Science and me
Jan. 29th, 2013 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ikosaedrThere was once a discussion online about science and kids. The topic was, how can we get more kids to be excited about science. I posted that I was really never excited about science. I was excited about video games, adventure books, and some odd things like history. Never science. Someone asked me, why this was? I never replier because I did not know.
When people talk about the advance of science, I experience a feeling of slow doom and powerlessness. I feel like science is useless, like it is something extra, something contrived, something which does not actually make people happy. On an intellectual level, I can think about improvements to quality of life, etc. but on the level of my heart I do not experience the excitement that I sometimes see older people exhibit. I became a scientist mostly because I was good at it, and we often end up doing the things we are good at, because of a sort of career railroading effect. I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with that, and that is not what this post is about, anyway, this post is about feelings, because feelings are important. Somewhere, somehow, perhaps wrongly, I came to dislike science.
I have felt it in others, too. Like my friend Brett, for example. He likes the simple life, the simple things like hunting and camping, and once he asked me, do we need to keep going like this with science, always creating problems and solving them only to create more problems? And what is the point of improving the quality of life, when the secret to happiness it accepting things as they are? Is the Sparrow unhappy? Are the fish in the river unhappy? But of course, a person who rejects science, and clings to an earlier time would always be unhappy, because they would be rejecting reality in favor of fantasy, and not accepting the world as it is.
So where did it come from? Why is it that people older than me often love science? Maybe they were excited by the landing on the moon? Maybe they have just learned to accept the world as it is, and love it what what it has to offer? On the one hand, I grew up with Soviet science fiction which was... wait a minute, it was not particularly positive about science, was it? No, definitely a little dark in places. Then there was pollution. Chernobyl. And little to show for technology. But there are things I like about science, too. I love that I can video chat. I love that I can connect with people - and heck, computer games come from science. I like cars, let us face it. I like solar panels. And wind turbines. What about chemistry? I like fireworks. Heck, I like fire. I like rockets. Ooh, I like beer. And whiskey. I like biology. I like trying to understand basic things. What is, for example, pine sap? How can a pine tree take something which is just begging to congeal into unbreakable insoluble amber, and happily push it around its little trunk? Strange.
So, where did that feeling go? That little feeling of doom, that creeping slow death? I look now, and I do not see it any more. Was I really railroaded into a career of science, or do I actually find it exciting on some level, some level of which I am not often conscious, because for whatever reason, I tend to stay in the shadows. Perhaps I can think about that another night.
When people talk about the advance of science, I experience a feeling of slow doom and powerlessness. I feel like science is useless, like it is something extra, something contrived, something which does not actually make people happy. On an intellectual level, I can think about improvements to quality of life, etc. but on the level of my heart I do not experience the excitement that I sometimes see older people exhibit. I became a scientist mostly because I was good at it, and we often end up doing the things we are good at, because of a sort of career railroading effect. I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with that, and that is not what this post is about, anyway, this post is about feelings, because feelings are important. Somewhere, somehow, perhaps wrongly, I came to dislike science.
I have felt it in others, too. Like my friend Brett, for example. He likes the simple life, the simple things like hunting and camping, and once he asked me, do we need to keep going like this with science, always creating problems and solving them only to create more problems? And what is the point of improving the quality of life, when the secret to happiness it accepting things as they are? Is the Sparrow unhappy? Are the fish in the river unhappy? But of course, a person who rejects science, and clings to an earlier time would always be unhappy, because they would be rejecting reality in favor of fantasy, and not accepting the world as it is.
So where did it come from? Why is it that people older than me often love science? Maybe they were excited by the landing on the moon? Maybe they have just learned to accept the world as it is, and love it what what it has to offer? On the one hand, I grew up with Soviet science fiction which was... wait a minute, it was not particularly positive about science, was it? No, definitely a little dark in places. Then there was pollution. Chernobyl. And little to show for technology. But there are things I like about science, too. I love that I can video chat. I love that I can connect with people - and heck, computer games come from science. I like cars, let us face it. I like solar panels. And wind turbines. What about chemistry? I like fireworks. Heck, I like fire. I like rockets. Ooh, I like beer. And whiskey. I like biology. I like trying to understand basic things. What is, for example, pine sap? How can a pine tree take something which is just begging to congeal into unbreakable insoluble amber, and happily push it around its little trunk? Strange.
So, where did that feeling go? That little feeling of doom, that creeping slow death? I look now, and I do not see it any more. Was I really railroaded into a career of science, or do I actually find it exciting on some level, some level of which I am not often conscious, because for whatever reason, I tend to stay in the shadows. Perhaps I can think about that another night.
