Reflections on Frontiers of Science

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” said Richard Feynman in his speech, “What is Science?”

What did Feynman, a pioneer of quantum theory and surely an expert in his own right, mean by this provocative definition? A superficial reading might suggest a form of radical skepticism—reasoning that may well lead one to believe nobody, perhaps not even oneself. But such a dictum is an absurd one to live by, let alone to ground science on.

No, Feynman was not advocating a path to nihilism. Rather, he advocated a pragmatic skepticism of authority; a realization that it is not impolite to ask for evidence and to try to understand things on your own terms, even if the person telling you what to believe is Quite The Expert.

In my last Frontiers of Science seminar, a student shrewdly pointed out that the word “science” in Feynman’s statement seemed like it could be replaced by almost any critical endeavor. After all, impressionists challenged the Acadèmie de Beaux-Arts experts’ sense of aesthetic, expanding the Western notion of art. Shakespeare, needing a word, wasn’t hampered by the vocabulary of his day; he made up new ones, and in doing so, powerfully expanded the English language’s range of prosaic and poetic expression. Feynman’s dictum, suitably generalized, gets at the core of the liberal arts’ mission: to educate a citizenry that can participate fully in the intellectual and civic life of the nation and the world.

I enjoy thinking of my first days as a Columbia student, stepping into my first Core class (Music Humanities). In that class and others I was enriched by a broad cross-section of world knowledge, thought, and culture. More significant was my exposure to methods of thinking about, parsing, and interpreting a book, a symphony, a philosophy. This was not something that instructors discussed explicitly. These modes of thought seeped in through reading, essay writing, and most importantly, the give-and-take of seminar discussion.

One thing troubled me: We laud Shakespeare’s plays as great art, but why isn’t Newton’s thought accorded a similar respect for its creativity? Science and art clearly differ—science requires the possibility of disproof, even of cherished ideas—but it seemed to me that the wall separating how we present these two strands of thought was too impermeable. At Columbia, we had the Core and we had science requirements, but at the time we had no Core course that exposed the student community to varieties of scientific topics, highlighting their role in the human endeavor to understand the world and ourselves. This void was to the detriment of the arts and the sciences, for they are not created in separate worlds. They influence each other, and our understanding of either is impoverished when we lack either perspective.

I graduated and went on to get a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cambridge. Imagine my surprise on finding out that Columbia had instituted a science-based Core course in the meantime! Fortunately, I had the opportunity to return to Columbia, this time as a faculty member charged with leading seminars in the new course.

Frontiers of Science is probably more intimidating to the beginning instructor than to the first-year student. In many ways, I was a scientific ignoramus—I knew a lot of physics, but miniscule amounts of biology, chemistry, neuroscience, or pretty much any other science. Yet I have to guide activities and discussion, highlighting the insights at the cutting edge of various sciences. The fact that I can even teach the course is a testament to its notion that having “scientific habits of mind” is sufficient, not to master these subjects, but to look at data, understand arguments, and even constructively critique the lectures given by the experts.

Frontiers introduces students to scientific ways of thinking about the world. Taken together with the humanities, these modes of thought allow us to apply Feynman’s dictum to its most important subject—ourselves. The little expert in one’s head is hard to argue with, but with the methods of artistic and scientific thought embodied in Columbia’s Core, one can begin to constructively appreciate one’s own ignorance, and perceive with greater clarity the awesome mysteries at the heart of our existence.

The author is a postdoctoral researcher at the physics department’s Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics. He is also an adjunct lecturer for Frontiers of Science.