Second-level students are showing declining interest in science subjects, particularly chemistry and physics. This coin cides oddly with a booming economy dependent on science-based technology. Unless this trend is reversed, there will be a strangling shortage of scientists and engineers in the near future. Nervous efforts are afoot to attract more students into science. The only effective way, in the longer term, to get people into science is to convince them that it is intrinsically satisfying.
There will probably never be a shortage of young people interested in becoming pilots or doctors, even if salaries declined significantly from present levels. These careers are seen to be intrinsically satisfying, offering excitement and glamour (pilot), and status plus opportunity to help the ill (medicine). Science doesn't have such a powerful appeal for young people - in fact, it may present a forbidding face.
An important factor in attracting people to any career is the prospect of secure and well-paid employment. Science does not register in people's minds nearly as well as it should on this barometer. The general perception is that the fast lanes to "big bucks" lie in the business/financial and information-technology sectors and that while jobs are available for biologists, chemists and physicists, they are not plentiful and the pay is modest. Employers will have to put more effort into marketing science jobs and offer better salaries to counteract this impression.
The third-level sector also will have to restructure the outdated and inflexible career paths available to its scientists if it hopes to attract and retain top class people.
Is science perceived to be as intrinsically attractive as it could/should be? I think not. All too commonly, science comes across as a stern, patrician affair consisting entirely of dry rational analysis. Research is done by studying existing knowledge of a problem, forming a hypothesis as to the solution, carrying out experiments to test the hypothesis and making smooth deductions based on the experimental results.
Scientists present their findings dryly, avoiding hype and overstatement. All very worthy of course, but there seems to be no scope here for emotional or sensual experience. Presented like this, science has a sort of inhuman air. This perception of science is false. There is scope in science for emotion, inspiration, insight, intuition and sensual experience. In fact, the exercise of these capacities is important for sustained high quality research. A brief perusal of the lives of well-known scientists illustrates my point.
Take something as basically sensual as music. Many great scientists have found music extremely helpful. Einstein loved to play his violin. The great French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) worked best to the sound of music. The American chemist Charles Martin Hall (1853-1914) was a fine pianist and whenever he encountered a difficult chemical problem, he played the piano to think more clearly.
Some scientists find music so stimulating that they have to treat it with care. In later life, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) found concerts painfully stimulating because they set his mind off into "too rapid perambulations".
THE intellect doesn't function in a vacuum but in a whole person. The process of understanding is not purely intellectual but is also sensual. Insight is normally accompanied by physical and emotional feelings. In general therefore science thrives best in the sensitive and emotional mind.
The best science comes from a combination of an analytical mind and an aesthetic sensitivity. The mathematician and poet Jacob Bronow ski (1908-1974) said: "It may be odd to claim the same personal engagement for the scientist as for the artist, yet in this the scientist stands to the technician as the artist stands to the craftsman." The hypothesis is a basic building block of the scientific method and calls for a good imagination, i.e. the ability to account for existing facts in a novel way that might provide a solution to the problem under investigation.
The results of subsequent experiment then either support or destroy the hypothesis.
The physicist-philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) describes the beginning of understanding as an act of imagination in which one projects oneself into the object of study. The most famous examples of this are the "thought experiments" of Albert Einstein (1879-1955), in which he carried out experiments in his mind, often with an image of himself participating in the experiment. For example, in developing his special theory of relativity, Einstein pictured how the universe would look to him if he rode through it on a beam of light.
Many famous scientists have employed this general device of mental projection, for example the Nobel Prize-winning plant geneticist Barbara McClintock (1902-1992). The German chemist Friedrich Kekule (1820-1896) correctly visualised the structure of several organic molecules (e.g. benzene and methane) for the first time in his dreams, and it is surely no coincidence that so many famous scientists have also been gifted in literature, e.g. Claude Bernard (1813-1878), musically, artistically or athletically. Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) was a fine athlete and Neils Bohr (1885-1962) played soccer for Denmark.
The traditional third-level scientific training, concentrating exclusively on science, may not be the optimum way. It might be better to develop a system that, while concentrating mainly on science, also offers a range of minor options from the arts and humanities.
William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry and director of microscopy at UCC.
Correction: Last week's article contained an error in the third-last paragraph where it stated that "the four limbs of the human, crocodile, dog and flying fox all share a basic structural design with a horse". Four limbs should read forelimbs and the words "with a horse" should not appear.