People go into science because they have intense curiosity. Every kid is basically a scientist; they like to poke things to see what happens. Fortunately, we can turn that curiosity into a lifetime’s work. If you loved watching ants as a kid, you become an entomologist. If you loved staring at the stars, you become an astronomer. Being a scientist also means being an engineer who likes to build things to see if they work. A scientist is just a person who’s willing to stay with a question for hours, days, weeks, or years. You go to sleep at night and can’t wait to wake up and get back to the problem you’re working on.
No matter what answer I get, I just go on to the next question, so it’s the inquiry—the absorption in the question—that matters. When I work on a mathematical derivation, I’ll put my head down and get started, then suddenly five hours have gone byand I didn’t notice at all. You just disappear into the work. I think the same happens with musicians and artists. And there’s this sense, especially with the deeper questions, that something extraordinary is waiting to be seen just over the horizon. So for me, it’s the journey that is so engaging.
But in the same poll, the public said scientists don’t have feelings like other people do. They apparently got that notion from watching TV shows where scientists were portrayed like Mr. Spock on Star Trek. That, of course, is the biggest misconception. Scientists fall in love, we get pumped when our baseball teams win (the Mets, thank you very much), we’d throw ourselves in front of a bus to help our kids—there’s fundamentally no difference between a scientist and anyone else.
A lot of it has to do with the COVID pandemic. Because the data were new and constantly changing, the scientists couldn’t always get it right in the beginning. But then, very quickly, they figured it out, which is why we had a vaccine in less than a year. On top of that, the pandemic became politically polarized, with experts like Dr. Fauci being villainized. Also some very well-funded people have been leading efforts for years to subvert the public’s understanding of science. This is particularly true since it threatens the bank accounts of folks in the oil and coal industries. But sowing distrust in science is a very dangerous and slippery slope. You can’t just point to one area of science and call it a hoax. It will spill over into other areas of science. And the problem with that is that science is a central pillar of this country’s success. Now all this misinformation and science denial is being spread for purely political ends, and we’re going to pay a real price for that if we don’t correct it.
The implications are very simple. The nation that controls the scientific high ground controls the future. Germany before World War II was a scientific powerhouse. It is, after all, the birthplace of quantum mechanics. With the Nazis, it was clear that the nation was moving toward and much of their scientific talent left for the United States. So if the United States continues down this road of science denial, the best and brightest of the world won’t come here. It’s really about our nation’s capacity to be an economic powerhouse.
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