Why I Am Not A Scientist

I know a lot of people think I am down here in Mexico drinking beer and wandering the beaches.  Well, they are mostly right, but lately I’ve been reading about science.  If I can complete the book I am reading, I am hoping to go from a complete science ignoramus to pretty much a science ignoramus.  The distinction is slight, but real.

The book I am reading, voluntarily I might add, is Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything.”  I know, that sounds like a history book, but the New York Times Book Review said it was, “Destined to become a modern classic of science writing,” and that’s good enough for me.

And what a story science has to tell.  It’s the story of men and women of such great genius that it makes you wonder how their brains fit into roughly the same size container as the one you and I walk around with on the top of our necks.  It is also the story of perseverance, mistakes, good and bad luck, good and bad timing, villains, heroes, accidents, rivalries, and teamwork.  The cast of characters includes some incredible weirdoes and the story of science is, in and of itself, fascinating.

But that is only the human side of the equation.  What science has uncovered in the last 500 years is just plain mind-boggling.  The creation of the cosmos, the age of the earth, the distance between objects in space, the atom and it’s components, the evolution and extinction of species on earth, plate tectonics, and asteroids crossing the earth’s orbit are a miniscule recital of the incredible things we have scratched the surface of understanding.  Yet, with all our progress, the amount we don’t know dwarfs what we understand.  In fact there is so much unknown out there that it draws into question man’s ability to ever understand much about the big questions, or at the very least, to come to understand them before our species becomes extinct.

All of this got me thinking about my own science education.  I went to a Catholic parochial grade school from first to eighth grade.  Our teachers were Dominican nuns, who, as I look back on it, did a pretty good job.  My seventh and eighth grade classes were 55 and 56 students.  That is a class size that no one should have to manage, but the nuns were able to teach us the basics despite our numbers.  Of course, they had some advantages few teachers enjoy today.  We were all from the same socio economic background.  None of us were hungry or homeless.  We came overwhelmingly from stable households and shared the same religious heritage.  Then there was the fact that when a nun sent a note home that you were screwing around in class, you weren’t just misbehaving in school.  You were offending and disrespecting a representative of the church and that carried a lot of weight with our mothers.  The nuns did a great job teaching us how to read and write, sentence composition, English, a little history and a bit of social studies.

When it came to science, the best that can be said about my parochial school days was that it was missing.  I believe we did get a science book in seventh grade, but it was seldom opened or discussed in class.

I have no way of proving this, but I suspect the Church’s somewhat spotty record when it comes to science may have played a part in the apparent indifference the nuns felt about our science education.  You know, things like Galileo, heretics, and inquisitions didn’t often encourage scientific inquiry.  After all, it was Bishop Ussher, who, using the books of the bible in 1650, determined the earth was 6000 years old. This number is still clung to by people who believe Fred and Barney always stopped for brontosaurus burgers on the way home from bowling with the boys from the rock pit.  By the early 1700’s, people who studied the earth knew 6000 years was a ludicrous underestimation of the earth’s age (the best estimate of the earth’s age is 4,550 million years, give or take 70 million years).

I don’t feel the nuns did a very good job with teaching us math, either.  I suspect it was similar to some Methodists prohibiting dancing because they believe it leads to sex.  Catholic educators may have felt the same way about math, in that teaching it could lead to science.

So, when I began my high school career at a Catholic high school, I was a virtual science virgin.  My freshman, and only year at that particular school, found me enrolled in a class called “Earth Science” taught by Father Gibbon.  Father Gibbon was Lurch from the Adams Family without the personality.  I feel I need to reveal here that I didn’t like Father Gibbons then and I think if I met him now, some 45 plus years later, I still wouldn’t like him, for reasons we shall get to shortly.

For some reason, Father Gibbon took and almost instant dislike to me and another student who sat next to me in class.  He made his dislike for us apparent almost every day.  Now, I admit I was no angel, but neither was I disruptive in his class or, at least I felt, deserving of the distaste and scorn he displayed toward John and I on a regular basis.

One day Father Puchelli came into Father Gibbon’s classroom and asked him if he had any students that gave him a hard time.  Father Puchelli’s role at the school was to make sure the kids of the wealthy or powerful were feeling welcome.  I think the rest of us could have fallen down in front of Father Puchelli foaming from the mouth and bleeding from our eyes and the good priest would have stepped over our bodies to make sure the heart surgeon’s son was getting everything he needed.  Anyway, Father Gibbon pointed out John and me and we were asked to come to the front of the class.

Father Puchelli told us we were going to play a little game for the amusement of our classmates.  This representative of Christ on earth stood working chalk into a blackboard eraser as he explained the rules of his game.  John and I would each get a turn.  Once the eraser was white with chalk we were to stick our tongues out and if we could get them back in our mouths before he hit us in the face with the eraser then we would “win” the game and get to go sit down.  I went first and managed to get my tongue back in my mouth before he hit me in the face.  I “won” and got to sit down with my nose, face, and hair full of chalk dust.  It took John two tries before he could return to his seat.

As an adolescent, I might have taken the priests’ good time a little personally.  I have to think that my relationship with earth science deteriorated from that point on.  I know I didn’t put forth much effort and passed the class without gaining any appreciation of the earth sciences.  In fact, that class was one of the many reasons I decided to end my Catholic education and move on to the public high school on my side of town.

It wasn’t until my junior year when I took Larry Gazell’s chemistry class that my true scientific potential was exposed.  Larry might have known a great deal about chemistry or he might not have known anything.  The only thing that was for sure was that he never taught any chemistry.

Every class period he would enter the room and climb up to his desk that sat on a slightly raised platform.  The budding scientists sat in two rows of desks in front of Larry’s desk.  Larry would tell us what experiment we should do and what page in the workbook we could find it spelled out.  He would say something like, “be sure to measure carefully” and then would either walk out of the class room and head down the hall or would go into the room attached to the chemistry room where chemicals and supplies were stored.  That would be the last time we would see him until he returned about three minutes before the class ended.  He followed this same procedure when he gave tests, which fostered an unprecedented level of cooperation and teamwork among the young scientists.

There was one other curious thing about Larry.  Every two or three years he would manage to blow himself up or set himself on fire.  He would show up in class all bandaged up and never bothering to explain what had happened.

On our first day of class Scott and I were paired up with two girls who quickly agreed to actually do the experiments and share their results with us.  This freed Scott and me from actually learning anything about chemistry and left us free to explore raw, or as I prefer to think of it, pure research.

Our first three classes or so, we busied ourselves with mixing chemicals in an attempt to find the right combination that would blow the lid off the centrifuge.  We eventually succeeded, but our rookie mistake of failing to measure anything or write down what chemicals we had used caused us not to be able to repeat our results and to lose interest in the experiment itself.

At the beginning of one of our next class periods, Larry entered the room and took his place behind his desk.  He was bandaged from knuckles to biceps on both arms and he was missing most of his eyebrows.  Yes, our class was one of the lucky ones given a concrete lesson in the dangers of chemistry.

Next, Scott became fascinated with mixing various chemicals to create colorful concoctions he would pour into test tubes.  He would then throw the test tubes out the window in order to observe the patterns that would be created when the tubes landed in the parking lot a couple of stories below.  These experiments ceased when Scott threw one test tube a little too close to a teacher’s car and a bit of his creation splattered onto the paint job.  This was followed by a short-lived, but intense investigation by the school administration, but because there were chemistry classes all day long and Larry was never around to see anything, the investigation bore no fruit and became a cold case.

Nonetheless, Scott decided this would be a good time to end his research and we moved on to what would be the highpoint of my career in chemistry.  One day, we decided to put a cork in the end of the hose that hung down from the faucet on our worktable.  By placing my thumb over the cork and letting the water pressure build, we could get some interesting results in the discipline of hydro propulsion.

When I eventually removed my thumb from the end of the hose, the cork shot across the classroom and ricocheted off the far wall.  As interesting as that result was, the truly revelatory discovery was that following the cork, much more slowly, was about a half of pail of water that landed about three quarters of the way across the classroom.   This break through was near the end of class, but the implications of our discovery were clear and we looked forward to our next chemistry class with anticipation and excitement.

I imagine Scott and I were feeling the same kind of excitement that the NASA scientists felt right before the launch of the first moon mission.  As soon as Larry made his exit, we began our preparations for a more practical application of our discovery.  Extrapolating from our earlier results, I worked on aiming the water stream so that I could drench an unsuspecting friend whose table was about three fourths of the way across the room.  As the water pressure built, I aimed the hose and at just the right moment removed my thumb.  Again the cork slammed off the far wall followed by the stream of water that hit its unsuspecting target in the head.

The success of our experiment set off a tremendous level of excitement and chaos in the classroom, as our fellow scientists congratulated us on our break through.  The reaction of the other scientists in the room, who were also pursuing pure research, was informative. If I know anything about the scientific method, and I know practically nothing, I know that when one team of scientists make a major discovery, it spurs other scientists to attempt to either duplicate the results or build upon them to reach new and interesting discoveries.  Scott and I had laid down the gauntlet and we knew that it was a matter of time before our results would face challenges.

During our next class period we worked on refining our results.  Now that the other scientists had witnessed our results, they were making themselves much more of a challenge as targets. However, Scott and I had not rested on our laurels and continued to improve our accuracy.  During the class, we were able to hit our target on two of three launches.  As gratifying as this was, we did find out that the other scientists had not been sleeping on the job.  Our original target had found a large syringe in a drawer and filled it with a chemical concoction he had prepared.  When he was hit with another of our hydro specials, he aggressively charged forward with his syringe and managed to hit Scott in the chest pocket of his pale blue shirt. Instantly a green stain spread across Scott’s shirt.  Before Scott could fully withdraw he was hit again on his sleeve and another green stain spread down his arm.

Near the end of class, Larry returned as he always did, and the students took their seats at their desks in front of him.  Two students looked like they had been dipped head first in a pool of water  up to their chests and sat dripping onto their desks and one student had conspicuous green stains all over him.  In one of the most amazing examples of scientific indifference, Larry failed to comment or take notice.

I managed to get through my education, from elementary to high school, without knowing anything about science. I suppose if I have to be honest for a moment, I would say I was primarily to blame.  Having said that, I do hope that science education has improved over the years, although you have to wonder when you read that one in four Americans believe the sun orbits the earth.  I think the teaching of a little bit of context could help the general student understand how fascinating the world of science is to contemplate.  I suspect those who are really gifted in science will eventually find their way there.  But for the rest of us, it sure couldn’t hurt us to better understand the story of how scientists came to their discoveries and how those discoveries have changed our world.  Pondering the wonder of it is, in and of itself, worthwhile.

I suspect, no matter how good my science education might have been, I would never have found myself pursuing a scientific career.  I just didn’t have the requisite aptitude.  It’s probably a good thing.  I’d look pretty weird without eyebrows.