Why study science?
Michael West
Artists are oddly insecure about science. John Keats lamented its ability to “unweave the rainbow”, and Walt Whitman urged us to ignore “the learn'd astronomer” and instead just look at the stars. Implicit in these lines is the idea that science is dry and dusty, the province of charts and equations that strip the beauty from nature, to be dissected and locked away in glass cases. Given the steady decline in science enrolments around the world, this view seems to have caught on. But nothing could be further from the truth. Science offers a rare blend of intellectual elegance, civic contribution, and economic benefit. Far more than just dreary repetition, science “needs the free play of the mind in as great a degree as any other creative art”, in the words of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born. It is one of humanity's greatest academic achievements, and students should take the opportunity to be a part of it.
Importantly, this intellectual endeavour also leads to practical outcomes. Science takes the poetry of discovery and adds the prose of implementation. In fact, our lives depend on the fruits of research. From the fertilisers that nourish our crops, to the medicines that save us from polio and smallpox and countless other afflictions of bygone eras, no part of the modern world is untouched by science. But we are certainly not out of the woods yet, with overstretched resources, a potentially hostile climate, and a host of threatening diseases that still plague us. These immense challenges can only be met by the determined application of scientific knowledge. The work of artists might bring some temporary happiness to the impoverished, but it cannot fill their stomachs or cure their sick children. We need more bright young people to study science, so that their enthusiasm can be harnessed to its tools of genuine transformational ability.
Technology is also the engine powering our economy, and Australia's dwindling supply of scientists and engineers is a serious risk to our global competitiveness. Studies for the OECD show that scientific research and development accounts for about half of all GDP growth and two-thirds of productivity growth. Sometimes this has led to fear, the so-called Luddite view that science inevitably brings a bleak future of unemployment as artisans are replaced by soulless automation. But this is disappointing superstition; actually, net job growth occurs, as employers increase productivity with the same workforce instead of reducing staff numbers. Moreover, high-tech industries pay the highest wages. Even basic research, seemingly remote from the world of business, often spawns new fields of enterprise. Quantum theory brought the transistor and thus the computer, while investigations of a particular tiny worm have been crucial to the development of genetic engineering. Science underpins prosperity, and will continue to do so; but a reliable supply of science students is vital.
Finally, science should be studied because it prioritises a search for truth over a proliferation of opinions. Scholars in the humanities construct theories and counter-theories, generating complex ecosystems of debate that may be entirely divorced from reality and supported only by intricate arguments, not facts. Sadly, they are often little more than rickety scaffolds of ink and ideology. Where science builds similar edifices of abstract thought, they are always anchored to the bedrock of reality by experiment. A theory that does not make testable predictions remains merely an intellectual curiosity, unable to claim any privilege over dozens of other equally valid hypotheses. Science may be complex and specific, and sometimes inaccessible to the public, but it represents our best representation of the truth about the world around us.
Despite science's clear strengths, few scientists would advocate its study taking place to the utter exclusion of the arts. It is not a case of scientists looking down on artists in a sort of intellectual apartheid. Indeed, the plea of C.P. Snow in his famous 1959 "Two Cultures" speech at Cambridge was for a greater connection between the arts and science communities. Educated citizens, he thought, should understand as much of thermodynamics as they do of Shakespeare. But presently, that equality does not exist, and because they directly address the human condition, the arts are often seen as more relevant to our lives than science. In a world ever more dependent on technology, that is emphatically not true. There is room for both the dreaming spire and the gleaming laboratory, but in this century we will need more science more than ever, and that is why we should study it.