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I once was on a psuedo-date with an English literature/art history major. She ordered coffee, which arrived without milk. On request she was given one of those irritating plastic mini-cartons of plasticy creamer, but no spoon. As we both watched the clouds in her coffee, I made a comment along the lines of "And so the fight for thermodynamic equilibrium."
Hey, its certainly not the wittiest thing I ever said, but it certainly didn't seem controversial to me. However at this remark the young lady took some exception, and essentially accused me of being unable to see the beauty of the clouds through the fog of my scientific cataracts. I attempted to argue the point, but we parted with me feeling I'd failed to make my case.
Somewhat annoyed at my bumbling efforts to explain myself, I returned home and wrote the mini essay below. In the end the experience of writing it was enough of a catharsis, and I never sent it to her. Heres a slightly de-personalized version:
I remember the day I really came to know ice.
When I was growing up in Malawi (the true heart of black Africa), it was, to somewhat understate the situation, damn hot. Perhaps contrary to most peoples' expectations, we did have a few modern appliances (although often 30 year old versions of them!). In particular, we had a refrigerator and freezer; I did not live in conditions so primitive that I had never experienced ice. Ice was this stuff we put in drinks to make them cold.
When we moved to Australia the quality of our appliances improved. Ice, however, remained merely an aid to cooling down drinks. After five years of living in Queensland, a place one can fairly describe as damn-hot-most-of-the-time, my family took a trip down to New South Wales. It was early summer, I was 17 years old, and I remember almost nothing of the trip except for the following incident. We were driving near the Snowy Mountains, and one of my siblings caught sight of a glistening patch of white near one of the mountain peaks. We clamored for my father to drive us there, and he readily acquiesced. You see, none of us had ever seen snow. Although there is no permanent snow on the Snowy Mountains, a patch had apparently survived summer's initial foray.
The winding mountain road afforded us quasi-periodic glimpses of our goal, and an almost hysterical excitement began to take hold. When we finally arrived at the nearest point reachable by car, we four kids piled out and raced each other the 50 metres or so to the edge of the white patch. I cannot remember exactly what I expected, but I know that I was completely surprised once I got there. For a start, the white stuff wasn't soft fluffy snow, it was actually hard ice - a patch about 80 metres long and 40 metres wide. In our confusion we tried to have a "snowball" fight - it took one thump in the head from a chunk of ice thrown by my cricket-playing brother for me to realise that generations of kids growing up in colder climes were either considerably tougher than I'd ever given them credit for, or Australian snow, like so much else, was considerably hardier than its northern hemisphere counterpart.
What I do remember well is how my conception of "ice" was expanded exponentially by the 30 minutes or so we spent on the ice field. I saw that ice comes in different colours, and it can catch the light in a myriad of different interesting ways. Some of the ice was really slippery and some of it wasn't. And I finally realised that ice was, to somewhat understate the situation, damn cold. Somehow the true coldness of ice was something for which I had developed no intrinsic appreciation.
A few years later I was living in Canada, and I experienced more ice than one might reasonably think is necessary in one person's lifetime. I experienced the beauty of ice crystals and icicles, the hard work of drilling through ice to go ice-fishing, the danger of hitting "black ice" while on a motorcycle, and much more.
Yet another realm of my experiences with ice has to do with its physical and chemical properties. Ice is rather an amazing substance. It assumes a wider variety of crystalline structures than any known material. The unusual fact that ice floats on its liquid form has major implications for life on this planet - as does the fact that the heat required to melt ice is relatively large. This in turn is related to the fact that ice will melt under pressure, something that every glacier needs to get started on its doomed bid for freedom from the mountains. Sudden stress causes ice to fracture, but with gradual stress it can bend. And so on. This realm of my experience with ice is, of course, due to my training as a scientist.
Now, to what extent does my scientific "knowledge" of ice differ from the other experiences which together form the somewhat ethereal conception of "ice" in my mind? Although, superficially, one can quickly list a variety of differences, most of them melt away under a more intense examination. Even those properties I have not directly "put my hands on" in a laboratory I understand only through their relationships with other concepts, observations and experiences - some of which are considered scientific, many of which are not. These in turn I appreciate and understand through a complicated network of relationships to yet further objects, concepts and associated experiences, and it is the ephemeral whole of all these relationships which serve to give me scientific understanding of physical properties. The dichotomy between the things I know from my studies in physics, and the things I know from my "other" experiences is tenuous at best. Science is simply a schema for deepening my understanding and appreciation of this intricate network of relationships, an understanding which cannot be divorced from the personal experiences which I, a 75 kilogram, semi-stable excitation of the electromagnetic field, seek representation for with linguistic constructs such as "ice" .
So here's the crucial question: Is it possible that my scientific appreciation of ice has somehow been to my detriment? I cannot think of circumstances under which one can possibly uphold that argument. When I use the word "ice" in a conversation, I do not, of course, think about all my experiences of ice. Over the years I have internalized an ever broadening set of mental images and remembered senses that I implicitly draw on when I think of, or use, or hear, the word. The word "ice" is a representation of that whole range of my experience. Similarly when I encounter a beautiful snow crystal I do not automatically start thinking about the physical processes by which it was formed, nor, for that matter, do I start thinking about that first experience of an ice field. My appreciation of the beauty of ice is enhanced by the depth of my scientific knowledge, not through some series of dissociated calculations, but because my relationship to the object is one of greater breadth and implicit understanding than it might otherwise be.
Of course I am not the first scientist to confront such sentiment. Famously, the poet John Keats complained that Newton, by explaining the origin of the rainbow in terms of the optical properties of raindrops, had destroyed its beauty:
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -
Unweave a rainbow
During the famous "Immortal Dinner" Keats and Lamb berated Wordsworth for not joining their toast of "Confusion to mathematics and Newton."
It seems such anti-scientific sentiments are somewhat cyclical, and in current post-modernist circles it appears we are at (what I hope is) a peak in such a cycle. It is easy to shrug these opinions off as simply the defensive mechanisms of a group of people who live in fear that they may, in fact, be missing out on something. After all, should I consider seriously the opinion of someone who believes that the truth of scientific laws is a matter of social convention? As tempting as it is to dismiss them as crackpots, these people are responsible for the education of large numbers of humanities students, and that troubles me.
John Keats' last words were "Don't breathe on me, it comes like ice."
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