8 Words: Reframing Science

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms."


- Muriel Rukeyser


Wow! This is poetry at its finest.

In a single line, Ms. Rukeyser re-examines a whole framework of reality that provides the intellectual terra firma of our modern age.

These 8 words do a better job of defining what the postmodern take on the world is than all of the books sitting on library shelves gathering dust while everyone sits on the couch watching National Geographic Explorer present the scientific history of the Earth.

For those out there without a sense of irony, I'm not making fun of National Geographic. I happen to think that Explorer, for example, is often one of the most playful and engaging shows on television. I'm commenting on the interesting inversion that we watch a television show which tells us a story, thinking that we are learning fact. It's not facts which catch our attention; it's the next level of cognition which works that magic. We watch those shows enthralled by the magnitude of the story. The drama of a planet's coming of age, after all, should resonate with us on some primal level and cause us to rethink our human tendency to get carried away with our negotiation for position with the natural forces which surround us throughout the days and nights of our lives.

Throughout our education, we get really caught up trying to define the facts of our worlds. For example, those worksheets we worked through during 8th grade designed to teach us to differentiate facts from opinions really dug in deeply to the back of our minds. We spent our evenings after piano lesson, ballet, or football (take your pick) pouring over those worksheets trying to learn how to identify which was which. Stripping away the obvious programming of dialectical bias for a moment: when we unlocked the fact/opinion secret, we figured out that the only really solid way to classify each statement was to look at the way the concept was presented at a grammatical level.

Facts look like: The Earth is a planet, which revolves around the Sun.
Opinions look like: I experience the Sun as a ball of fire which rises in the morning and sets in the evening.

Right?
Wrong!

There are no facts. There are only stories. Every idea which we cherish as a fact is nothing more than a story, a summation of best guesses by our scientists. I can say this; I'm part of the club. Science doesn't try to define what things are. Instead, it uses all of its analytical energy to define what things are NOT. 

Science, once it defines what something is not, tries to weave the little points of data that don't and can't be used to define it as something we've already labelled into a fabric, a theory, an attempt to explain a Positivist or Post-Positivist reality. The challenging point, though, is that these theories are really nothing more than a bunch of stories, albeit some really interesting and often complex stories.

Speaking of stories, I imagine that the day isn't too far off (if it hasn't already arrived) on which we will see the "fact" statement that the Earth revolves around the Sun as a quaint perspective indicative of 20th century thought prevalent throughout human society, a nice narrative expressing the consciousness of human beings at this point in time.

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms."

Muriel Rukeyser is making a powerful point that, once we work through all of the data, we are left with a deeply beautiful human need to make sense of what we have perceived.

Whether we make our careers creating enlightening academic courses or crafting beautiful marble countertops for luxury kitchens, we all have moments in our lives where we are left struggling to try to glue together the fragments of our lives, our experiences, and the hopes and dreams of those who love us. And the beautiful patchwork which we piece together is the proud story of our moment on the Earth. We tell this story over and over to find the value we produce, to identify our comfort zones, to plan our next action and ensure that it fits in with the pieces already present in our puzzle. Our story provides a map we use to navigate the unexplainable data points which populate our lives. This capactiy to make stories may even be the defining capacity for our human consciousness. We can certainly say that our capacity to develop tools and our consciousness, our self-awareness, are no longer the defining traits. These are stories which have outlived their welcome.

Why would anyone think that we, as scientists, are different and don't share this need to make stories to deal with the deeply challenging data sets which we are confronted by everyday?

Sure, we analyze a lot of data pulled from random samples and weed out possible confounding variables in an effort to ensure that we are really looking at what things seem to be and how they inter-relate. Again, in the end, we end up with data which we communicate in the language of narrative, of stories.

As a final thought, I want to send a shout-out to my scientist brothers and sisters. There is  one deeply courageous quality which we all share that most of our brother man don't recognize: We are required by the tenets of our scientific discipline to be ready, at any moment, to abandon our theories, our stories, our cherished beliefs in the face of new and overwhelming evidence which provides a better, simpler, and more elegant narrative to explain the mysteries which dance around us.

This is no easy feat, even for the best of us!

However, because of this belief in a greater cause, we are collaborative storytellers. Sure, we each have our private stories. Yet, we spend the days of our lives putting the great collaborative story of human knowledge ahead of our own individual stories. Together we build a legacy that's more about showing the future of humanity how individuals can put aside differences in the spirit of working on a body of knowledge which will be a most important legacy for, rather than truth, our most noble and passionately human pursuit of elegance.

Atoms are important, but mean nothing until perceived as part of an enthralling story unfolding all around and within each and every one of us.

Again, I thank you all for taking the time to muse on a beautiful quote with me.