Teaching the process of science: What gets in the way?

Ask scientists what's wrong with the way we teach science, and high up on the list is that we teach facts derived from science, but we often fail to teach the process of science itself.

Why do we fail in this way? At higher levels, we blame the lower levels -- elementary, middle school and high school teachers who only understand facts but not the methodology. At lower levels, the higher levels are blamed -- college and university professors who write textbooks and lab guides that don't convey the excitement of scientific discovery.

So what's the real story? I don't know for sure, but I have a hunch, and I think it has to do with a fear of the softer, less analytical side of the scientific method.

Most introductory science courses will discuss the scientific method including the elements described in this figure (above) -- which is similar to thousands of other "scientific method" figures. We start with a hypothesis, test it with experiments, get some results, and report the conclusions.

What's missing here is obvious to anyone engaged in scientific work...there is no mention of where the hypotheses come from. Some courses and texts may mention observation, but how does observation produce a hypothesis? Where do we see the importance of WONDER?

When searching for alternative diagrams of the scientific method, I found a well-developed blog post that discusses the wonder and failure inherent in the scientific method. Here's a link to that author's blog and the author's wonderful diagram is below.

What's wrong with putting this diagram in every textbook? Well, nothing. It would be an exciting change. Why don't we?

Observation is allowed, of course. But inspiration, confusion, fiddling -- these smack of uncertainty and failure. As noticed by many great thinkers including Kuhn, when a domain of intellectual achievement finds itself at the top of the pile in terms of status and power, people involved in that domain naturally do not want to lose their status and power.

My sense is that discussion of the uncertainty and failure so clearly inherent in the scientific process feels like it could lead to losing status and power, so it is not done. But this feeling is false, as demonstrated by demagogues and cults that repress questioning and eventually are overthrown by the reality of human wholeness. How strong is a God or a Structure that can't be questioned?

The strength that comes from transparently revealing the soft underbelly of any group of people or field of work is far more solidifying, enlivening, and powerful than any method of repression. What if our textbooks featured the failure and confusion in science? What if elementary science students made up their own, new questions? What if awards were given in science fairs for the most inspiring representations of the scientific process, regardless of the results? What if every chapter of every science textbook ended with the phrase "...at least that's how we think it works, but we're probably wrong?"

It seems to me that in this kind of world, science would have real staying power. And, perhaps more importantly, a shot at reaching everyone.

A carefully planned sneeze

I'm working on job talks for tenure-track Assistant Professor positions at schools around the country. Crafting these talks has provided me with the insight that doing experimental science in academia is a lot like having the urge to sneeze, sneezing, then discussing the sneeze in detail as if that particular sneeze were the logical and only thing to do at the exact time you did it.

Each talk I'm writing combines a discussion of the motivations for each of 2-3 experiments together with a discussion of the results and their implications. It seems like it would be easy to write the talks in the proper order -- my motivation always occurred before the experiments and results in real time, right?

It depends, I think, on whether we're talking about the real motivation or the stated motivation.

The real motivation that I have for doing an experiment is essentially always the same. It's something like, "Wouldn't it be cool if blah blah blah influenced blah blah blah and the mechanism was blah blah blah? Yummy!" The thought comes out of thin air, seemingly, and it's not attached to anything rational or even a memory of the reading that might have influenced it. It's exactly like having to sneeze. It comes over me without effort and sometimes at awkward times.

What I am starting to believe is that this is true for most scientists, but apparently because we want to be perceived as rational beings (good luck, us!) we have agreed that it's best not to talk about the shameful secret of our irrational experimental intuition. Instead we sort of retrofit rational explanations to our motivations. "Goldberger and Schnitz showed in 1989 that blah blah blah, so I thought blah blah blah -- which was clearly a reasonable single step from this previous idea."

I'm not saying that Goldberger and Schnitz' seminal work (ovular work? does it depend on their gender?) is not important, nor that scientists shouldn't cite related work, nor that Goldberger and Schnitz couldn't have influenced my thinking subconsciously.

However, if what happens to me is similar to what happens to other scientists, then the conscious order of events in the world of experimental science is more like this:

1) Get an idea for an experiment, probably while showering.
2) Look up some references and read/re-read the ones related to the idea.
3) If the idea is still feeling like a strong urge, ignore any references that go against the idea.
3.5) ...even if there many many references that go against your idea, and very very few (or none) that support it.
4) Design and perform the experiment.
5) Look at the data and try to understand what they are telling you.
6) Go back to re-reading references in order to understand why you should have predicted the result that you got.
7) Write a story that makes you appear rational throughout this process.

It's somewhat embarrassing to write this process down, even though I am sure that I and many of my colleagues do exactly this. We're trained not to report our intuitive urges, but we all have them. Once we do have them, and if we find them valuable, we have to come up with a story about how smart we were to have had them.

Sure, it's the same rationalization process everyone uses, including non-scientists. It's just that we scientists are supposed to be empirically observing and recording what is actually happening.

It just seems a bit dishonest to carry on as if we didn't simply have to sneeze.

Playing for truth

I have been reading and thinking about mathematical philosophy lately. There are many schools of thought that try to address the question of whether mathematics is a more accurate reflection of truth than the reflections arrived at through other sciences.

For historical reasons, in the West we are raised in the Rationalist tradition that tells us that math is King (masculine oligarchical noun selected on purpose here). If an observed or empirical piece of data defies a piece of information that has been proven mathematically, there is supposed to be a problem with the empirical data, not math. Interestingly, this is what is taught and is the water in which we swim, but it is not representative of how science/math actually works. 

What actually happens is that whenever possible, mathematicians are guided by intuition. Like most of us, they use their learned experiences (their sense perceptions) to inform their intuitions. In a world in which any three points (instead of two) defined a straight line but straight lines also had every other characteristic that they have in our world, the intuitions of mathematicians would be very different than they are here. 

To add insult to injury for those hoping that mathematics could help find truth, physicists compare their mathematical results with physical data whenever they can. If there is not a match between the math and the data, they start over on their equations. Chemists, biologists, and neuroscientists follow this same rule. When in doubt, the empirical data win.

What fascinates me is that the agreed-upon story, at least culturally, is that math wins. Yet in reality, experience wins. This situation is so human, it's touching. We realize that our senses are flawed, so we strive for truth elsewhere, and we think that math offers a place beyond our senses. But we have such faith in our senses and/or we are so trapped by them that we have difficulty believing any truth unless our senses support and defend it. I think this paradoxical position is nonetheless the correct one.

One way to leave this paradox in the dust is to admit that our work cannot really find truth. Instead, we can only play with truth using every game we can dream up. It seems to me that if there is any truth to be found by mathematicians and scientists, it is in play. 

We follow our curiosity and see where it goes. Sometimes it goes somewhere beautiful and elegant, and we are inspired. Sometimes it goes somewhere dark, clunky and awkward, and we are driven away. Sometimes the beautiful and the ugly conspire to produce elegant and damaging results, sometimes they conspire to produce awkward and healing results.

Regardless of the results, what drives most of us is that we delight in playing these games with the universe. The act of this play is where we find the closest thing to truth. Not in our results or our methods, but in the act of this relationship with the universe; the simultaneous and mutual, loving and awe-struck interaction with what is within and beyond us.

The feeling of communion and delight we get from this relationship is what keeps us playing. I wonder if that same feeling is what keeps the rest of the universe playing as well.