The human side of science

The human side of science

I’m not sure how we, as humans, ended up doing science, as we don’t strictly need it for surviving on Earth. But, the search for truth, which surely drives all scientists in the world, has little to do with their personal life.

Anecdote #1
The oil drop experiment

A beautiful example is the famous experiment of Millikan for measuring the electron charge. Unfortunately I was not able to find the plot of the electron charge as a function of time. However, I found the story in Feynman’s words (“From “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”): “Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that”.

Anecdote #2
My last days as a PhD candidate

When I gave the department seminar before my PhD defense, I had to talk about networks in front of an audience of condensed-matter physicists. After three talks about superconductivity and graphene, I start talking about nodes and links and network properties. After fifteen minutes of listening to the audience humming, I finally get the question I was waiting for: “where is the new physics?”. I could not think of anything but Max Planck’s famous quotation: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Anecdote #3
Doubt, doubt, doubt

Feynman, again (“What Do You Care What Other People Think”): “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.”

— Andrea Lancichinetti