The Thrill of Primal Knowledge

The driver of science is well-trained curiosity in putting big ideas together with hypotheses and their empirical tests

Five scientists climb a trail toward a mountain lake in the North Cascades. As they reach the outflow stream, a whole, largely submerged but also mostly upright Douglas fir comes into view, needles mostly intact, its root ball grounded on the steeply rising shoals at the exit stream. One scientist poses the question, “How do you think this tree got here?” Her articulation was both late and superfluous. Each of us already had one or several different, tentative explanations, and over lunch we looked for evidence around the lake for and against the manifold alternatives among geological and biological processes. Far from diluting the hiking experience, our little exercise — or, more precisely, work-related habit — enhanced our wonderment and awe inspired by the exhilarating scenery around us.

For reasons that will be (if not already) apparent, this question is not a great scientific one. Rather, it is symptomatic of habitual asking in the scientific thought process, analogous to a musician playing the scales just to stay in shape between performances. Scientists perform with their minds (and in some settings also with their hands and their own unique instruments). Although simple, the question of how the tree arrived at its current location and posture shows how a question typically catalyzes the scientific method. An observation leads to a question. The question leads to multiple working hypotheses as potential answers to the question. Participants look for additional observations to test those hypotheses.

In the vernacular, “question” and “problem” carry some negative connotations, as in admonishments to avoid causing problems. Outside science, “good problem” rings a little oxymoronic. Houston certainly was not happy when it had a problem. For a scientist, however, these words convey much more anticipation than anxiety. What scientists do for a living is to pose questions and find or formulate “good problems” that we then endeavor to answer or solve. Our unparalleled passion for questions and problems stems for the quest for what might be called primal knowledge. This passion is the product of a very natural channeling and maturation of childhood curiosity.

I should take a little diversion here to address two other motivations often ascribed to scientists, but mostly by non-scientists. One is a goal of subjugating nature. That idea rings truest to people raised in the tradition of western philosophies, and is one good reason not to like those philosophies. It is completely alien to many indigenous cultures and not an obvious goal in many eastern philosophies. Curiosity is far more universal across cultures. The other motivation frequently mentioned is fame. I do know scientists who aim to be famous and a few who are. Less pejoratively, a fair fraction of people in any profession who enjoy that profession seek to excel, and with excellence fame can come. I don't see a large number of colleagues in science who are driven by the seeking of fame, any more than in any other profession that takes a lot of training and practice. In over 50 years apprenticing and practicing science, I have heard aspirations of getting a Nobel fewer than five times.

A scientist’s thrill differs qualitatively — a rush like no other. It is a massive dopamine release from learning something that nobody knew (or at least nobody wrote about knowing) before — a new knew.

Every reader, on the other hand, has experienced the thrill and satisfaction of learning something new. That thrill reinforces the reading habit. But what does “new” mean in this context? To most people, it is simply something that they did not know before. A scientist’s thrill differs qualitatively — a rush like no other. It is a massive dopamine release from learning something that nobody knew (or at least nobody wrote about knowing) before — a new knew. And the thrill multiplies if someone else uses that new piece of knowledge to unlock further secrets about how the natural world works. The process of posing good questions and solving good problems snowballs into bigger and better problems opened to attack as the smaller ones yield.

The dopamine release can be a siren song. I've watched many young scientists hit the rocks by seeking the next new rush before doing the hard work of writing up their novel findings and getting them peer reviewed and published. If findings go unpublished they do not exist in the formal science world. If they go unpublished one can hear about them at meetings or on social media, but they lack quality control through peer review. Moreover someone else who comes up with the same new knowledge but publishes first will and should get credit for it.

I can learn something new to me by reading textbooks. I cannot learn something new to science by reading textbooks — unless I get exceptionally creative and recombine existing ideas found in them to provide novel insights. To be truly novel, those insights should correctly predict observations or experimental results that otherwise would not have been anticipated. They should also spawn new questions.

Textbook knowledge and technological (engineered) devices like the iPhone are valuable products of science. Looking at them gives little insight, however, into how textbook knowledge was gained or how it was engineered into useful products. One can think of those products as what comes out of the science factory. But how was it made; what is the process of science going on in the factory, and what is the necessary mindset of scientists to contribute productively on the assembly line?

Two ingredients are critical to formulating, asking or choosing a research question and addressing it scientifically: an idea about how the system under consideration works, and experiments or observations that can provide evidence supporting or refuting the idea. Science is the testing of ideas about how systems work against empirical evidence in a way that in principle can be reproduced by someone else to whom the idea and testing methods have been communicated.

Although the testing of ideas against empirical evidence about how natural systems operate is familiar today, science as a practice could not come into existence without a quantum leap in deliberate metacognition — at least an awareness, and preferably a more analytic understanding, of one’s own thinking. This awareness allows consideration of processes and mechanisms (“laws of nature”) underlying how the natural world works without placing humans or deities at the center of explanation. Posing questions like our tree-in-the-lake example are so commonplace now that the metacognitive leap they initially required is underappreciated. Historians conjecture that the leap into exploration of natural laws operating independently of people and gods first occurred in the Greek civilization because Greek thought and philosophy were relatively unfettered by either theology or orthodoxy. Greek gods were numerous and neither omniscient nor all-powerful, giving room for humans to take an alternative approach.

A majority of historians attribute the first known practice of science — the pairing of ideas about how the world works with tests against empirical evidence — to Thales of Miletus (c. 625–546 BCE; Before the Common Era, numerically equivalent to years BC), a Greek philosopher and mathematician of Phoenician origins. His work is known largely through the writings of Aristotle. Thales was first to ask of what fundamental substance the universe was made. That insightful question is still being profitably addressed, albeit now at subatomic scales and in contexts of dark matter. Thales theorized or hypothesized that the universe was all made of water, with evidence including the observation that water could become a solid or gas or a liquid under the right conditions. He also hypothesized from observing ships that Earth’s land masses floated on liquid water. Although both the theory and the evidence are suspect based on common (textbook) knowledge today, the method remains recognizable.

Thales also knew how to put knowledge to practical use. He estimated the height of the pyramids by measuring lengths of their shadows at the time of day when his shadow’s length equaled his height. He successfully predicted a nearly total solar eclipse in 585 BCE and with the success of that prediction is reputed to have cowed two armies into avoiding battle. Other historians suggest that he may have predicted only the year of the eclipse, but even so the prediction based on observations and mathematical proofs based on axioms are stunning testaments to the kinds of big problems that can be addressed with deliberate metacognition.

Orbits and revolution certainly figured in Thales’ calculations for eclipses, though details of his mental models for planetary motion and calculations are not known. The first recorded model of the planets revolving explicitly around the sun came not much later and had them in the correct order of distance from the sun. That model is attributed to the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – 230 BCE). Unfortunately (but supporting the observation that authority lacks utility in science), Aristotle squashed those ideas for a few hundred years by asserting that humans would fall off the earth if it were moving, and that surely humans could sense such motion if it existed.

Science, however, continued to develop in other directions. Archimedes (c.287 – 212 BCE) took Greek science to a new level. His inventions displayed keen understanding of mechanics, in particular mechanical advantages provided by levers and pulleys. He established hydrostatics. Its founding principle is now known by his name and states that the upward buoyant force exerted on a body immersed in a fluid, whether fully or partially submerged, is equal to the weight of the fluid that the body displaces and acts in the upward direction where the center of mass of the water displaced by the object would have been. Archimedes had the first recorded “Eureka!” moment in science in his realization that he could use this principle to distinguish a gold crown from one that had been diluted with cheaper, less dense metal. “Eureka” translates from Greek to English as, “I found it” and was uttered by Archimedes when he jumped from his overflowing bath after realizing how much water he was displacing. Like Thales, Archimedes also made insightful contributions to mathematics, for example using the method of exhaustion to derive a good approximation to the value of pi, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. Exhaustion in this sense means solving for the bounding lengths of the perimeter of inscribed and inscribing regular polygons having increasing numbers of sides and points toward the method of limits developed much later in calculus.

The light of science also shone on the golden age of muslim civilization, with many notable advances in mathematics (also often aimed at describing orbits of heavenly bodies). Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965 – 1040 CE) was aware of Greek science and was first to apply the scientific method to optics. As the opening chapter quotation indicates, he put even more weight on empirical evidence than did earlier, Greek scientists. While in protective custody by his patron, he is reputed to have observed on a wall of a dark room an image projected through a hole in the opposite wall, noting that it was reversed left to right and upside down. He theorized or hypothesized that light is similar no matter its source (fire or sunlight) in traveling in a straight line until striking an object and that reflected light allowed an object to be seen. His observation is the origin of the pinhole camera. He was first to conclude, again based on empirical experiments, that the eye was a sensor for light traveling from some other source, rather than the source of light used in vision as had been thought by the Greeks.

Advances under the scientific method are largely unknown from the Dark Ages. The Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment restarted science by rediscovery of Greek and middle eastern methods and results. Revolution of the planets re-emerged as a central question. Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbits around the sun supplanted Ptolemy’s complicated epicycles. The idea of planetary motion around the sun instead of the sun was so difficult to accept without willing metacognition about processes operating in nature unaffected by humans or gods, however, that it almost cost Galileo his life. The difficulty is captured in the etymology of "revolution" and "revolt" as attempted overthrow of the government (revolution denoting a successful attempt), first applied c. 1560. Rotation of planets about the sun was effectively a reversal of thinking based on empirical evidence compiled fastidiously by Copernicus.

Science as practiced by Thales or Copernicus is surprisingly recognizable today. Current practice of science underlying the posing and asking of good research questions, however, usually resolves the idea part of the process into two parts. One is an overarching, big idea as context — a theory (or thesis) about how systems (this one in particular and ones like it) work. Theories are usually too expansive to submit to empirical testing all at once, but the good ones spawn smaller hypotheses susceptible to observation and experiment. The prefix “hypo” means beneath or below, marking their lower status. Science is the testing of plausible theories (under existing evidence) against potentially reproducible evidence from observations or experiments directed by hypotheses.

Case studies, notably by the economist Imré Lakatos, document that theories are not rejected. Rather, their ranges of application enlarge or contract as hypotheses derived from them are either supported or rejected. Rather than rejected, theories are instead replaced and only after ones come along that better explain the same phenomena and make more and better predictions.

A typical path for a scientist is to ask a question, such as why the sky is blue. Then one looks for existing theory (before trying to generate one if the search comes up empty). For waves in general, wavelengths are scattered (diverted from a straight path) most effectively by objects similar in size to those wavelengths and are also well scattered by larger objects. When particles are smaller than the wavelength, they scatter (change the direction of the wave) much less effectively. A person standing in the surf zone creates very little change in the direction of wave travel. In light waves, red wavelengths are about 40% longer than blue ones. Hence orange and red light has greater tendency to continue in a straight line than does blue light. Because blue light is more easily scattered, it fails to keep traveling away from the sun and is effectively redirected, with some of it reaching your eye.

Early thinking based on general theories of wave scattering was that dust particles in the atmosphere with diameters near the wavelengths of light did the scattering, but tests and calculations revealed that scattering was too intense to be due to dust and instead varied with the much more abundant molecules that air comprises, mostly of nitrogen and oxygen. Unlike classic wave scattering, this scattering (now known as Rayleigh scattering) results from interactions of light with electrons in the gas molecules and varies in intensity with the inverse of the fourth power of the wavelength, making the shortest of the abundant visible (blue) wavelengths dominant by far. The experimental results revealed that the general theory of wave scattering by solid objects was quantitatively inadequate.

The question of why the sky is blue was a good research question, and wave scattering theory was a good place to start the search for an explanation. The explanation led to tests with dust as the target cause, with quantitative hypothesis tests rejecting that cause in favor of electromagnetic scattering by molecules. Iteration of hypothesis tests and modifications of theory led to a consistent, quantitative answer. Theory not only suggests hypotheses to be tested, it also provides a way to generalize results of those tests. Confirmations of hypotheses broaden the range of applicability of the theory, whereas rejections of hypotheses narrow that range.

Some would suggest a preferred order to the scientific method, with observations leading to theory, leading to hypotheses and then to tests of hypotheses. The method as actually practiced has feedbacks in nearly all directions, however, with tests suggesting improvements upon both theories and hypotheses. The method most often starts with an observation (e.g., that the sky is blue) that leads to a question. The question itself often gives good clues of where to search for or how to derive suitable theory as well as pointing toward relevant hypotheses. A major shortcoming of my tree example is its lack of a larger context (big idea or theory). Avalanches, landslides and shore erosion were candidates for delivering our fir to the lake. Target theories (big ideas) would likely deal with expected frequencies of erosional events large enough to deliver trees to lakes. Another shortcoming of our tree example is that it focused on a single tree. The context of a theory would also help define a population of tree events (not just our one) from which additional examples could be sought. Theory enriches and generalizes.

The thrills that scientists seek increase in intensity and frequency by asking better scientific questions and making more readily testable predictions in the context of a theory. Alternatively a thrill can come from raw exploration and discovery, but most such discoveries are made while pursuing a related question with some idea of what to search for and where (i.e., with a question in mind). For example, the lush, modern communities surrounding submarine hydrothermal vents (with ancient analogs long known from the fossil record but now much more easily interpreted) were discovered by marine geologists looking to estimate heat loss from the interior earth to the oceans through its subsea plumbing.

Copernicus, N. 1995 English translation by C.G. Wallis. On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres. Prometheus Books. Amherst, NY.

Lakatos, I. 1970. Falsification and the methodology of research programmes. Pp. 91-196 in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, Eds. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Lam, A. 2011. What motivates academic scientists to engage in research commercialization:‘Gold’,‘ribbon’or ‘puzzle’? Research Policy 40: 1354-1368.

O'Grady, P.F., Ed. 2012. Meet the Philosophers of Ancient Greece: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Ancient Greek Philosophy but Didn't Know Who to Ask. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., Surrey, England.

Padmanabhan, T. 2010. Dawn of science. 1. The first tottering steps. Resonance 15: 498-502.