Paean to Learning

I’m enjoying Carlo Rovelli’s collection of essays, published in book form as There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness… and Other Thoughts on Physics and the World. As my summer comes to an end, and no new flash of insight has emerged on the research project I’ve been working on, Rovelli reminds me (in the essay “Ideas Don’t Fall From the Sky”) that discovery is preceded by lots and lots of work. You don’t wake up one morning with Eureka! if you hadn’t been working hard at the problem.

 

So where do novel groundbreaking ideas come from? Rovelli writes: “They are born from a deep immersion in contemporary knowledge. From making that knowledge intensely your own, to the point where you are living immersed in it. From endlessly turning over the open questions, trying all roads to a solution, then again trying all the roads to a solution – and then trying all those roads again. Until there, where we least expected it, we discover a gap, a fissure, a way through. Something that nobody had noticed before, but that is not in contradiction with what we know; something miniscule on which to exert leverage, to scratch the smooth and unreliable edge of our unfathomable ignorance, to open a breach onto new territory.”

 

One example Rovelli provides is Copernicus’ deep astronomical knowledge of those who went before: Ptolemy, Kepler, Brahe. On top of that, Copernicus was in the rich learning environment of the University of Bologna, where Rovelli also spent time as a student. In another essay (“Copernicus and Bologna”), Rovelli reminisces on his time as a university student, while imagining what the young Copernicus might have experienced there as a student five hundred years prior. Rovelli speculates that it wasn’t just immersing oneself in specific subject knowledge, but also the rich milieu beyond one’s field and being exposed and challenged to see everything anew.

 

In our current milieu, where higher education is on the defensive, Rovelli’s final paragraph is a paean to learning: “What can the university offer us now? It can offer the same riches that Copernicus found: the accumulated knowledge of the past, together with the liberating idea that knowledge can be transformed and become transformative. This, I believe, is the true significance of a university. It is the treasure house in which human knowledge is devoutly protected, it provides the lifeblood on which everything that we know in the world depends, and everything that we want to do. But it is also the place where dreams are nurtured: where we have the youthful courage to question that very knowledge, in order to go forward, in order to change the world.”

 

This reminded me of another paean about science and the love of learning by Tom McLeish, author of Faith and Wisdom in Science. (I previously pondered his vignette on Robert Brown.) I close this post with an excerpt of his majestic first paragraph from Chapter 5, which reminds me to persevere on my building computational models for complex non-linear origin-of-life chemistry even when I feel discouraged by my lack of insight.

 

“Science runs far deeper, quirkier and at more fully human levels than we would think from stories of relentless discoveries, spectacular phenomena or the cool application of [scientific] methodology. We know better than to swallow and inadequate narrative that portrays science as simply replacing an ancient world of myth and superstition with a modern one of fact and comprehension… [This] older love of wisdom of natural things, does indeed call on a growing illumination of nature by experiment and imagination, creating understanding where there was none before and opening up the exploration of new phenomena. It maps, in increasing detail, the physical world onto patterns, often mathematical ones, in our own minds. Notably, the scope of science in both its experimental and theoretical explorations needs to capture the stochastic, the random and the chaotic as well as the regular, smooth and periodic. But science also emerges from an ancient longing, and from an older narrative of our complex relationship with the natural world. Its primary creative grammar is the question, rather than the answer. Its primary energy is imagination rather than fact. Its primary experience is more typically trial than triumph – the journey of understanding already travelled always appears to be a trivial distance compared with the mountain road ahead. But when science recognises beauty and structure it rejoices in a double reward: there is delight both in the new object of our gaze and in the wonder that our minds are able to understand it.”