Getting Comfortable With Confusion

People sometimes ask me what it takes to be a science writer.

I always tell them: Dare to be stupid!

You’d think it takes some smarts to snoop around scientific laboratories trying to interpret the obscure wisdom of a strange culture.

But mostly, it takes the ability to be dumb.

It means asking stupid questions, and not pretending to understand the answers. It means admitting you can’t understand concepts clear to any precocious 5-year-old. It means embracing ambiguity, getting comfortable with confusion, learning to live with the eerie unease of always being the most clueless person in the room.

The only thing that makes this constant humiliation bearable is the knowledge that the same sense of muddlement guides the work of many top scientists.

“Every cosmologist has spent at least 99% of his or her life in confusion,” writes cosmologist Rocky Kolb in a charming book about astronomy whose title pretty much gives away the game: “Blind Watchers of the Sky.”

Lay people sometimes get intimidated by science because they think they don’t understand it. What they don’t realize is that scientists often don’t understand it either. Scientists have just learned to be comfortable with not understanding.

A case in point: One of the subjects I find confuses people most is the idea that the four-dimensional fabric of space-time can be curved, and that this curvature produces the “force” we feel as gravity. Normally, scientists (and science writers) try to explain curved space-time by drawing analogies in lower, more understandable dimensions.

For example: Imagine that space-time is the rubber sheet atop a water bed. If a giant sits on the sheet, it sinks down, forming a huge warp in the bed. In the same way, a massive object like the sun creates a warp in the fabric of space-time.

Furthermore, a child sitting on the bed next to the giant will sink into the hole created by the giant’s weight; the child will be “attracted” to the giant. In the same way, Earth is “attracted” to the sun because the planet is “falling” into the well in space-time created by the much more massive star.

All this makes sense--sort of. Einstein’s theory of general relativity works uncannily well in predicting how things move in the cosmos. Still, it’s hard to wrap your mind around.

Once, many years ago, I confessed to the great MIT physicist Victor Weisskopf that I had trouble visualizing exactly what all this meant. He confessed he felt the same way, and told me the following story:

A peasant asks an engineer to explain how a steam engine works. The engineer draws diagrams of the steam engine and explains in careful detail exactly how the heat from burning coal is transformed into steam and then motion. The peasant nods knowingly, then says: “I understand everything you said perfectly. But where is the horse?”

Then Weisskopf said: “That’s how I feel about general relativity. I don’t know where the horse is.”

Knowing the equations, in other words, doesn’t mean you really understand the concepts behind them.

It’s the horse, for example, that’s tangling up physicists who work on string theory--the idea that the whole of nature is sung by the harmonics of 11-dimensional vibrating strings. The math works out so well that many physicists consider it close to magic. But they don’t know why it works. They don’t know why strings, or why 11 dimensions, or just what the strings are.

That doesn’t mean the theory isn’t right, or at least worth pursuing. Newton, after all, admitted he didn’t understand gravity--something that earned him Einstein’s greatest respect.

“Does this confession weaken [Newton’s theory’s] predictive power?” asks Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser in his delightful book, “The Dancing Universe.”

“Not at all. Contrary to what some people think, scientists don’t have all the answers.”

Gleiser goes on to point out that this ignorance is not a weakness of science, but its major strength. What’s more, total ignorance is surprisingly common--especially for scientists working at the forefront of knowledge.

“The truth of the matter is research is almost always without understanding,” says University of Arizona physicist Johann Rafelski, whose specialty is the physics of the vacuum--or empty space. “Physics doesn’t require someone who’s intelligent. It requires not taking for granted things which are happening around you.”

So go ahead. Dare to be stupid. But beware. Being stupid can be harder than you think.

As Kolb describes the experience: “By its very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of ignorance. Viewed from a safe distance from the knowledge side, the edge looks clean and smooth, but when examined close up from the ignorance side, the edge seems dirty, ragged, raw. Many who have visited the raw edge of ignorance have been cut and bloodied by the experience.”