What did your eureka moment sound like? Did it come with trumpet sounds or did it come on tiptoe? That was the question I wanted to ask Dr. David Gross, Nobel Prize winner in Physics (2004), but I wanted to hear more of what the young science students wanted to ask him. I was in the audience when Dr. Gross was in UP sometime last month as part of the UP Centennial celebrations as well as part of a series of round-the-word visits by Nobel Prize winners to foster peace sponsored by the International Peace Foundation under the Bridges: Dialogues Towards a Culture of Peace program. Gross shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for Physics with Dr. Frank Wilczek and Dr. H. David Politzer. In brief, they discovered that at very close distances, quarks inside protons behave like “free” particles, i.e., they do not interact with one another, which turned out to be a surprise since following nuclear theories, they should be, and all the more attracted to each other the farther you pull them apart. But it seems that at such closeness, quarks “lose interest” in each other and behave as if no one else were in the room (technical term is “asymptotic freedom”). The published works of the physicists came out in 1973 and were later verified by experiments by particle accelerators and the results were found to be consistent with their theory.
But what I failed to ask Dr. Gross last month, I was able to ask the students who had represented their schools with their 113 projects in the Intel Philippine Science Fair last Friday in Tagaytay City. In their young minds that must be vibrant with curiosity, that question should have hit them and I expected that they would be teeming with stories of what led them to choose the research topics they did: for instance, the power of snails to act as fuel to “speed up” a car, to help with soil quality or with the human body, chicken feathers as a reinforcing construction material, or to make ampalaya cake.
I also asked the students: “What made you fall in love with this problem?” “What inspired you to pursue something as strange-sounding as levamisole or some hidden adsorbing power of a banana stalk? “What is levamisole?” “In your own words, what is ‘bioefficacy’ and why did you think it was important?” The Intel kids might have thought I was a judge or a three-year-old who had progeria (a disease that makes one grow old rapidly) since I asked questions they did not seem to expect. I was not a probing judge during that fair but a curious guest, interested to know what kinds of investigations are happening in our country aside from the ongoing ones involving corruption scandals.
The students stood or sat by their booths ready to answer questions of judges or wandering curious guests like me but they most often are not ready to answer the questions I wrote above. They would either go back to their topic or read from their tarpaulin spreads or from their papers. I don’t think it was because they did not know but more of because they did not think it was as important as the technical discipline by which they pursued their project. I wanted to tell them stories about the great and famous scientists they all learn in school and what kind of quirks they had and that they are as human and playful and that is a great part of the joy that comes with pursuing science. Science is a human endeavor and should in no way be upstaged by tarpaulin spreads.
A boy named Deoxier Ribo C. Agub from Isabela was part of the Intel Fair. His project had to do with the oil cleaning properties of banana stem. He was twiddling with his hanky when I approached him as he softly read his research findings to me but when I asked him why he ever thought of his topic, he told me a tale so fluid and so natural that it was the only time that I saw his round eyes light up. I do not think I would break his heart if I told him that the Nobel committee might not accept his nomination. In fact, he did not even win any of the categories in the Intel Philippine Science Fair this year but he demonstrated what Dr. Gross so emphatically wanted the young scientists to understand when he said, “You never go to a life of science to win an award. That is just wrong.” This was how Dr. Gross answered the young woman who asked him, “Did you know you were going to win the Nobel Prize one day?”
There is of course great honor and great rewards that come with some recognition and some awards. But for the complete and consummate scientist, the prime reward that could never be taken away is the joy he or she gets in pursuing an understanding of the world, even just a tiny weeny part of it through rigor and discipline. I always feel that my mind breathes so much easier when it is able to understand something. What is most pathetic I think is when you do not get enough reward from your own personal experience in the life of science that you have to resort to even citing Google hits on your work as testimony to your scientific greatness.
Intel Philippines has taken it on its own to provide the resources, for 11 years now, to provide the venue where investigations and curiosities from the many schools for young Filipinos from all over the country are made to stand scientific tests and the best of them to interact with other works of young scientists abroad. The Department of Education has continually provided the mechanism for this process with its hardworking teachers. I think the work they do is commendable and I also think they can encourage the public more to support science done by young people if they are able to remind their students that as much as discipline is required in research, they have to love and be passionate about their sense of discovery.
Dr. Gross reminded his mostly young audience that day in January: You enter into a life of science because that is the kind of adventure you want for your life and you are happy and excited with the struggle and the progress it brings to your own understanding and perhaps to the larger community of minds.
So young men and women in science, show them you are not mere geeks but geeks who have as much joy as much as you have discipline in doing your science. Geeks may not make the world go round but hey, it was some wonderfully passionate geek named Eratosthenes who figured out in fact that it was round.
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