Emerson and the orange guy with four eyes

One fine day, a few years back, a renowned zoologist handed out rectangular basins, handheld microscopes, even butterfly nets to doctoral students to do a fieldwork on ponds. The students, including this writer, silently shared with each other the terror they felt being under this renowned zoologist, uncertain of what was expected of them. My gross inadequacy in taxonomy also surfaced to add to my terror. Beyond classifying living things under their respective Kingdoms, I have trouble remembering the rest of the classifications without a good written guide.

This attitude and demeanor is what usually accompanies our encounters with science as a way of knowing the world. Somehow, there is a prevailing perception that science is the exclusive purview of the "gifted" mind, glimpses of which you can have from those children in those baby milk ads or in the other extreme, the "godless" mind of the aging scientist. But as human beings, species with brains that are always searching for connections and meaning, science is a natural, everyday path that we choose, whether we realize it or not. This, in varying scales, involves an honest, grounded observation of an event, making notes of it, making a sense of their relationships with other related events and formulating a working explanation of why that particular thing is the way it is. Now, why is it that the majority of us are still hesitant to recognize this reasonable path to understanding the world? I think there are many reasons but for now, I will explore one. I think it has to do with science’s track record of, as Ralph Waldo Emerson descriptively located it, "leaving us where it found us," still ignorant and fearful of the world, how it works and its possibilities. And I think this has to do with the language of science or what we think it is.

The language of science is usually in mathematical equations and in arcane Greek. No wonder, Emerson noted, that astrology and other forms of divining that consider the physical world’s role in our lives are so attractive to most people. Astrology, he said, "tied man to the system"; that through astrology, "instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him and he felt the star" (Emerson, The Conduct of Life, Volume VI). But I propose that since language is instinctive in us as a way of engaging in reciprocity with the world, we should be able to, without necessarily resorting to astrology, "talk to the stars"! The language of science need not be as dried as the stuffed specimens in a lab, nor simply the geometric ink stains on the scientist’s browning notebook. This is because the experience of or the encounters with science also most importantly evokes wonder! Having read Galileo’s descriptive account of the Moon and Jupiter and its moons, as well as being aware of the dominant "planetisimal theory" of where the moon came did not diminish nor mute my resounding wonder when I saw the Moon and Jupiter and its moons for the first time through a powerful telescope. I know of a senior botanist who specializes in ferns who was found jumping for joy, like a little boy, when he discovered fern species long thought to have been extinct. The science here of "watching" fern experience the world and the world experience it in ecology, led him – us – to discover our own humanity in experiencing the world, expressing joy, chancing upon life, in whatever form, continue.

What I personally like about learning and writing about science is that it more readily opens doors in my mind for other kinds of languages to be expressed, leading me to see, in a seamless fashion, how beauty flows and is woven through the languages that all creatures speak, individually, as a species, or belonging to one planet in the universe. Literature, myths, festivals, songs and dances extend and enlarge the wonder and understanding that science can initially evoke. There are myths which foremost scholar Joseph Campbell pointed out are not "falsities" but stories we rely on for their "message" as they express what have been experienced by communities of people who have related to each other and to the world, before us, the same way we rely on science for the facts of Nature and her laws. Prose and poetry, especially the works of timeless geniuses like Shakespeare, make our experience of the world visible, meaningful and truly beautiful in inked splendor. Music and dances are the rhythm of nature – mathematics – flowing in the air about us through sound waves or through the African dance mimicking with grace the thousand-powered movement of a millipede. It is mathematics in its shapes, the "music of the spheres" that also inhabits the spaces we live in through the science and art of architecture. I think those who show fear or even disdain for science miss out on the chance of being enlarged by it, in the sense of experiencing this infinite universe within an individual’s finite lifetime, and getting as much joy from it through reason as they can from experience and imagination.

The first scientific society, the Lyncaean Academy, established in 1603 by Federico Cesi, a wealthy Roman, in fact, acknowledged science and its connections with other fields. It was established for "its member-philosophers who are eager for real knowledge and will give themselves to the study of nature, especially mathematics; at the same time, will not neglect the ornaments of literature and philology, which like graceful garments, adorn the whole body of science." (Dava Sobel. Galileo’s Daughter, Penguin Books NY, 2000). I personally find scientists one of my most favorite people. Aside from their natural love for science that makes them most interesting, they usually are the ones with the most respect and appreciation for other ways of knowing the world.

So is Emerson still right in having said that "science leaves us where it found us"? I don’t think so. Not wholly, anyway. At the end of the pond work, we all found ourselves squatting and peeping through our microscopes, unmindful that remnants of the pond water were still dripping from our clothes and to each other as we snuggled close to share our "collections" with one another. As a closing remark to the fieldwork, the renowned zoologist played what he had hidden from us: a recording of our remarks as we were enjoying our pond collection. We sounded like a kindergarten class full of wonder, calling "cool" the "orange guy with four eyes" or that "green wiggly stick-like figure munching on the orange guy" that were swimming in the pond water in our basins. He said that taxonomy was not the point of the pond work. It is to cultivate "wonder." And indeed, I felt like I was not anymore where science found me before I "met" the "orange guy" and Mr. Emerson.