Writers, Fools, and Scientists

The larger writing project I’m working on for Biosphere 2 is based on a kind of biomimetic epiphany that became a hypothesis. I will not go into the details here, but as I work on it I keep remembering a story attributed to either Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. or William James, depending on whose apocrypha you subscribe to. The great man wakes up from a dream, in one version ether-induced, having been struck to the core with a profound awareness. The secret to life, the universe, and everything is within his grasp. Frantically he scribbles down his message from the nether realms and promptly falls back asleep. In the morning he wakes to read his great truth: “A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole."

The theory I’m working on has not so much turned to turpentine as languished on the back burner of my mind, somewhere between “I don’t know what to do with it” and “even if I did who would care.” But as I write now I know that I have also sought to protect it from the potentially killing light of day. Perhaps it’s just a seed that’s been waiting for the right soil.

Growing up I often lost points in math for failing to show my work. In writing, I’ve found myself susceptible to the same problem. I tend to think in terms of getting an answer – or not – while forgetting that the journey toward answers may be more valuable than the end. A writer recently admonished me that showing the journey is what writers do.

Having of late more conversations with scientists has rekindled a paradigm I had left to the days when life was democratically divided by academic disciplines. Scientific method requires showing one’s work. In fact, the one thing that saved Victor Flemming’s discovery of penicillin was a professionalism that compelled him to unenthusiastically publish his results. Like many of the most influential discoverers, Columbus, for example, or the Medieval alchemists, Flemming stumbled across his finding while looking for something else – and didn't seem to realize what he had. Macbeth says, “All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death;” yet there is a grand tradition in science and mythology of wise men succeeding who thought themselves fools and fools finding lights by shamelessly pursuing their folly.

My admiration for fools and foolishness increases with my tuition. I aspire to be a better fool, less afraid of failure and more willing to explore. Scientific method gives a hopeful respectability to my stumbling – and even a useful set of steps to cadge. Writers may make observations, ask questions, develop a hypothesis. So far so good. Then gather data, perform experiments – hold that thought, analyze the data, okay, revisit the hypothesis. Then publish. Well, we try.

As for conducting experiments, in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, the Dueña Alfonsa says, “In history there are no control groups.” Even good metaphors break down somewhere. Still, it’s all about the approach, the construct. The question is not whether it’s true but whether it is useful. Science itself is a construct, a tool, with its own limitations. Human beings, scientists included, tend to turn their favorite constructs into rules and rules into rituals. Rituals become sacred and then … and then right and wrong becomes a matter of life and death. Constructs – just try them on, like sunglasses, see if they help. Evolution, for example. It doesn’t block UV rays, but it sure is helpful if certain people, doctors at the CDC for example, know how to use it.

If you’re a painter, try turpentine.