science

My On Being podcast of the day was the first third of this interview with Carlo Rovelli, who talks about science as a voyage of discovery; a way of thinking that constantly builds on what we already know but is at the same time always ready to question everything. It's about forming new ideas, then using those ideas to make predictions and test whether our new ideas are correct

...which also means that many beautiful ideas turn out to be wrong. And science is the capacity to say, "oh, this was a beautiful idea, but too bad, it was wrong" - which is specific to science and is a strength of science, the capacity to question and change our own ideas...science is a way of thinking that accepts change and death.

...science is not about perfection, certitude, certainty. It's an inspiration, it's a movement, it's the capacity to change ideas, which is something that is so hard, even in our everyday lives...people have their own ideas and they keep them, they even think that they are good people because they remain faithful to their ideas...which is sometimes good...but sometimes being able to change ideas is our strength and not our weakness, I think

Glennon Doyle talks about how our biggest flaws are also our superpowers, and I think this is mine: a chronic uncertainty that is, on the flip side, an unusual capacity to hold ideas lightly. In my lived experience of science, my chronic uncertainty looked like low self-confidence, and without self-confidence you will get precisely nowhere in the world of academia. Or in the world of electrical engineering. Well, in the world in general, really...but my point is that because I experienced this as such a negative quality, it did not until today occur to me that it might also have been the thing that drew me to science or made me a good scientist.

It's tempting to contrast science with religion here: church, what an excellent place to find people who think they are good because they remain faithful to their ideas! But ideally, religion also helps us to accept change and death; it's also a way to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. A different path to the same human goal?

I have so much I want to write these days, how am I going to make the time to actually try??