Science

What Mick Southern taught me was both the imperative to and the means of writing scientific prose—“if it’s not published it’s not done,” as a later adviser put it. Mock showed me that the rather dry technical requirements of scientific writing did not necessarily mean that elegance, humor, and even wit need be excluded from the scientists’ products.

Science, like the Mississippi, begins in a tiny rivulet in the distant forest. Gradually other streams swell its volume. And the roaring river that bursts the dikes is formed from countless sources.

Today scientific constructs have become the model of describing reality rather than one of the ways of describing life around us. As a consequence there has been a very marked decrease in the reliance of people on their own experience and their own senses.

The downgrading of experience and the glorification of expertise is a very significant feature of the real world of technology.

Maybe what the real world of technology needs more than anything else are citizens with a sense of humility – the humility of Kepler or Newton, who studied the universe but knew they were not asked to run it.

“What the artist does is essentially the same as the scientist. In other words, what you do when you start to do a painting is that you begin with a basic idea, a hypothesis of what you’re setting out to do. Then it’s just a million yes-no decisions. You try something in the painting, you look at it, and you say, ‘N-n-no.’ You sort of erase it out, and you move it around a little bit, put in a new line; you go through a million weighings. It’s the same thing in science, the only difference in the character of the product.”