So, what’s science good for?

by Lena Groeger

Thanks Massimo for inviting me to join the conversation at Rationally Speaking! I'm quite excited to be here.

To start off, I'll tell a little story about a trip I took this fall with my NYU classmates — an overnight trip to Brookhaven National Laboratory. Even though it's just an hour and a half from New York City, Brookhaven feels like some sort of 1970's sci-fi alternate reality set against a quaint suburban backdrop (with lots of Canada geese). It's got facilities with names like Space Radiation Lab, Synchrotron Light Source, and Laser Electron Accelerator Facility. As we tour the various buildings, I start to feel just slightly overwhelmed by all this grand epic-scale science happening in every corner.

Then we arrive at the STAR detector at RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. I won't even try to pretend like I can explain what RHIC is, but it has something to do with crashing ions together, liberating quarks and gluons, and possibly replicating the microseconds after the Big Bang. At least, that's as much as I scribble in my notes.

At the very end of our tour around what I can only describe as a convoluted multi-colored three-story eyeball, physicist Les Bland takes a few questions from our (at this point somewhat bewildered) group. It's not too long until the inevitable question chimes over from somewhere in the back: “So what's this all good for?”

Bland pauses for a few moments before giving a very simple reply: “Questions of our existence are worth answering.” He explains that in his mind, we have a responsibility to try to understand the world at its most fundamental level. Why? Because we can.

I think the question and his subsequent answer exemplify a distinction in our usual understanding of why we do science. Either it's (a) useful for society, leading to practical applications and new technologies, OR it's (b) valuable for its own sake, because the pursuit of knowledge is something worthwhile regardless of the practical value of anything we discover or learn.

There are of course many variations of (a) and (b). Science training leads to the cultivation of applied and profitable skills, so we do science because we'll get a job. New clean energy and information technologies let us compete in the global market and spur economic growth, so we do science because it increases national profit (à la Obama's recent State of the Union address). Medical advancements are often accidental byproducts of the pursuit of knowledge, so we do science because we never know when we'll discover the next penicillin. Or, in line with Bland's previous answer, humans have the capacity to learn about the world they live in, so we do science because it fulfills our natural potential.

What I don't hear much in this Useful/Its Own Sake discussion is a third factor, one that seems to get overlooked in the haste to divide by two. And that's the value to the person — the habits, the values, the character that a person develops by actually doing science. The ability to think critically, exchange ideas, imagine alternatives, ask questions, invent new possible worlds and go on speculative adventures, present reasoned arguments and retain a healthy dose of skepticism and doubt; these are all deeply scientific and deeply formative values. You become a different person with scientific training, and we do science because we value that kind of person. Science is not only bridge-building (usefulness and technology driven) and knowledge-building (adding to the pile of facts we know about reality) it is also people, character, and citizen-building.

Of course, science doesn't necessarily have to produce those qualities. When usefulness is the premiere value to all scientific endeavors and progress is measured by test scores or economic gain, many of the humanistic dimensions of science fall by the way side. In her recent book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Martha Nussbaum worries about precisely this problem, but in the context of the humanities and the arts. She argues that these subjects are valuable because they develop abilities crucial to the health of any democracy, and to the creation of a decent world culture and global citizenship. She chooses to focus on the humanities because they are under the most immediate threat from the cost-cutting measures of many schools and universities, in some cases downsized or eliminated entirely.

But I would argue that many of the traits she holds up as exemplary — critical thinking, imagination, curiosity — apply to the sciences as well. The name of the discipline is ultimately much less important than the values and qualities developed through the process of learning and thinking, whether reading a great novel or observing the stars through a telescope. If we really are in the crisis Nussbaum warns us of, it is not because of a lack of the humanities per se, but because (a), the Useful view, is becoming the metric of worth for all subjects. But, there is much more to science (and the humanities) than practicality and “impact.” At its best, the exploratory, inquisitive, and wonder-inducing practice of science can be just as beneficial to a flourishing individual and a democratic society.

So I'd add to our list of why we do science: (c) it’s valuable for the people who do it, because it changes the sort of person they become.

At this point, I'm still standing in front of RHIC, staring off into the immense jumble of blue pipes and orange wires that will perhaps someday unravel the beginning of the universe. The rest of my class is now marching over to the Center for Functional Nanomaterials. I better catch up.