IT COULD BE OTHERWISE

The importance of knowing—“but never knowing for sure.”

Firestein, professor of neuroscience at Columbia and author of Ignorance: How It Drives Science (2012), writes that we believe that humans will eventually cure cancer, fly to other planets, and eliminate poverty. This optimism turns out to be recent, a product of the Scientific Revolution that began in Renaissance Europe. Until then, he adds, all cultures (Ancient Greek, Chinese, even Christian) accepted that life would change little as generations passed. But humans hate uncertainty, so every culture assumed everything important was known. One found truth in holy books or words from wise men. Aristotle never performed an experiment; he simply observed and thought. Moving from philosophy to history, Firestein describes the Age of Enlightenment. Its immortals (Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz) produced spectacular, mathematics-based laws that convinced many that we live in a deterministic universe and led to 19th-century social Darwinism, eugenics, scientific racism, phrenology, and other pseudosciences. Firestein’s hero, Charles Darwin, demonstrated with natural selection that fixed laws were not necessary to explain the apparent orderliness of the universe. Optimism recedes in the book’s second half as the author presses his opposition to determinism, which still dominates the popular mind. Some schools still teach a 19th-century version of science, while 20th-century chaos theory and complexity science have not entered the mainstream, although technologies that depend on randomness and uncertainty govern everyday life—not only quantum theory but lasers, GPS devices, computing, cryptography, gaming, clinical trials, and economic models. “Complexity is everywhere, though we barely notice it,” Firestein writes. Today, there is no overriding urge to find a “single answer.” It is possible to ask questions that have more than one answer or no obvious answer.

A solid and even stirring defense of science.