar path. “To them, the shortest line is always the accustomed path.” Lorenz decided to explore the extent of this habit by removing a stone from a water-shrew’s path. When it came racing along, it jumped over the nonexistent stone. It paused in bafflement, backed up and jumped ‘over’ it again, then finally reconnoitered the anomaly.
How often do we leap missing stones?
Consider the science of science. Let’s turn our gaze on our lives, looking beyond the surface interplay of experiment and theory. What are we scientists doing, and what tools are we using?
We’ve left such introspection to philosophers, but their goals differ from ours. They deal in abstracts: what rules do scientists follow, and how should the process of science change? We scientists generally prefer the more pragmatic approach of just doing, not talking about doing. Are we too busy, or too confident in our established routines, to analyze what we are doing? Why are virtually all of the books on scientific methods written by philosophers of science, rather than by scientists?
