Ignorance

by Firestein, Stuart

  …

  We are all scientists: trying to understand our environment, to make sense of input that is not always complete or sensible, looking for black cats in dark rooms. Our minds do their best to decipher a complex world with information gathered by our limited sensory organs. The process is familiar to us all. We occasionally do “experiments,” testing this or that to see how closely it fits our theory of the world. But let’s face it: we are mostly stumbling about in the dark. The occasional glimpse of genuine reality only confirms for us the extent of the darkness we live in, the scope of our ignorance. But why fight it? Why not enjoy the mystery of it all? After all, there’s nothing a like a good puzzle, and it turns out, in this life, it’s not hard to find one.

  Notes

  I have not included extensive notes and citations in order to make the reading experience smoother. There are a few places in the text where I could have gone on longer, but there always are, so I resisted as much as possible. I have here included a few extra notes and, where it was not clear in the text, the source of some material. I have also included an annotated reading list, including books and articles that I use in my class and others that I used to write this book. The articles are all available for download on the Ignorance Web site (http://ignorance.biology.columbia.edu) as PDF files; the books are almost all still in print or easily available from used book sites on the Web. My remarks about them should be considered personal opinions relevant specifically to this book and topic, and not complete reviews.

  PAGE 2

  Andrew Wiles description of searching in dark rooms is from a Nova interview on his publishing a solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem in 2000.

  PAGE 7

  Pascal once said, by way of apology, at the end of a long note written to a friend, “I would have been briefer if I’d had more time.” This has been credited at one time or another to Voltaire, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, and others. But the earliest and most credible source I could find was as follows:

  Blaise Pascal, Lettres provinciales, 1656–7, Number 16, this one written December 4, 1656. “Je n’ai fait/cette lettre-ci/plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.”

  This is from a discussion thread on the Web site for the NPR program A Way with Words.

  PAGE 11

  New data in a continuation of this Berkeley study of information shows a million-fold increase in capacity and transmission. The Web site for the study group is as follows:

  http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/howmuch-info/

  You can find summaries of the report and the full report as a PDF there.

  Also an article in Science online in 2010 reviews the data. That citation is as follows:

  Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, The world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and compute information. Science, 332(6025), 60–65. doi: 10.1126/science.1200970

  A PDF of that report can be found at the Ignorance Web site. Other relevant URLs:

  http://hmi.ucsd.edu/howmuchinfo_research_report_consum.php

  http://hmi.ucsd.edu/howmuchinfo.php

  PAGE 14

  There is considerable controversy over the rate of growth of scientific literature and how to measure the actual number of scientific publications. While this may sound like a bean-counter problem, in fact there is quite a bit at stake, including things like obtaining grants and judgments about promotions and tenure. Are all articles to be counted equally when it is clear that some are more important than others, or more extensive, or have a longer shelf life? Do we only count articles, or do conference presentations also matter, or online publications? Does an article have to be available in English to be counted? How often is an article cited by other scientists? So you can see it’s a morass, but the outlines and general estimates are reasonably clear. If you want to delve into this further, I recommend a wonderful little book called Big Science, Little Science by Derek J. de Solla Price (Columbia University Press, 1961). I believe it is out of print and I was unable to locate any more than excerpts online, but a more dogged search might come up with a used copy or access through the Yale Library (de Solla Price was a Yale professor). De Solla Price was one of the first to apply serious quantitative methods to studying the scientific literature. This book, like many of his papers, is nonetheless very readable and accessible. He died in 1983, an unfortunately young man of 61, probably at the height of his powers.

  This article is a recent updating of de Solla Price’s work, and it is available on the Web and at the Ignorance Web site: Peder Olesen Larsen and Markus von Ins, The rate of growth in scientific publication and the decline in coverage provided by Science Citation Index. Scientometrics, 84(3), 575–603 (2010).

  PAGE 17

  Erwin Schrödinger, one of the great philosopher-scientists, says that “In an honest search for knowledge you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period.” Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks and, Science and Humanism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press (1996). Reprinted in Canto series with a foreword by Roger Penrose, in 1996. These are written versions of two lectures, The Shearman Lectures, delivered by Schrödinger at University College London in May 1948. They are full of exciting ideas and fascinating historical perspective from a man who stood as close to the horizon as anyone.

  PAGE 20

  Mary Poovey recently wrote a noteworthy book titled A History of the Modern Fact in which she traces the development of the fact up to its current, perhaps overexalted position. A very readable account of something you might otherwise not think very much about—after all a fact is a fact, no? No. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

  PAGE 32

  J. B. S. Haldane, known for his keen and precise insights, admonished that “not only is the universe queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.” The full quote from Haldane is:

  “I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

  J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Essays. London: Chatto and Windus (1927), p. 286. This quote, or one very similar to it, is often credited to the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, but this seems to be a misattribution because there is no citation or record for Eddington ever having said it.

  PAGE 33

  In a similar vein, Nicholas Rescher, a philosopher and historian of science, has coined the term “Copernican cognitivism.” Nicholas Rescher is one of the leading philosophers of science in contemporary studies with a remarkable record of productivity over six decades, including some 100 books (I didn’t actually count them). I am always surprised to find that his books tend to be well known among academics but not widely known outside of philosophy. This is a pity because they are immensely readable. I have relied on many of his writings to spur my thinking and, happily (for me), found that we were in agreement on many things. Here are just a few of his books that I found to be especially rewarding:

  Finitude: A Study of Cognitive Limits and Limitations. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2010.

  The Limits of Science. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999 (1984).

  Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  Unknowability. New York: Lexington Books, 2009.

  PAGE 33

  In Edwin Abbott’s 19th-century fantasy novel, a civilization called Flatland is populated by geometric beings (squares, circles, triangles) … This book is available from a gazillion publishers; it has apparently never been out of print since its first publication in 1884. I personally liked this version with lots of interesting annotations by Ian Stewart who also wrote an “updated” version of Flatland called Flatterland, which was unfortunately not quite as charming as the
original. There are several animated cartoons based on the book as well, but I have found all of them to be stupid and boring compared to the book. None of them are in 3D yet—but then why would they be?

  Ian Stewart, The Annotated Flatland: A romance of many dimensions. New York: Basic Books, 2008, p. xvii.

  PAGE 40

  As Rebecca Goldstein recounts in her excellent, and highly detailed, book on Gödel, his shyness and reluctance …

  Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The proof and paradox of Kurt Gödel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.

  PAGE 53

  Seymour L. Chapin, A legendary bon mot? Franklin’s “What is the good of a newborn baby?” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 129(3), 278–290, September 1985, p. 278. I find it remarkable that in a country that has been the world leader in scientific research and that has gotten so much economic growth and general well-being from the fruits of that research that we have to be reminded of how important it is to take the long view. We are busy quoting the Founding Fathers for so many things of dubious value that Franklin’s statement should not be lost as one who really had his eyes on the horizon.

  PAGE 79

  I heard about this Alan Hodgkin story from a colleague, Vincent Torre, who was a postdoc with Alan Hodgkin. It has since been confirmed in a pub conversation with his son Jonathon Hodgkin, an excellent molecular geneticist at Cambridge. I unfortunately got into science just a tad too late to actually meet Alan Hodgkin, who was ill for the last several years of his life. I am proud to say that I have made the pilgrimage to his laboratory in the basement of the Department of Physiology at Cambridge University. What is most remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is. Great science doesn’t always require fancy accommodations.

  PAGE 125

  The brain—that thing you think you think with—is slightly altered from Ambrose Bierce’s definition of the brain in his wry turn of the century, A Devil’s Dictionary (1906, 1911).

  PAGE 174

  Dr. Marlys H. Witte, known affectionately as the Ignoramamama, has been using ignorance as an integral tool to teach medical students. Her efforts, begun in 1984, have flowered into an innovative high school science outreach program as well as becoming an integral part of the medical curriculum at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center. I suggest you have a look at her informative and engaging Web site (http://www.ignorance.medicine.arizona.edu/index.html), which will take you to a publication called Q-cubed that describes the innovative programs she and her team have initiated—all based on ignorance as the premiere tool for scientific (and other) education.

  Suggested Reading

  Barrow, John, Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998. Barrow is a mathematician and theoretical physicist by trade and has written several very readable, popular books on these subjects. He does not oversimplify, which is refreshing. This book muses mostly on the limits of cosmology and what we can know about the universe. It is a rewarding primer on the limitations of our knowledge, which is a kind of knowledge itself.

  Chaitin, Gregory, Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science and the Limits of Reason. New York: Springer, 2002. Chaitin is a mathematician and computer scientist who is one of the leading experts on Gödel and Turing and has proposed some his own complex and provocative theories about information and truth. The essays collected here are among his least technical and most readable.

  Crasti, John L., and Karlqvist, Anders, eds., Boundaries and Barriers: On the Limits to Scientific Knowledge. New York: Perseus Books, 1996. A collection of relatively short but pointed essays based on talks given at a conference held in the Arctic Circle metropolis of Abisko, Sweden, in 1995. Although Casti and many of the other contributors continue to write and speak and think about these issues, I am not aware of any follow-up conferences or meetings. Seems overdue.

  Let me take advantage of this moment to recommend two other less well-known works of Casti, both fiction of a sort. The One True Platonic Heaven (John Henry Press, 2003) is billed as “a scientific fiction on the limits of knowledge” and has quite a cast of historical characters making fictional statements—but ones they could have made—regarding what can really be known. The other book, The Cambridge Quintet (Perseus Books, 1998) actually came first, but I read it second. This one is subtitled A Work of Scientific Speculation and imagines a dinner party hosted by C. P. Snow and attended by Alan Turing, J. B. S. Haldane, Erwin Schrödinger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Quite a dinner party. Don’t you wish you were there? Get the book.

  Duncan, R., and Weston-Smith, M., eds., The Encyclopedia of Ignorance. New York: Pergamon Press, 1977. A collection of short articles solicited by the editors for leaders in many fields of science at the time. I have never understood why it was never updated or turned into a regular journal. It’s a wonderful idea, although the articles are a bit uneven and could have used some editing. It’s still fairly available as a used book, but it’s now mostly of historical interest.

  Fara, Patricia, Science: a Four Thousand Year History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Four thousand years in a little over 400 pages, quite an accomplishment—and Fara doesn’t limit herself to Western science (of course, it’s only 400 years old). Full of remarkable insights and provocative historical perspectives. I’m not a historian of science, but I bet it’s controversial.

  Gillespie, Charles Coulson, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay on the History of Scientific Ideas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. This “essay” goes on for some 550 pages, but the author, a well-known historian of science, writes with such clarity and originality that it is a pleasure to read the book just to be reminded what good writing sounds like. Gillespie successfully blends the historical with the philosophical approaches to understanding how science has come to work the way it does. His knowledge is encyclopedic.

  Goldstein, Martin, and Goldstein, Inge F., How We Know: An Exploration of the Scientific Process. New York: Da Capo Press (division of Perseus Books), 1981. This husband and wife couple, who both have connections to Columbia University (one went there, the other worked there), have written a wonderfully readable primer on how to be a scientist. In my opinion every undergraduate who thinks they want to be a scientist should be required to read it—no, every undergraduate. Written in 1981, there is not one thing in it that is not relevant today. I found this book by accident on a shelf in the used science book section in the basement of New York’s famed Strand bookstore (“18 miles of books”), one of those happy accidents that suggests why we will so miss bookstores.

  Gribbin, John, The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors. New York: Random House, 2002. John Gribbin is one of the most prolific scientist/science writers on the scene. I personally like this book the best, but perhaps that’s because I find it the most scholarly and researched. It is a very straightforward approach to the progress of science in the West, beginning largely in the Renaissance traced through the scientists who did the work—or at least are credited for it. This is of course only one way to trace the progress of ideas, but Gribbin’s writing is so clear and the organization so precise that it becomes very insightful.

  Gribbin, John, The Origins of the Future: Ten Questions for the Next Ten Years. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Gribbin is still one of the most readable scientific writers on the planet. This book poses 10 pretty big questions, mostly cosmological, that I doubt will be solved in the next 10 years. But once again, the writing is crystal clear and you learn more about what’s known by looking at what isn’t. A formula I can certainly agree with.

  Harrison, Edward, Cosmology: The Science of the Universe, 2nd edition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005. A big and unfortunately expensive book that is a technical textbook and at the same time a valuable historical approach to a crucial intersection of physics, mathematics, and astronomy—even some biology appears at the e
nd. A wonderful reference book if this is where your interests are and full of fabulous quotes that Harrison has presumably spent years collecting. He also includes a list of suggested readings at the end of each chapter, which are generally more accessible to a lay audience. His chapter on “Darkness at Night,” for example, traces the not-so-obvious solution to an age-old paradox about why in an infinite universe the sky is not ablaze with stars at night. It is a masterful treatment of the process of scientific thinking as well as downright entertaining, even though full of equations.

  van Hemmen, J. Leo, and Sejnowski, Terrance J., eds., 23 Problems in Systems Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. With a nod to Hilbert, the editors engage a group of modern neuroscientists to write essays about the critical questions that remain in the area of what is called systems neuroscience—that is the study of the brain as a system, and not merely as a collection of parts. Some of the essays stand alone; many require a certain amount of assumed neuroscientific knowledge. Mostly interesting for its emphasis on questions.

  Holton, Gerald, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Holton is a deservedly well-respected historian of science, and this book traces his particular take on the development of scientific thinking. It is mostly about the physical sciences, and it is a scholarly work meant for the serious student.

  Horgan, John, The End of Science. Boston: Helix Books/Addison Wesley, 1996. I suppose no list of books on possible limits in science is complete without this popular volume about which much has already been said and written. There are interesting interviews with modern scientists and philosophers of science, a surprising number of whom have passed away since its publication, so it’s becoming something of a historical record. The thesis is provocative but almost assuredly wrong, as I suspect the author knows.

  Lightman, Alan, The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs on 20th Century Science. New York: Vintage Books (Random House), 2005. Lightman is a physicist turned writer—both fiction and nonfiction, perhaps now best known for his charming book Einstein’s Dreams. Although largely concerned with the great physics experiments of the day (there are a few chapters on biology and chemistry), Lightman takes the famous papers of Planck, Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, among others, and helps you read through them. The papers are reprinted, often in slightly abridged format, and are preceded by a deconstruction in lay terms by Lightman, putting the article in historical perspective and alerting the reader what to look out for and what are the key findings. It’s a brilliant attempt to allow readers access to what we call the primary literature—that is, the original papers written by the scientists—a territory that is normally way out of bounds for the lay reader. Regardless of whether you care about the particular science being presented (cosmology, astrophysics, relativity, DNA, etc.), this book will allow you to see that you can read these papers, and others as well, and that there is great pleasure to be gotten from doing so.