Standing up for science
06 Mar 2011 2 Comments
in Thinking aloud Tags: human beans, ponderings, rant, science
I can totally see you (translates to hello), and a happy beginning of March to everybody~
Have some tips on how to have the touchy-feeliest month possible. Click for full view, since I shamelessly stole it off the internets again.
Be sure to enjoy it, because next year (I think — I’m going solely based on something I remember, so feel free to prove me wrong), February will be a whole day longer and you’ll have to wait for it…! Speaking of waiting for it, Pokémon Black & White (and Dragon Age 2, but since I haven’t gotten around to playing the first one yet either, I’m not really excited about this one yet. I did make a funny joke about it being a jrpg because you can’t choose your character race/class, but that’s sort of obscure, and if you got that joke, please to leave a comment) are coming out this week, so if I disappear completely from the blogosphere, it’s simply because I’ve become so addicted with the game that I can’t properly function in this society anymore, except maybe to trade Pokémon. Also, I like brackets. Get used to it.
Just to start things off (or continue, since I kinda rambled), I’ve been noticing that there’s been a SLIGHT increase in traffic on my blog — which either means that more people are reading it, or the same people are reading it more times. Regardless — if you ever have anything at all to say about something I write about, even if it’s simply “I totally disagree with you because of x (in which x can be anything from “you’re a woman [though I can't guarantee the reception for that one will be very good]” to “you smell funny” and everything in between and beyond)” or “hey, why don’t you write about y (in which y can be something like “your toes” or something equally or less important),” please, please, please, PLEASE leave me a comment! Don’t get me wrong — I like writing this blog and whether or not you respond in any way isn’t actually going to keep me (from) writing, but still… It’d be nice to know what you guys think, because you obviously have a most impeccable taste.
So anyway. I’ve most obviously survived my first week at university, including that lab I was freaking out about. It wasn’t too bad, once I did the pre-reading for it and everything — though I haven’t received marks for it yet, so I shouldn’t celebrate before that. But since I’m not a pessimist, what the hell. Also, I seem to have caught a cold from the new environment, one that’s left me pretty much disabled this weekend. Damn you, study that piles up on me while I’m incapable to do anything but sniffle and sneeze! Damn you!
Damn you!
Ahhem. I don’t seem to get over this rambly phase of mine… The whole transition to the subject of university was supposed to lend me with a gateway to talk about some of the things one of my lecturer taught us about the scientific method and how we should be skeptical about the things even our own lecturers tell us and how information changes and everything, and how I felt kind of like my study is not very much my own responsibility, and that it’s not really even study anymore, it seems more like the basis for research — and from there, I was supposed to head to the topic of today’s post. But since I’ve already rambled far too much about my sneezing and about Pokémon, I’ll skip this bit about the lecturer and go straight to my topic, and I’ll start it with an illustrative picture:
To those of you who can’t quite fathom what this picture is supposed to represent — it’s the differences between the left & right brain. If you’re still confused, then the main premise is that the left brain controls, among other things, your linguistic centre, and most logic-driven mechanisms, whereas the right lobe governs art and music and all that sort of “creative” stuff. While, in premise, that’s all good and dandy — I don’t know specifically how a brain works, perhaps all the “boring” bits happen in your left brain and the “fun” bits happen in the right (if you know more about this than I do, feel free to tell me) — it’s the representation of it that drives me absolutely crazy and berserk to the point where I could explode onto the walls of my room to decorate them a pretty white. In that picture that’s currently above this text, there’s the left brain with its grey cubicles and people with their down-bent heads, and on the right, there’s the colourful, green meadows and the people painting and lazing about and playing music and just enjoying life. Search for “left brain & right brain” on google, and you’ll find lots of similar representations — the grey left part and the colourful right one.
I’m going to delve into the why of all this in a minute, but before I do that, I’d like to give some more background information on all of this. This representation of the brain is very similar to the way in which lots of the people in my school who only did the art-oriented subjects viewed science and math. Very often I heard in conversations that math is “methodical” and “formulaic”, whereas art gives you free range of expression in emotion; that it allows you to experience life in a much more full way than dusty math and science ever would. Who would want to sit inside and read a book and learn all these useless physics theorems when you can go outside and paint a sunset? Science and logic aren’t important to experiencing life. The irony here is that a lot of the time, these art subjects also taught the history of the art or a specific style, to which I could (though I never did, since then I wouldn’t have a right to complain) reply that why would you want to learn about its history and the great artists of old, if you’re simply doing your own thing? Developing the style, you say? But the point is to explore a single moment… and so on.
Just a short disclaimer here — I’m not trying to attack the artistic community in any way with this post. I’m simply tageting what I hope is a very marginal group of people with a sense of being “different” and being somehow more entitled to life or to certain things because they have decided that what they do is right and what others do is not. It’s just an example of what a closed mind can do — the scientific community can probably shrug at art, going “what do you need that for”, and I’d be happy for someone art-oriented to lecture them about that. But! The point here is that I can’t stand the fact that science and logic are labelled methodical and formulaic and boring — like the science and art ways of thinking are completely separate entities and the only people who could possibly elect to study science are those old and wrinkled people and the ones whose parents told them to or who desire stable careers in their lives. Some people fail to understand that science is, essentially, delving even further into the mechanics of our world and our current state of being than art ever can. Sure, you can paint a sunset or compose a song about it, but will you ever understand just the brilliance of how it all works? Will you ever wrap your head around the fact that it’s truly a miracle that we’re even able to exist at this time — that human life depends on such specific conditions that it baffles your mind? People need to understand that science isn’t just something that’s existed forever — someone has thought of all these things. Someone has to have dreamt and imagined that our understanding of the world is actually wrong — but they haven’t left it there, exploring their thoughts in works of art, but instead, they’ve investigated the phenomenon and allowed a platform for more innovationa and creation of theories. Science is full of imagination and experience of the here and the now!
Just as a comparison — I recently read a friend’s tumblr, where they had posted a picture of a pack of wolves. The caption was very short and sweet, something about how wolves are simplistic creatures and that being one would probably be very nice every now and then. I, on the other hand, was slightly taken aback by this statement. Simplistic creatures? Has this person not thought of the way the wolf operates — both in terms of how it functions within its own environment, with its packs, the intricacies of the social hierarchy, and in terms of how the actual animal has come into being, through evolution and changing times? How is it possible to call the smallest of creatures in this world “simplistic”? Consider that, you art-oriented people, when you next time accuse science of being difficult and bookish — sure, there’s a lot you need to learn in the basics before you can go any further, but it’s all in the endeavor to give us more insight into the world and the times we live in, and to form our own crazy theories on how everything came to being. Science involves a great deal of imagination — ever heard of quantum physics? Wave-particle duality? The fact that the entire premise of the birth of the universe revolves around matter we have yet to find?
If you want to take home anything more than my hatred for lumping science with dry, grey cubicles, take this: don’t ever assume that something that you don’t understand or have no desire to understand is any lesser in any quality that you possess. If you don’t know anything about it, you can’t make judgements, right? It is essential for every one of us to endeavor to understand the other, and not to pick sides — like the left-brained against the right-brained. It’s alright to have pre-conceptions on things, as long as it doesn’t make you completely blind to what the reality of everything is. That, too, is why science is so great — it encourages research, and the expansion of knowledge; science is ever-changing. I believe that everyone has a right to those critical-thinking skills that science provides you with; it makes basic human interaction much more equal, for science does not make presumptions before it is provided with evidence — and when provided with evidence to the contrary of what had been proposed before, science changes. Now, there’s a whole other post I could write about bad scientists who stick to their theory when it has pretty much been proven false, but that’s for another time — just keep in mind that those who do science are also human beings.
By the way, I’m still a creative writer, so I love and respect art and think it’s extremely important for human survival in an every day life. Just for the record.
Atoms and electrons and pre-historic animals, lovelies. And peace and love, of course.
