Advice for college-bound science students
![Reflections of a Frontiers of Science Institute participant ( FSIer) almost thirty years later
Good morning. Not counting my brief visit here about a week ago, it’s been almost thirty years since I was at FSI in 1978. Back then, I looked like you all. I had hair. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever be forty-six years old. And I had no idea what my future held.
I was pleasantly shocked and surprised when Lori called me and asked me to come here to speak to you all. The only problem was, I wasn’t sure what to talk about. But in the mean time between when she spoke to me and I met with Professor Heikkinen, I managed to formulate some thoughts about some things that I think you might want to hear, or at least some things that I think you might need to hear.
I want to speak to you all this morning about three major topics. These are:
1) Why your pursuit of scientific rationality as a method for understanding the universe is the most difficult but the most rewarding path that you can take in your lives;
2) The daunting challenges that you will surely face in the next four to ten years of your lives and beyond;
3) Some advice, which you will surely forget in the short term but which you will hopefully eventually remember my having given you in the long term, for how to cope with these challenges.
Where to begin? First of all, why are you here? You are all different, all unique. But you all share, I’m sure, some common bond of belief in the utility and the goodness of the scientific method as a method of knowing the nature of the universe. The question I want you to ask yourselves is, why do you have this interest? Why do you believe this? And what reason do you have to believe that your pursuit of scientific knowledge is a good and useful thing to do.
Well, Winston Churchill once said that democracy is a terrible form of government, but it’s better than all the other forms that have ever been tried. I think that science is the same sort of paradigm, in that we can say that the scientific method is a terrible way to have to gain an understanding of the universe, but it’s better than all of the other methods that have ever been tried.
Let me explain by reviewing some of the sorry history of all of the other methods that have ever been attempted for understanding the way that our world works. First of all, please appreciate that anatomically modern humans, people who looked like us, were walking around in southern Africa by about one hundred thousand years ago. We don’t know for sure if they talked, but we do know that their brains were substantially the same as ours. There is one thing that we know human beings had developed by thirty thousand years ago: art.
Art, sculptural in bone and clay and pictorial in the form of cave paintings, was the original form of expression (at least the first that we know of, being imperishable) that people used to express their appreciation of the world around them as an internalized map of comprehension. That’s a tricky sentence. Let’s deconstruct it. What I mean by that is that, the first way that people managed to take the outside world into their psyches, their brains, as a set of symbols, and to store those symbols, and to then regurgitate those symbols in a meaningful way, was through the production of sculpture and paintings. (They probably did this with legends and songs as well, but those forms of expression don’t leave any archaeological traces.)
They did more than express their observations and feelings about the world with these symbols. They also tried to control their world with these objects and symbols. This is an approach that we now call magical thinking. It is, in its own way, quite logical. You observe the world and its workings. You see that it contains beautiful, powerful forms such as giant bison and waterfalls. You believe that you see some rules that seem to govern the behavior of these forms, but you aren’t quite sure what the rules are. So you develop a set of guesses, what we scientists nowadays call hypotheses, about what these rules are. Then you materialize your hypotheses in the form of art, of objects that don’t just show the outward form of things but that you hope will also control the power of these things. You hope to impose your will on the world with the power, the essentially magic power of these things.
We see this thinking reflected in stone-age art. We see it reflected later in the buildings and sculptural forms of the early river valley civilizations, such as those of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates rivers, the Indus river, and the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. These societies all developed priesthoods that incorporated magical thinking into their daily lives, and that used magical thinking to explain the world around them.
The problem with magical thinking is that it is not, by definition, rooted in any testable observations of nature and nature’s laws. That word, testable, is important. By testable, I mean that one forms an idea about how something works and then tries to test the rightness of that idea by trying to disprove the idea. Now that’s a powerful idea: don’t try to prove that you’re right about something. Instead, try to actually prove that you are wrong!
The first people who really got this idea and who really developed it were the Greeks. They developed this idea several centuries before the current era. They really developed it to its fullness after the conquests of Alexander (around 330 BC) when they became heavily exposed to the magically-based but nevertheless useful mathematical and astronomical observations of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent (what is today Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey). In the wake of this intellectual cross-fertilization, the Greeks developed what we now call the scientific method that you have all been studying this summer, in one form and another.
In the scientific method, you develop an idea about something and then try to prove that you are, in effect, wrong. Your exercise in showing that you are wrong is your experiment. If you can show through your test of nature, your experiment, that you were indeed wrong, then you have made progress, you have been a success, because you have learned something about nature that you did not know before.
The scientific method is the only way that we have ever discovered for making progress in learning new things about nature in a systematic way. It is slow, it is difficult, and it is paradoxical. The scientific method, the scientific way of thinking, is not, I repeat not intuitive. You don’t naturally grow up thinking this way. It doesn’t fit the magical thought patterns that most people have when they are children, and that they continue to use as they grow to adulthood. The fact is, in my experience, that most adults think magically in their heart of hearts. It is not an accident that it took human beings about 100,000 years to develop this mode of thinking and analysis.
That is why the scientific method is so difficult to use and why it is still, unfortunately, not accepted as a valid mode of thought by most of the people who live on this planet today. It isn’t that people don’t acknowledge its power or its utility. It’s that it is so absolutely darned difficult to absorb into your very fiber of being. You have to be trained to think this way, you have to train yourself to think this way. You have to develop rigorous methods of thought in which you constantly try to prove yourself wrong about everything, and then test your hypotheses, and then get that big thrill of discovery when you discover that you were, indeed, wrong, and that you have now consequently learned something new. Science is the one and only field in which being wrong can, and often does, bring immense rewards and satisfaction. I’ve been there. It’s great to be wrong!
And so scientists are seen by most people on this planet as a lonely breed. They are often idolized, but they are mysterious to people who are not scientists themselves. This is the path that you are now staking out for yourselves in your lives. It is this conflict, this dichotomy, between your desire to understand the universe in a methodical and rational way and the perception that many other people outside your community, outside your circle, will have of you that will make you seem, in some cases, difficult and remote to non-scientists.
Your challenge will be to reconcile this dichotomy, to communicate the wonder and the majesty of your discoveries to your fellow human beings. This is your mission, this is your charge. It is important that you do this, for your work, and that of your compatriots, is the only hope that we have for our future as a civilization and as a species.
Someone once said to me, Frank, really, rationality only goes so far in the world. And my response was, well, it needs to go farther if we’re to have any hope. I said that because the alternative, which is superstitious, magical thinking, does not inform us of how the universe works, and can lead us to intellectual dead-ends that we can ill-afford to pursue. Remember this: the universe does not care about us. The universe is neither a force of good nor of evil. We bring those value judgments to the universe. So our only hope for understanding the universe is to solve it as a giant puzzle, to deconstruct it step by step, with our method of logical hypothesis-making and experimental attempts at disproof of our hypotheses, which we call the scientific method. So concludes my explanation of why your chosen path of scientific inquiry is so potentially wonderful and rewarding but will prove so difficult for you.
What are the daunting challenges that you will face in the next four to ten years and beyond? Basically, they will fall into three categories: Personal, academic, and public. I’ll explain them briefly, just to scare the heck out of you, but then I’ll tell you how to deal with, and overcome, these challenges.
First and most briefly, I will explain the personal challenges that you will face. Most of you will graduate from high school in less than a year from now, and you will move on to college. You will move from the middle part of your youth, which is where you are now, and on into your late youth and then into the early part of adulthood, even as you more or less move from your homes, lose (or at least loosen) the bonds that have previously connected you with those you now know, and begin to develop new bonds with new people. This can be emotionally wracking and difficult. All I can tell you is, as you face personal challenges, stay in there and keep pitching; every generation, almost every person, in our society goes through this, and the outcome is almost always better than you ever imagined it could be.
At all costs, do not isolate yourselves from your fellow human beings. Interact with people; mingle; be social. The more you interact socially the better off you will be in all of your other endeavors. Do be well-rounded: be physically active and learn to literally work and play well with others. I don’t care if you’re the most brilliant person in the world, or at least think you are. If you are a jerk to other people, they will have nothing to do with you and you will ultimately be rather miserable. And if you are miserable you will tend to become depressed, and if you are depressed you will not be of any productive use to yourself or to anyone else. Maintain a positive attitude at all times, even when adversity is staring you in the face. Remember, almost everything will always turn out better than you think it will, in almost every situation that you will encounter in life. It’s a mystery why, but it’s an observation that I’ve made repeatedly.
Enough said about that. Now on to your academic challenges. You have, until now, been accustomed to being in the upper part of your classes—you have been above average. You will discover in college, and in academia in general, that you are suddenly surrounded by a whole bunch of people who are brilliant and who will give you a run for your money like you’ve never seen before. You will suddenly be average. You may even turn out to be below average, at least in some fields or areas of your studies.
In addition to discovering to your rude surprise that you are suddenly relatively average, you will also discover that you don’t know as much math as you should. The reason I can say this is that nobody ever knows as much math as they need to. Other than having a bad attitude, the thing that holds people back the most in academia and subsequently in their careers is lack of math skills and knowledge. You are not born knowing math—you learn it, step by step and building block by building block. Even people who look like they are naturally good at math nevertheless never know as much they need to, or wish they knew, and even those people have to work at math to get better.
Your next challenge is writing. Just as no one is ever a truly perfect, natural-born mathematician, even if they look like they are, so no one is a natural-born, perfect writer. Your lack of writing skills will limit your ability to express yourself. Thus you will be limited in your ability to communicate yourself, your ideas, your persona, and so forth, to other people, by your lack of writing ability. And just to make you even more depressed about this topic, bear in mind that most people who are good at math are less good at writing and vice versa. Oh, joy! What agonies to look forward to!
But wait, there’s more trouble. In addition to your other problems, time management will be a problem. There is no one in the world, in academia, in industry, in government, or anywhere else, who has enough time to get all of their work done. Your life’s work will never be done, and you will surely end up wishing that you had less money if only you could somehow use it to buy more time. Your first problems with time management may have occurred this summer, here at FSI. The bad news is, you haven’t seen anything yet. Most people who flunk out of college do so because of poor time management skills, rather than, say, lack of ability to comprehend course materials. So be warned.
Then comes your post-academic career, when you need to communicate your work and your discoveries to your colleagues and the rest of the general public. Remember, the greatest work that you can ever do will be of no use if you don’t tell anyone about it. The normal way that scientists communicate their work is through peer-reviewed journal papers—that is, papers that are reviewed by your peers and colleagues in your own field before they are released. In addition, you will likely be called upon to describe your work, to report on your work, to audiences of people who are non-specialists but who are interested in your work. So you will need to learn to communicate not only in a highly professional sense and style to your peers, but also in a less formal and less technical style with audiences of interested lay people. These audiences of lay people may be among your most important, in a certain sense, because they will include political and sometimes military people who need to understand what you are saying so that they can make better decisions on matters that involve science. Current examples of this sort of intersection between science, politics and public policy include global climate change and evolutionary biology. There is no debate about the reality and general characteristics of global climate change and evolution among scientists who specialize in these fields, albeit plenty of work and debate over the details. But to lay people who are on the outside looking in, topics like these seem very confusing. It will be part of your job to set them straight on topics like these.
You will be particularly bedeviled by the difficulty that people have in understanding the differences between scientific theories and scientific hypotheses, and between scientific ideas and non-scientific ideas about how the world works. The confusion between scientific theories and hypotheses arises because a scientific theory is a large, well-established body of knowledge that is supported by numerous proven facts and observations. Scientific theories include gravitation, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, biological evolution, and electromagnetics, to name a few. This use of the word theory is at odds with the vernacular use of the word, in which it is used to stand for what scientists call hypotheses. For example, a person might say, in the vernacular use of the word theory, “I have a theory about why the car won’t start.” A scientists, on the other hand would say, “I have a hypothesis about why the car won’t start.” So non-scientists, being confused about the different uses of these words, will often say to you, “That idea of yours [fill in the blank, quantum mechanics, evolution, etc.] is just a theory.” That’s meant to be a put-down, because they think that a scientific theory is a hypothesis. It will be your burden to set them straight.
The corollary to this burden will be that you will need to set people straight on which hypotheses are scientific and which ones are not, and that in turn means that you will need to become an expert, as hopefully you already are becoming, in distinguishing between scientific and non-scientific hypotheses. The difference between these two groups is whether or not they are…here’s the drum roll…testable. Specifically, whether they are disprovable. If someone gives you hypothesis that is not testable, not disprovable, then it is not scientific. That’s not to say that it couldn’t necessarily be true. But if it’s not disprovable, then you will not be able to prove that it’s true. It’s straightforward. By this rule, for example, the proposition that the Earth is warming due to the injection of anthropogenic carbon is a scientific hypothesis since there are a myriad of scientific experiments and observations that can be undertaken to try to disprove this proposition.
In contrast, the proposition that there exists a hidden, unseen intelligence that is guiding the process of biological evolution is not a scientific hypothesis because it states, in its own proposition statement, that the mechanism that is supposed to exist cannot be found and thus cannot, through any experiment or observation, be disproven.
Lastly, there exists the challenge of distinguishing between science and engineering for the general public. I could give an entire talk on this topic alone, but let me just say here that the confusion exists because the outputs of science, the study of the fundamental nature of the universe, are widely applied in the development of technology (which is engineering), and conversely the technology that we have developed is commonly used to help move scientific experiments and observations forward, such as for example the development and deployment of telescopes in space. Given this feed-back loop between science and engineering, it is natural that even scientists and engineers sometimes become confused about which is which.
So given all of the challenges that I’ve now outlined, what are you to do? This brings me to the third and last part of today’s talk, the part that you will not retain much beyond today but that you will hopefully recall a couple of years from now, when you are depressed and in trouble in school.
My advice on all of these points is: Don’t Panic! First, consider college. Everyone else in academia is in the same boat as you. When brilliance isn’t necessarily enough to put you over the top (and it won’t always be, no matter how smart you are), remember that hard work and persistence probably will put you where you need to be. Hit the books enough and you will be alright. This is where the time management part will come in. If you are going to succeed in academia, and in life in general, you will need to become an expert in time management! You must discipline yourself to get away from other people when you need to, and to spend the time that it takes to do all of the things that you’ve got to do: to eat, to sleep, to study, to write, and most of all, to think.
Now, as you are managing your time, here are the three things that you will need to concentrate on the most: first, mathematics. Take every math class that you possibly can! No one ever knows enough math, as I said before, and the biggest reason that people drop out of school programs, besides poor time management skills, is lack of mathematical tools in their math toolboxes. I know that math can be hard, but stay in there and work on it. It is always ultimately very understandable, if you work long enough to gain the proper insights in any given field of mathematics.
Second, you must write, and write more, and then write even more after that. You need to keep writing until it becomes second nature to you. Here’s a tip: if you want to write well, read a lot of good writers. For both non-fiction and fiction prose, as well as poetry, I recommend the New Yorker magazine. I also recommend The New York Times and Washington Post newspapers for their prose reporting as good models to follow for tight scientific writing. All of the the publications cited above employ people who really know how to write--some of the very best English-language writers in our society. Then, having written a lot, edit your own material ruthlessly and find other people, students and professors, who can likewise edit your work relentlessly. You, in turn, need to gain experience editing other people’s writing. Only in this way will you become good enough to express yourselves. If you stick to it you will become a terrific writer, and people will look up to you for it. In my own career I have done more good for myself and my organization through my writing skills than through any other activity or ability, including my leadership and math skills.
When you graduate with your bachelor’s degree and later, hopefully, with an advanced degree, you will need to use, and will be able to continue to develop, all of your skills in science, math, writing and time management to promote your work and your ideas in scientific papers and public talks, and so forth. At that point you will have become a contributing member of the scientific community and of the wider community and society in which we all live.
My own career may prove somewhat instructive in this regard, so I’ll wrap up with just a few words about what I’ve done since FSI. I graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a degree in physics and enough courses in electronic engineering that I could have taken a degree in that field instead. I am sorry to say that I haven’t yet gotten an advanced degree, but I certainly have worked in a number of fields since then. These have primarily been spectrum engineering and the sciences of paleontology and geology. I’ve thus been privileged to be able to work in both science and engineering on a professional basis, and that sort of cross-fertilization had been good for me.
Here are some pictures from my web site, which will go live this week, that show my work with radars, paleontology, fireballs and meteorites, and finally a quick look at my bibliography, my publications where I have communicated my work to others.](796BB871-A61C-427D-B9FF-3194AE075E26_files/shapeimage_1.png)
Almost thirty years ago I participated in the Frontiers of Science Institute (FSI) at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. On July 10, 2007 I gave this address to the current crop of FSIers as advice for their transition from high school to college science studies.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Advice for college-bound science students
