My girlfriend, who has taken it upon herself to keep me abreast of cool culture, has gotten me hooked on the hit YouTube show “TwinsthenewTrend,” also called “First Time Hearing.” Tim and Fred Williams, twin brothers who live in Gary, Indiana, react with infectious enthusiasm to songs they’ve never heard before. I never really appreciated Phil Collins or Dolly Parton until I watched these young black men grooving on “In the Air Tonight” and “Jolene.” Watching Tim and Fred makes me feel like I’m hearing these old songs for the first time too. The twins cut through my habituation and put a smile on my face.
The show got me wondering: Could there be a scientific equivalent of “First Time Hearing”? A way for us to get excited about scientific theories, like the big bang, as if encountering them for the first time? This turns out to be a complicated question for me. I became a science journalist decades ago because I found science thrilling — and especially pure science, the quest to understand, well, everything. I wanted to convey to non-scientists what scientists are discovering about the universe, life, us.
Eventually I veered away from celebratory science writing. I decided that I could better serve readers by critiquing and even debunking scientific claims, which are often exaggerated, incoherent or wrong. Science, I persuaded myself, needs tough, informed criticism more than “gee-whiz” journalism, which in unskilled hands resembles mere marketing. The trouble was, I felt myself becoming jaded, losing the sense of wonder that lured me into science journalism in the first place.
We’re all subject to habituation, perhaps for reasons related to evolution. Our brains weren’t designed to keep us in a state of slack-jawed awe before the weirdness of existence; that wouldn’t be very adaptive. Yes, natural selection instilled curiosity in us. We want to know how nature works, and how to manipulate it for our ends, because such knowledge can help us survive and propagate our genes. But we have a strong predisposition toward what might be called instrumentalism, in which all that matters is accomplishing tasks on our to-do lists, with as little cognitive expenditure as possible.
Ideally, education should counter our tendency toward instrumentalism and habituation, but too often it has the opposite effect. In fact, habituation is arguably the goal of STEM courses. Students are trained to learn formulas and techniques so thoroughly that they can apply them unthinkingly, like automatons. Within quantum physics, this pragmatic attitude is summed up by the command, “Shut up and calculate.”
Ironically, teaching has helped me overcome my habituation. I started teaching at Stevens in 2005, to be honest, because I needed the money to supplement my freelance writing income. At first, I felt awkward in the classroom, but over time I relaxed, and I even started having fun. I discovered that I like telling students about science’s greatest hits. A personal favorite is the big bang theory, which is easy to explain. I start by asking, “How many of you know how the universe began?” A few tentative hands go up. Then I ask, “How many of you care how the universe began?” Often, fewer hands rise. I yell, “Come on, you should care! We should all care about why we exist!”
Then I tell them about the big bang, emphasizing that the theory is less than a century old, and based on three pieces of evidence: the shift of light from galaxies toward the red end of the spectrum, which indicates that the galaxies are hurtling away from us; the proportions of hydrogen, helium and other light elements observed throughout the cosmos, which match theorists’ predictions of what would be forged in the big bang; and a faint microwave buzz that bathes the earth, which is thought to be the big bang’s afterglow. I like saying “afterglow of the big bang” while wriggling my fingers evocatively.
I add that the cosmic afterglow was discovered accidentally in the 1960s right here in northern New Jersey by physicists at Bell Labs testing microwave receivers. Cool, huh? I emphasize that, although the big bang theory tells us a lot about our cosmic origins, it doesn’t explain why the big bang happened in the first place, or what, if anything, preceded it. Scientists have proposed lots of theories, some of which say our cosmos is just one of many, like a tiny bubble in a vast, foamy sea. But no one really knows why our universe exploded into existence, or why it took a form that allowed for our eventual appearance.
My reward, if I’m lucky, is that some students—not all, but at least a few, usually—will perk up. Their eyes will narrow, their brows furrow. They might even ask me questions. Perhaps they want to get my thoughts on string theory, the many-worlds hypothesis, the simulation hypothesis or some other far-out conjecture they’ve heard of.
Here’s why I enjoy these exchanges so much—and this outcome applies to conversations outside of classrooms. Talking to young people about scientific mysteries and theories helps me rediscover them, see them anew. When I write about string theory or the many-worlds hypothesis, I’m usually disparaging them, pointing out their inadequacies. But telling my students about the theories, I’m overcome by scientists’ audacity, their wild ambition and imagination. If I’m lucky, my jadedness fades, and for a moment I feel as though I’m seeing science, the world and my own benighted, noble species for the first time.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from one originally published on ScientificAmerican.com.
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