Science has taken a beating in the past century.
Some time ago, almost everybody and their mother was a scientist. Those genetically variant pea pods on the windowsills of backyard botanists and Old Herbert So-and-So’s collection of trilobite fossils dug from craggy river beds were proof that science-which is, above all, driven by a basic curiosity about the natural world-was accessible to anybody with enough wit and leisure to pursue it.
Now it feels like humans are more intimidated by science than we have been in previous ages. The large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator that smashes atoms together at nearly 300,000 km/second (light speed), lurks in its 17-mile stretch under the Alps, and while it searches for answers to the fundamental questions of modern physics, it also destroys the layperson’s chance of doing the same.
Where once Kepler only needed a few lenses and his own mind and eyes to study the motions of the planets, now the important discoveries of science are dangled far above the reaches of the ordinary human, the experiments performed high in ivory observatories and in billion-dollar atom-smashing operations. Joe the Botanist might as well surrender and pick up the plunger.
I don’t mean to say that research should take a step back. In many ways, scientific inquiry in the 21st century almost has to be this way: the only method to glean the information we need to further our understanding of the cosmos is through ridiculously expensive equipment that requires, in addition to generous funding, years of technical training. But it does present a great schism between “real people” and “scientists.”
There are other problems as well. Aside from science itself and the scientists who employ long laundry lists of fundamental particles like leptons and quarks and who are rarely schooled to translate their knowledge into the vernacular, much of this can be attributed to government sponsorship and media outlets.
Both of these have developed a business-like approach to knowledge that many Americans have blindly accepted. Our consumer-driven society has dictated that something must be profitable for it to be worth knowing about-there must be some economical use for a fact, and government policy and non-funding of scientific endeavors have (in part) reflected this. Together, these forces have decided that sheer wonder at the world is not a good enough excuse anymore.
That seems wrong. Science should be open to everybody, as it was more likely to be in Darwin’s day. It is a right, as fundamental as life and liberty, to have access to information about the very fabric of reality, even if this reality proves complex and intimidating. It is the responsibility of citizens and government to make sure that everyone knows how very basic things work, that electromagnetic waves flit from GPS to satellite to GPS, obeying special relativity and that the earth is constantly undergoing its own processes of drift and thermodynamism.
Down to the barest particle, science seeks to understand human existence and consciousness. To surrender to intimidation and bad government is one of the deepest tragedy of our time. Though seemingly esoteric, I believe a solid understanding of at least the basic principals of reality will bestow an appreciation of the physical world that, lacking, leads to an over-obsession with superstition and a neglect of the planet.
Despite leaps in technology, it is still possible for ordinary people to engage in the scientific community, but some of the push needs to come from over-arching institutions and popular culture. These could do a lot to promote curiosity and accessibility to scientific inquiry, whether in the form of backyard biology or nuclear physics. We would benefit as a society from a better scientific education; after all, if we don’t understand our world and our planet, we can never attempt to change it.
Roberta Singer is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences.
