Men in White
There is a great deal of heroism in science. People are often drawn to science by the desire to
save lives, improve the environment and contribute to the economic and cultural wealth of our
society. Scientists also work and study very hard. The scientist hero has a lot in common with the
character of Lancelot in the story of King Arthur. Dedicated to the principles of chivalry from a
young age, Lancelot trained to be the perfect knight. He became an unbeatable warrior with
absolutely no sense of fun, at least in the version of T.S. White. Like White’s Lancelot, the white
knights of science are often considered tedious. Their dedication is laudable, their training and
accomplishment impressive, but they are not generally liked. Their single-mindedness makes them
boring. Worse, when looking at the impact of their actions, we suspect that in spite of the heroism of
individual scientists, science itself may not work for good in our world. Lancelot’s love of
Guinevere leads to the destruction of Arthur’s kingdom; scientific passions can also lead to disaster.
Thus, my talk today is about scientists: the men (and women) in white lab coats. I’d like to examine
their virtues and weaknesses and the role that scientific ideals play in modern society.
What does it mean to be scientific? A scientific model must logically connect evidence and
arguments and should have predictive power. In daily life, we hold to many unscientific models
about how the world works because they seem simpler and more intuitive. We tend to remember
when models succeed more often than when they fail, or we find ways to attribute their failure to
extraneous causes. And most of the time, it doesn’t matter at all. We respond to the world around
us in a natural way, and the principles of science don’t have a large impact on our actions, unless
something goes wrong. This is true of everyone, scientists and non-scientists alike. However, when
problems occur, there is a big difference between a scientific and an unscientific approach.
Here’s a mundane example: suppose that your television picture is unstable. Naturally, you
push every available button and slap it on the side. If, by chance, you find that the picture stabilizes
as long as you hold the case of the remote control against the cable connection, the problem is
solved. When this doesn’t work, you may find that you can also solve the problem by rapidly
changing channels and raising the volume while turning on and off the room lights. Now, you no
longer have a single technique to deal with the television, you have a set of empirical approaches to
a problem. If you stop there, you haven’t been scientific. A scientific approach would be to search
for the common elements of the two solutions (both involve the remote control unit) and eliminate
the unlikely elements (the room lights).
At this point, if you are an experimental scientist, you change the batteries in the remote
control unit and see what happens. If this doesn’t help, then you keep looking for new empirical
approaches that work; identify their common elements; and eliminate the unlikely elements until you
finally zero in on the problem element. Or, if you are more inclined to theoretical science, you
analyze the remote control unit, make a hypothesis about what could be wrong, and then try to fix it
(or find someone to fix it, if you are a pure theorist).
One of the things that you may have noticed about this example is that it doesn’t presume
that the scientific individual knows much to start. Of course, a scientist with more information
about a subject is a more effective problem solver, because she will be better at identifying common
elements of the empirical solutions. If common elements between the remote control and the cable
connection are previously known, it’s a big help in the analysis of the solution. This is why the
scientific community works hard to publicize what other people have learned, to make subsequent
problem solving easier. But in many problems, you can apply scientific reasoning without having a
battery of scientific facts at your disposal.
Thus, what makes a scientist is her problem solving ability. It’s not about knowing facts, it’s
about knowing how to connect them. Every situation can be different and will need to be analyzed
separately. It’s a mistake to simplify cases and pretend that facts (and solutions) are always the
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same. Science, itself, is not an unchanging catalog of facts. Science is a culture, a process, and a
body of knowledge that must be applied to problems.
The key to a culture is language, and the starting point for learning any language is
vocabulary. In science, precisely defined words are useful not only for communicating ideas, but
also for clarifying thinking. In carefully describing a problem, a scientist may find the keys to its
solution. Highly specialized language allows scientists to play with concepts and develop new ideas.
It’s a kind of symbolic shorthand that helps one to build bigger and more elaborate scientific models.
That said, scientific language can also be misused to disguise very unscientific models and mislead
those that don’t have an adequate technical vocabulary. Misused or misunderstood scientific
vocabulary pollutes the debate about important scientific and social problems. A well-educated
person needs to know enough of the language of science to make judgments about the worth of a
scientific opinion. This doesn’t mean that everyone needs to specialize in science, but everyone
should have basic tools to enable them to recognize the most common frauds and hoaxes.
Scientists use other tools in addition to descriptive language. As a physicist, most of my
theoretical tools are a combination of mathematics and logic. Mathematics is sometimes called the
language of science, but it’s the more grammatical part of scientific language. It is the framework in
which concepts can be connected to develop new ideas. My experimental tools are less glamorous.
Lab work requires manual dexterity, Duct Tape and practical knowledge of plumbing and electrical
wiring. The real requirement is patience. Most lab work succeeds only because of dogged
persistence in applying scientific problem solving techniques.
My list of a scientist’s “tools” may surprise you. Ordinarily, the first tools that come to mind
are physical (rather than mental) equipment. Indeed, my laboratory contains a large and very fast
laser, fancy machines for making micrometer sized electronic devices, and enough cryogenic
equipment to make you feel that winter temperatures in Maine are very, very warm. All of this
equipment is obviously expensive, and requires a certain amount of technical infrastructure for
development and maintenance. But the largest (and most valuable) scientific investment that our
society makes is in people, people whose potential to be scientists must be carefully nurtured.
Creating a scientist is an enormous investment. Academic communities are endowed and great
teachers devote their time and talent to develop human potential. I am amazed at and grateful for the
education that I have been given. It’s not something to take for granted.
Looking at me today, you may see a quintessential scientist, but my scientific talent was not
identified early, nor universally acclaimed. A few individuals offered the right support at critical
times and helped me realize my scientific potential, but there were serious obstacles to my progress.
What made it hard for me to become a scientist? In many essential ways, I am like scientists all over
the world. I enjoy solving problems and have had an intensely technical education. But in one,
relatively inessential way, I am not like most other physicists. I’m not a Man in White. I do wear a
white protective suit when I work in my clean room, but I have, to put it politely, a gender problem.
It shouldn’t matter, but it did and does. I have had male mentors and fellow students who tried hard
to support me as a woman physicist, but I have often felt excluded, marginalized and discouraged.
Many of my fellow science students who did not fit the (white male) stereotypes of successful
scientists have left the field. I’m still here, but I recognize that I am exceptionally persistent. I see
this as a big problem for science: the scientific community has not done all it can to look beyond
social categories when training potential scientists.
Of course, the lack of diversity in science is not only the fault of scientists. Many students
avoid science because they are sure that they are not the “scientist type.” People make this decision
quite early in life. Although young boys and girls express equal interest in science and scientific
topics, most girls give up their interest in scientific careers in junior high school. Research shows
that this choice is not related to student performance in science classes. Large numbers of very good
female students decide, at quite a young age, that science is not for them. Individuals make this
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choice for highly personal reasons, but social factors play a large role. Creating a scientist requires
the support of the entire community.
In order to increase the number of female scientists, everyone needs to stop typecasting.
Many of you have already embraced an identity as a scientific, artistic, atheletic or literary type, but
you should be alert to the opportunity to break out of your usual roles. For students this might mean
taking a course outside of your usual set of interests, but it could also mean that faculty and staff
might attend a lecture that’s not directly related to their typical interests. Your presence will
challenge stereotypes on both sides.
Future scientists also need your moral support. It’s quite difficult to decide to become a
scientist, if intellectual ambition is not socially respected. Nerd was one of the nicer words my
young friends used for scientists, and it had a chilling effect. Adults were kinder, but often
scrutinized my academic record for signs of weakness and counseled me to choose a traditional
career for “practical reasons.” I was encouraged to choose a career with a flexible schedule
(definitely not a research scientist) or a career that required fewer years of education. The fact that
these occupations offer considerably less pay and autonomy was rarely mentioned. I was advised to
make a clear choice between an ambitious career and time for family and personal life. All of you
will be offered the same choice, but I hope that you will reject it. I believe that it is a false
dichotomy. One should be able to balance career and personal choices without heroic sacrifices, but
it requires widespread support for the idea that balanced lives are important and that men and women
are equally called to take up professional and family responsibilities.
As a student, one of my limiting stereotypes was that I thought of physicists as “bomb guys.”
I loved solving physics problems but wished that physics and physicists could somehow be different.
Some critics of science think that science is an oppressive construction of knowledge that shapes our
reality. In extreme cases, they argue that unscientific miracles can occur if we can only throw off the
shackles of scientific thinking. If we could just free our minds, then we could overcome gravity and
fly. I think this is nuts. However, I do believe that science could be quite different than it is. It
can’t be inconsistent with the physical world and our observations of it, but, by choosing to
concentrate attention on different problems, science can develop alternatives. If all the resources
applied to the problems of intercontinental ballistic missiles were instead spent on developing a
passenger rocket to Mars, our technological and scientific development would be altered.
Thus, the challenge to the scientific community is to choose our problems carefully. To
dream that things can be done differently and work to connect that dream to what we currently
know. To make that happen, we also have to connect our dreams to social reality. If we want to
make science matter, we can’t ignore socially significant problems. Maybe Mars is a slightly better
problem than missiles, but what about poverty or racism or problems of the environment? If a
scientific approach makes sense, it should be extended as far as possible.
-- as far as possible, but not everywhere. Science is more effective when tackling some
problems than others. For example, problems that involve the behavior of individuals are usually
not good science problems. This is not because one can’t create logical theories of human
interactions, but because it’s almost impossible, given the wide range of human choices and actions,
to draw out a common element of human behavior from which one can make a completely predictive
model. The effect of nature on our personal development (that is, genes, the human body and
biochemistry) is amenable to science; the effect of nurture (our social interactions with our parents
and society) is less so. It’s critically important to be aware of the limitations of scientific models and
to think carefully about the appropriateness of a scientific approach in every case.
Scientists take a lot of joy from being problem solvers. They develop an intensity of focus
that allows them to concentrate on the details of complicated problems to the exclusion of other
things. This concentration is both a gift and a weakness. It’s not uncommon for scientists to lose
sight of the larger implications of their work while they focus on interesting and complicated
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problems. Normally, a scientist thinks hard about the impact of their problem when beginning. As
you choose your majors here at Bowdoin, and later your careers, you will, no doubt, think about how
to be a hero, how you might work to make the world a better place. But once your choice is made
and you begin the slow daily effort, it’s easy to loose track of the effect you are having on the world.
I think that a lot of the evil that people do, comes from this mistake. Immersed in interesting
problems, they forget to check how their choices are affecting the world. Or, maybe they remember
to check, but they check only by consulting those closest to them and don’t learn about the way they
are affecting other groups. Sometimes scientists are carried away by early success and push to
extend their work without proper care for circumstances. Such arrogance (or short-sightedness if
you want to give it a kinder interpretation) has caused an enormous amount of damage. Great moral
responsibilities are associated with the power of science. The price of complacency can be very
high.
Now, more than ever, we need informed public debate about the impact of technology on our
world. The best training for participating in this debate is a truly liberal education, an education that
transcends the division of academic subjects into science and non-science. The choice of problems
to be solved and methods of solution are both scientific and social choices. To make them well
requires broadly trained, reflective individuals. We must all work together to set priorities for our
social and financial investment in problem solving. We must all pay attention to science.
Some of you may have recognized that my talk title is a play on the movie title “Men in
Black.” I was, of course, hoping this would raise my hipness factor. (It was worth a try.) But I also
want to use it to underline the difference between scientists and science fiction action heroes. In the
movie, few people pay attention to the richness of the world around them. Will Smith and Tommy
Lee Jones have vision and information that the rest of the world lack. Their knowledge of alien
species and weaponry is highly technical, but best kept secret. They are lonely, anonymous heroes,
with a strong tendency to manipulate others “for their own good.” Rosario Dawson is allowed to be
an inspiration, but she is never considered part of a problem solving team. The Men in Black are
powerful, exclusive and secret. Scientists are powerful, but not, I hope exclusive or secretive. One
goal of science is to reveal the marvels of the universe to everyone, bug-headed aliens and all. This
isn’t always as exciting as movie pyrotechnics, but it can be quite thrilling.
I don’t want to be a lab-coated version of the Men in Black doing lonely, heroic things in
secret. For one thing, I don’t want all that responsibility. I’d rather live in a society where everyone
takes an active role in saving the planet. So I’ll end my talk with this exhortation.
(Put on sunglasses and bring out camera flash unit.)
Look this way please.
Science is a natural partner of your liberal arts studies. Make understanding science and its role in
our world an educational and a life goal. The world needs people who think about how problems
are solved. Dare to dream that things could be different and work to connect science to that dream.
Oh, and have a great academic year!
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