Chance and mystery

If I could gauge our attitude toward finding things out in Nature, I would make a survey and ask people two questions: One, what are your top 10 favorite words in the English language and in Pilipino? Second, what are the top 10 things you are most curious about Nature? I thought about these questions because I happened to have come across two materials sharing a space in my desk, which I think share a connection that lies at the heart of the human motivation for scientific discovery. Language is at the heart of human consciousness and curiosity is in that of science. To know something about these two questions will perhaps tell me something about a specific group’s temperament for discovery. One article is from a BBC program entitled "The Serendipity of Science" by BBC science writer Simon Singh that talked about the role of chance and the element of surprise in scientific discoveries. The other is a book called "101 things you don’t know about science and no one does either" by James Trefil (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston and NY, 1996). From only these materials, one may get the impression that discoveries in science depend on chance and that even if one discovers as much as we can, there are some things that, despite our Herculean efforts to know, we will forever be in the dark about many things and judging from Trefil’s topics, very important things about Nature.

If Filipinos were asked what their favorite word is, either in the English language or in the vernacular, I wonder what would be on top of our list. I read that in Britain, a nation noted for its love of the written word, in the tradition of Shakespeare as well as its heritage of scientific culture heralded by Sir Isaac Newton, the winning word was "serendipity." This apparently was what inspired BBC writer Simon Singh to do a series of programs that illustrated how "serendipity" played a role in some great discoveries in science. "Serendipity" is chancing upon a discovery quite by accident, when you are not consciously seeking it or are actually trying to find out something else. A fellow named Horace Walpole coined the term almost a quarter of a century ago. Interesting where he got the word. He read an Arabian tale called the Princes of Serendip ("Serendip" is supposedly the older name of "Ceylon" or now Sri Lanka). These princes were apparently like your fairy tale version of those Discovery channel features where the "hosts" or the "feature scientists" start out by just being infinitely curious characters – curious about the world and how it works. Singh’s article included the story of Charles Goodyear’s accidental dropping of a piece of rubber on a stove which led to the discovery of the process of vulcanization which saves us from buying new tires when a flat one can be rescued using such a process. One of my favorite solutions to everything in life is "superglue" or "crazy glue" and I was happy to find out from Singh that a chemist named Harry Coover discovered this right after some of his lab tools got really stuck to a polymer he was working on. Now, my mother can blame Coover for my fascination and intuitive reliance on superglue when it comes to bonding anything together in my life. Even the gas ethylene as an early form of anesthetic was discovered in some plant show in Chicago where the growers were complaining what was keeping their flowers from blooming. It turned out that ethylene, used to light up the greenhouses, was the guilty gas. And what a surprise that Viagra was discovered serendipitously when it was being tested as a possible treatment for angina. And we all know what happened there. I am quite certain that many relieved tigers and rhinos who used to be hunted to "sacrifice" their reproductive organs to service humans who believed in their aphrodisiac powers, thank the Pfizer princes of Serendip for that discovery. But with all these serendipitous discoveries, even if initially escorted by chance, they still required that one paid careful attention and pursued investigation vigorously before they could be science.

On the other hand, Trefil’s "101 things you don’t know about science and no one does either" are fundamental, deep curiosities about the world. It includes stand-alone essays on science topics ranging from physics, molecular biology, human evolution, Earth sciences, astronomy and cosmology to medicine, human evolution and technology. The top 10 problems in science he enumerated came from a scientist’s viewpoint and these were: Why is there something instead of nothing? Is there a future for gene therapy? Will we ever understand consciousness? Why do we age? How much of human behavior depends on genes? How did life begin? Can we monitor the living brain? Are viruses going to get us all? When will we have designer drugs? Is there a theory of everything and can we afford to find it?

The title of Trefil’s book is quite misleading as science is not a done deal and therefore, would always have a line-up of questions that we humans, scientists or lay, will always be wanting to find out for our own satisfaction, for the sake of "discovery" or to serve some real purpose in our lives. Despite the seeming arrogance and the intimidating technical details of scientific accomplishments, our knowledge of Nature is far from complete and in the hearts of many scientists, they would always be wishing that not everything be discovered. But even if so, science is a quest for "how’s" and "what’s" so that I suspect that even if we discover the complete set of mechanisms by which the universe and life work, we still would be left to ask "why." Why are we here to be part of it, witness it and observe it? And "why" was among the favorite words that figured in the British survey.

Chance and mystery. Physical laws can explain how the universe expands, how our solar system is held together, how our Earth spins, how life on Earth thrives, how our bodies live without our having to be in direct control over any of these things and processes. However, we are still left with uncertainty as to "why" all these things work the way they do. But the beauty of it all and the gratitude we all feel to be here, to be part of it, forever yearning to quest, are for me overwhelming enough and will gladly embrace chance and mystery as part of the beauty.

* * *

For comments, e-mail [email protected].