A sense of wonder does not come from a specific way of seeing the world; it comes from your ability to shift whatever way you have of seeing the world.
Children don’t yet have a fixed world view, they shift it all the time, so they wonder a lot. And they love science. A chemistry set is an evergreen present; looking at a flea through the lens of a toy microscope never did any harm to anyone’s sense of wonder.
We won’t even try to set aside the blinkers. Rather, we will learn how to make a thousand of them, all different from one another, so we can look at the world in a thousand different ways, and continuously rejuvenate our world view, like immortal jellyfish. Good science helps us with that.
*
When science erupted on to the scene, it came with punk-rock braggadocio. It wanted to unblock tunnels with loud explosions, be loud and brazen. It was born as a reaction to the dominant mode of thought, that said that any person worth their salt was supposed to do little else than obey their betters and admire God’s work. In a different way from our own, the world into which science came was disenchanted: nothing new was to be discovered, nothing new was to be understood. ‘And there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon’, to use Shakespeare’s words. Miracles and prodigies could show you the greatness of God, but then, you already knew God was great. Miracles were not meant to rock your world, but to confirm its ultimate nature.
The early scientists – Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo – mostly believed in God, and yet they said, look, we can lift the lid off His cauldron and look inside. They were not casting themselves as enemies of spirituality. Their faith was much more than perfunctory: Isaac Newton devoted his last years to biblical scholarship. They were rejuvenating spirituality, seeking to remove blinkers that were preventing people from seeing the full glory of God’s creation.
Then as today, though, scientists also needed something less elevated than enthusiasm and courage: they needed hard cash. They had to convince wealthy patrons to finance their research, and, as a rule, wealthy patrons wanted something back. Scientists started arguing that their research was principally useful, that it created things of practical benefit – like better weapons, for example. The strategy worked all too well, and too many people (unfortunately, even some scientists among them) started believing in the delusional idea that science must be for something. Science came to be valued for the technology it helped to produce, and for the money it helped to make. Before you knew it, science and capitalism were marching in step. Science existed in order to make things in order to make money. Human beings existed in order to make things in order to make money.
This was exactly the kind of ‘philosophy’ that John Keats was denouncing in ‘Lamia’. And with good reason: if science’s only job was to cleanse the mines of gnomes so as to make miners work harder, science would be indeed a force of despair. But science is a way of seeing the world, and while at its worst it is cold and disenchanting, it is at its best exactly the opposite.
To the best kind of scientist, the world is forever full of questions, and the scientific method is a way to scramble for temporary answers. As the writer Philip Ball puts it, science began when philosophers started asking questions about things that had until then seemed entirely obvious9 – such as the revolution of the Sun around the Earth. Scientists were mocked by those who had far too much common sense to entertain such fanciful theories (the definition of common sense changes, the unquestioning certainty of its enforcers does not).
The difficulty lies in that the blinkers you have been wearing have come to define what the world is for you. You only see other people, the planet, the universe, elephants and jellyfish, as filtered through those blinkers. Your entire life experience has been shaped by looking through those blinkers, and you see only those things that they allow you to see. If you had never seen a giraffe, never read about a giraffe, and never talked to anyone who has seen a giraffe, it would be virtually impossible for you to realize just what long-necked splendours you were missing. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Early scientists understood this problem. The remarkable thing they did, the thing that changed history, was to find a quite elegant, simple solution. It goes like this: when you are in doubt, ask questions, and when you are not in doubt, ask questions anyway. (Yes, I know, witches taught us precisely the opposite lesson; but please, trust me for now and we’ll get there.)
If you found yourself in a completely dark room, you would, naturally, wish to find the exit. You would grope your way around, not expecting to encounter anything specific but preparing yourself to negotiate whatever you might stumble upon. The same goes for scientific questions. Because we don’t know what it is that our blinkers are hiding, we question everything without fear of appearing naive. With this simple move, the tremendous strangeness of the world reveals itself again.
Let me provide an example.
*
Let’s look at a word: dog.
OK? Good.
The word evoked an image in your mind. You automatically associated the word with the image, even though, when you think about it, in and of itself the word does not ‘mean’ the image. It does not mean a thing. Words are shapes made of straight and curvy lines. They do not ‘communicate’ by means of some special, intuitively graspable power; they are doodles.
Words have meanings because you and I decided that some specific doodles are not doodles at all, but ‘letters’ that represent units of spoken sound. We also decided we can assemble these letters to form larger doodles that we call ‘words’; and we decided that ‘words’ represent objects, memories, experiences of beauty and of sorrow.
Your mind translated the doodle ‘dog’ into its meaning, ‘a diverse range of four-legged animals with a bizarre love for, and loyalty towards, Homo sapiens’. But try looking at the word itself, as a series of scribbles on paper or screen, without immediately rushing to translate it into a mental image. I will type the word here again, so that you don’t have to search for it: dog. Now, try to look at it as a meaningless doodle.
It is hard, isn’t it? The meaning of the simplest word is something that we create, but once we have created it, it binds us. The moment your eyes rest on the doodle-dog, images of canines start crowding your mind.
Everything we know (about the world and ourselves) is like this. Every piece of knowledge we have only exists within an immensely sophisticated network of rules. Within these networks, what we know seems obvious, banal, even. But only when we accept the rules without question.
By contrast, when we look at things in close-up, what we thought we knew becomes out-and-out strange: a simple action like reading a word reveals endless layers of complexity (in our lightning-quick tour around the meaning of the word ‘dog’, we did not touch on the question of how words sound). Get close enough to a solid-looking wall, and you will find that a wall is not actually as solid as it looks. Look closely at a crow (yes, the glossy black bird of the family Corvidae), and you will see that it knows how to use tools. Look at trees as closely as a dendrologist does, and you discover that they communicate with each other using an ‘internet’ of underground networks of fungus. All is strange. The world has always been, and ever will be, the ultimate Wunderkammer.