by STUART FIRESTEIN
ILLUSTRATION/by Oliver Munday
Most scholars agree that Isaac Newton, while formulating the laws of force and gravity and inventing the calculus in the late 1600s, probably knew all the science there was to know at the time. In the ensuing 350 years an estimated 50 million research papers and innumerable books have been published in the natural sciences and mathematics. The modern high school student probably now possesses more scientific knowledge than Newton did, yet science to many people seems to be an impenetrable mountain of facts.
One way scientists have tried to cope with this mountain is by becoming more and more specialized, with limited success. As a biologist, I wouldn’t expect to get past the first two sentences of a physics paper. Even papers in immunology or cell biology mystify me—and so do some papers in my own field, neurobiology. Every day my expertise seems to get narrower. So scientists have had to fall back on another strategy for coping with the mountain of information: we largely ignore it.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sure, you have to know a lot to be a scientist, but knowing a lot is not what makes a scientist. What makes a scientist is ignorance. This may sound ridiculous, but for scientists the facts are just a starting place. In science, every new discovery raises 10 new questions, as playwright George Bernard Shaw sardonically declared in a dinner toast to Albert Einstein.
By this calculus, ignorance will always grow faster than knowledge. Scientists and laypeople alike would agree that for all we have come to know, there is far more we don’t know. More important, everyday there is far more we know we don’t know. One crucial outcome of scientific knowledge is to generate new and better ways of being ignorant: not the kind of ignorance that is associated with a lack of curiosity or education but rather a cultivated, high-quality ignorance. This gets to the essence of what scientists do: they make distinctions between qualities of ignorance. They do it in grant proposals and over beers at meetings. As James Clerk Maxwell, probably the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, said, “Thoroughly conscious ignorance … is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge.”
Scientific American for more