{"id":2663,"date":"2016-06-08T17:12:19","date_gmt":"2016-06-09T00:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/?p=2663"},"modified":"2016-06-08T17:12:19","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T00:12:19","slug":"scientist-as-storyteller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/2016\/06\/scientist-as-storyteller\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientist as storyteller"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chemists are storytellers out of necessity. A friend of mine just sent\u00a0me an article\u00a0that he wrote (and has gotten\u00a0approved\u00a0for publication). It\u00a0begins, “One of the main problems for student comprehension of chemistry is that atoms and molecules are invisible entities.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

‘Invisibility’ imposes a very steep price on chemical knowledge. My friend didn’t say that atoms and\u00a0molecules are hard to see<\/em>, nor did he say that they can\u00a0only be seen with the aid of special equipment<\/em>. He says they are beyond<\/em> seeing. This means that any thoughts you or I might have about the\u00a0appearance<\/em> of atoms and molecules (what size are they? what shape are they? what holds them together? and so on …) are, at best,\u00a0stories<\/span>, the creative products of our fertile imaginations.<\/p>\n

These thoughts came to mind today when I read a review of Frans de Waal<\/strong>‘s recent book,\u00a0Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?<\/em><\/strong> (“Animal Acumen”<\/strong><\/a>, Science, 29 Apr 2016). The reviewer, Nicola Clayton<\/strong>, describes the\u00a0book by saying,<\/p>\n

… de Waal explores whether our mode of investigating animal cognition is inherently biased against manifestations of intelligence that are decidedly nonhumanlike.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What creates this ‘inherent bias’? Perhaps the problem is\u00a0nothing more than our limited abilities as storytellers. The stories we are most likely to tell ourselves about cognition\u00a0(and also about atoms & molecules) are necessarily constructed from\u00a0our own mental habits and experiences, and the latter may not be terribly useful when applied to other realms.<\/p>\n

Storytelling, whether it takes the form of words or the form of mathematical equations, is pervasive in science. Clayton quotes Werner Heisenberg<\/strong>, the inventor of the famous Uncertainty Principle, from “Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science”<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

“what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To which one could add,\u00a0and scientific\u00a0accounts<\/span> of these observations, whether they be mere descriptions or unifying theories, are, in fact, nothing more than\u00a0<\/em>stories<\/span> that reflect the orientation and limitations of our ‘methods of questioning.’<\/em><\/p>\n

‘Storytelling’ is one of my favorite ways to think about\u00a0science, and also about science instruction. A beginning student (we might as well\u00a0say ‘beginning scientist’ because\u00a0a scientist remains a student) is someone who, by definition, knows very few stories about the field in question. The beginner’s imagination can run wild. The advanced student or expert, on the other hand, is someone who has mastered a large number of\u00a0stories, and can employ them to solve problems, design experiments, and\u00a0weave new, scientifically plausible, stories.<\/p>\n

You could\u00a0ask, which is better, having an unfettered imagination or having a deep mastery of stories, but both have something to offer. From\u00a0a ‘storytelling’ perspective, the learning of science is, at least initially, the gradual accumulation of stories, but learning also requires the\u00a0practice of storytelling<\/em>. Story\u00a0telling<\/em>\u00a0complements \u00a0story learning<\/em> because to solve a problem, or design an experiment, a student (scientist) must be able to identify\u00a0the appropriate story and tell it in an appropriate way. Moreover, the advancement of science requires the\u00a0telling<\/em>\u00a0of new stories. We can succeed in this only if we have practiced storytelling and loosening whatever\u00a0constraints our ‘education’ may have imposed on our imaginations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chemists are storytellers out of necessity. A friend of mine just sent\u00a0me an article\u00a0that he wrote (and has gotten\u00a0approved\u00a0for publication). It\u00a0begins, “One of the main problems for student comprehension of chemistry is that atoms and molecules are invisible entities.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2663"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2670,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2663\/revisions\/2670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/alan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}