So if you fail more often than you succeed, what’s the draw? Well, I guess
Roxy Music explained it best in ‘Love is the Drug.’ Science is exciting and sexy and vital and addictive. Happily, you don’t need to spend several years in indentured servitude in your local research lab/dungeon to fully grasp the beauty of science, or to enjoy reading (or writing) about it. See, one of the things I love about pop music is that everyone is an expert at it. It’s that embedded in the fabric of our everyday lives; it’s that omnipresent. There’s no reason why good writing about science shouldn’t be every bit as strong, immediate and affecting as good writing about pop. Everyone is a science expert to some degree or another: anyone who’s cycled down a steep hill, anyone who’s popped a pill at a club and felt the tingling ecstasy rush, anyone who’s seen something explode on TV, anyone who’s gotten an awful headache from drinking too much cheap wine the night before. You know more about science than you think.
I never understood why science never got the punk-rock treatment. Why kids didn’t stay up late stapling handmade photocopied zines about science. Science changes every day, more often than music does. It’s got its share of rock stars, even – there’s a lineage; there’s the trad, established major-label dudes at the big universities, the indie-hip scientists, the rebellious against-the-grain badasses with unpopular theories. These people were engaging, too, and there’s a definite cult of personality. Anyone who’s spent some time with scientists know that they can be, well, really weird. Not just in the cute way Einstein was weird, with funny hair and riding a bicycle to work and all that. I mean really strange. There was my physics teacher in high school, for instance, who decided one day to rename himself Zarkon, and came to school wearing a vampire outfit (it wasn’t Halloween.) We had to address him as ‘Zarkon the Amazing, Magnificent and Sensitive One’ to ask him a question, or he wouldn’t answer. He was quirky for sure, but the man was a genius, teaching a ragtag crew of teenagers about quarks and gluons, Feynman diagrams, quantum mechanics — topics that high schools generally stay away from in favor of teaching plain-vanilla mechanics, but stuff he felt we were ready for. The stuff of mysteries, the Wonderful and Frightening world of Heisenberg…
Schools tend to teach science in this dull and grey eat-your-vegetables sort of way, as if science wasn’t the coolest thing ever, as if it was some hard-to-follow abstraction, as if it wasn’t a day-to-day experience. Science and technology are more inextricably entwined in your life than most things are. Sometimes a little science can maneuver you out of a tough situation (I once successfully argued myself out of a speeding ticket using Newton’s kinematic equations. It was bullshit mostly, but it worked.) Later on when I taught science to high school students at MIT, I’d emphasize the thrill factor of it. I’d sneak into chemistry labs at the dead of night and, er, ‘borrow’ several liters of liquid nitrogen for use in class. A lesson about air pressure might have involved pouring liquid nitrogen into plastic bottles, closing the lids tight, throwing them into the river, screaming “CLEAR!” — and running off. We’d take apart ancient mechanical devices to see how they worked, and then stitch them back together into grotesque Frankensteinian configurations. I’d give chemistry lectures without using any scientific jargon whatsoever, instead substituting ‘dude’ a lot. Thirteen-year-olds were learning college-level science with few problems. Science is a universal language (I would say math, but that line was ruined by that ‘Contact’ movie!)
I hope you enjoy reading the new Freaky Trigger ‘Proven By Science’ blog, written by a staff of intrepid reporters and expert commentators: we’ve got everyone from mathematics PhD students to music critics to computer scientists to guitarists. This motley group will serve up science, technology, and Internet culture in a way that’s readable, funny, strange, insightful, brainy, and most of all, entertaining. Have fun wading through our weirdness.