6.
THE SCIENTIST – FREEDOM TO DEVIATE
“Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome.”
One of the most direct ways of engaging with the unknown is the open inquiry and experimental methodology of the scientific method. Not Knowing plays a vital role in how hypotheses are formulated, experiments conducted and new discoveries made. Hans Hoppe, a senior bio-scientist at the University of Oxford, reflects on the part that Not Knowing plays in the scientific process.
“It was a Tuesday afternoon in the autumn of 2010 when I realized that the data staring back at me from my computer screen was telling me something annoying: still nothing. There was no way for me, given current thinking in my field, to understand what I had been looking at for several weeks.”
Hans had gone through all possible permutations of the prevailing theory that he could think of, trying to explain the data in front of him. He wanted to bring the data into the context of current understanding of how proteins can improve their function, but none of his assumptions made any sense. Hans was researching the reason for the appearance of a completely new function in a cell-surface receptor, a function that arose very suddenly during evolution. As this was an unusual change, Hans was perplexed. He wondered what else could be behind the change and how a completely new function could evolve.
He could have ignored this aspect, left it as some observational data outside his area of expertise and moved on. But the molecule was too important and he was also too excited about having discovered something new and surprising to let it go. At this point in his work it had taken over five years and a team of 16 scientists from three continents to describe the findings. “Yet I was still staring at the question of why and all I managed to achieve was to move from ‘no answer yet’ to ‘no answer possible from within my field of protein science’. The situation was very frustrating.”
Hans describes this period as strangely exciting at the same time. While he found himself truly at the limits of his knowledge with his current knowledge and skills, aware of the unknown ahead, he also felt a sense of freedom to be able to explore something new. This mindset enabled Hans to change his frame of reference completely and eventually led to a significant discovery in his field. Reflecting on the process, Hans describes the role Not Knowing plays in science:
“Sometimes the most significant aspect of researching the unknown in science is realizing where it begins. Yet we do not normally think in this way. Instead, we concentrate on ‘where our knowledge ends’. This is only natural, for after all it is only our detailed knowledge and experience which enables new observations. Mostly, this amounts to tackling the unknown in a ‘filling in the blanks’ approach to substantiate known theories.”
He argues that when small steps in theory adjustment lead nowhere, leaps in our understanding are required, a phenomenon American physicist Thomas Kuhn termed “paradigm shift.”
Hans points out that new insights require fresh thinking, which in turn requires a degree of freedom from certain constraints acting on the individual, both material and mental. He believes that mental constraints are more difficult to recognize and put aside, especially when they arise from the very knowledge that made the new observations possible in the first place. “As with my evolution research mentioned earlier, it is often the realization that an extension to the chosen framework of knowledge will not yield a sufficient solution which frees the mind and enables the search for new concepts as the old ones are abandoned. A process which instils a sense of freedom, or a license to venture out.”
Hans argues that letting go of the known and opening up to ideas previously considered too strange to explore are individual decisions that play a fundamental part in the scientific process, beyond filling in the gaps. “Once the newly expanded frame of knowledge is accepted and the boundaries of the unknown are drawn afresh, the cycle of ‘filling in the gaps’ research into the unknown can resume. At least, until another observation creates an obstacle to knowledge as we know it, sparking a new opportunity to let go of the known and to venture out.”
When science resembles knowledge acquisition, the freedom to deviate from a hypothesis can easily become seen as an unnecessary delay and distraction, reducing scientific research to a quest for usefulness. To advance real scientific progress beyond currently predictable applications, more consideration for individual freedom to think laterally, or “outside the box” is beneficial as it encourages personal ventures into the collectively unknown.