Chasing the Light: The Passion of Science
During the cold war I had Russian friends. My playmates were from all over the world and spoke all kinds of languages. Their parents had come to the U.S. to work on international collaborations at a lab called “Fermilab” after the physicist Enrico Fermi. It was a culture of old Volvos, homemade natural foods, wooden block toys and unkempt hair. Anyone who thinks scientists are stuffy haven’t met the kinds of people I was around as a kid, or spent 18 minutes with Clifford Stoll.
When I first met engineers, and expected them to think like me, I was baffled to discover that they seemed to lack the fundamental curiosity about the world that has resulted in the thrilling death of any number of scientists. I found myself having to explain the basics of how an internal combustion engine worked to an engineering student. This is a guy who drove around in a car every day of his life and, absolutely baffling to me, didn’t seem to care about what made it move! Not only was he uninterested in what I had to say, he was, in fact, in engineering because he hoped to one day design cars. He assured me that he probably knew how to do the math behind it.
Ultimately, the people who most closely resemble scientists are, in fact, artists. Perhaps it’s a mad drive to find beauty through understanding. One half looks at atoms or sheep genes and the other at human souls, but both willingly give up basic comforts to chase that flickering light into the swamp. Fermilab reflected this. The buildings always had a little flair about them, with big orange circles and bright blue posts. There were sculpture exhibits and musical performances. The high rise itself sat at the core, with its arcing sides easing up into the sky and atrium filled with plants and a massive pendulum. Any opportunity was taken to bring in a starving artist and enthusiastically hand them a big pile of leftover pipe scrap and a welder, asking them, “what can you do with this?!” “Can you make it sing when the wind passes through it?!”
In the last few years the winds of change have blown from under our current President’s desk to drift across the land, stifling creativity and innovation wherever the noxious cloud passes. Cutting funding for the arts is obvious enough for a republican, but it seems to go hand in hand with cutting funds for pure science. University and research labs in a wide range of disciplines across the country are struggling. The crazy dancers and biologists and musicians and physicists I love are being pushed away and spread into other countries overseas. I’m not sure a new administration will be able to act fast enough to change this, and maybe it’s not a bad thing. America had its time, and now the rest of the world will have a chance to share the light of innovation brought on by encouraging the unfettered searching by these curious humans.
Related posts:
Comments
Leave a comment Trackback