COLUMN: Confirming my sense of wonder

From Amanda Bergson-Shilcock's, "A Few Good Words," Fall '99 From Amanda Bergson-Shilcock's, "A Few Good Words," Fall '99The conventional wisdom is that science is and should be rational, logical and non-spiritual. We think of science as having solid answers, right and wrong. While historians can hold different views about the causes of the Civil War, scientists' debates are supposed to be not only scholarly and precise but based on fact. When I registered for Geology for non-majors, a course known half-affectionately and half-derisively as "Rocks for Jocks," I was hoping to do more than slouch in the back of the room and fill out the crossword puzzle. Initially, there was a cascade of minerals and rocks to learn about. Even though we actually had the physical rocks in front of us, we still had to memorize a long list of names and chemical compositions. I was not inspired. After a few weeks the dust began to settle into somewhat comprehensible patterns. Words like "granitic" and "porphyritic" were absorbed into my vocabulary. Studying mica schist jogged memories of childhood expeditions with my uncle the science buff. The class felt less overwhelming. Late one Tuesday night, I was heading out of Hayden Hall, as usual moving at a fast trot toward 30th Street Station and my homebound train. The lights shone off of the sidewalk and small bits of mica gleamed. I stopped, suddenly struck. I had words for this! It's a conglomerate, I thought, all those stones mixed together into the larger blocks that make up a sidewalk. No, it's not; a sidewalk is a human construction, not the natural result of geologic activity. It didn't matter. That moment under the streetlights was not about my new terminology so much as something much less superficial: a new skew to my vision of the planet. After that I noticed rocks and stone and pavement everywhere. I imagined what was going on under my feet. Bubbling magma about to erupt as a volcano? Earthquake-generating tension building in faults as plates went slipping and sliding past each other? Okay, maybe not in Pennsylvania. Practicalities began to make sense. Why would you build a house on top of a limestone cave (sinkhole) or next to a river (flood plain)? Those islands of plants strategically placed in the way of traffic in parking lots were also much more comprehensible once I knew that they absorb rainwater and prevent runoff problems. But I was really energized by the concept of our stable continents drifting around and slamming into each other in a slow ballet of collision and rebirth. Our whole east-coast cultural tradition of going "down the Shore" was indirectly influenced by the mundane-sounding continental shelf! Other classes have offered similar insights. Astronomy stretched my ability to conceive of space and heat. I could memorize the formula for computing the temperature of a star, but that wasn't the same as genuinely understanding that amount of energy. I could write an answer to a question about measuring distances in space, but it was harder to visualize how long it would really take to cross the Milky Way. Astronomy didn't have an "Aha!" moment, but I slowly grew beyond my baby-sized solar system. There was more out there than the nine planets I'd learned about as a kid. The constellations my uncle had so patiently pointed out for me were part of something so gigantic as to almost defy understanding. Science offered one other jolt, and it had to do with time. Most of my courses had concerned the last two hundred years of human history -- 500 if we were really going back. In scientific terms 500 years was a blink, a nanosecond in conceptual time. "It cools quickly," my Geology professor said, and "quickly" meant 100,000 years. "Bipedalism is a recent phenomenon," my Anthropology instructor said, and "recent" might mean 2 million years. As a student, I gravitated toward the humanities because I trust ambiguity more than fixed answers. The comfort of gray areas drew me to fields like Sociology and there I searched for insight into the big picture. But it was in science classes, in the midst of careful calculations and precise language, that I found respect for the unexplainable.