The Last Word On Nothing

There’s nothing like a stagnating job search to make you question your calling in life. I’ve been staring at the title “science journalist” for a couple of months now, and every time the words look more alien to me. The fact is, though I have a passionate interest in making science accessible to the public – who pay for much of it, after all, and should reap the benefits in understanding – I have to face mounting evidence that science itself is of limited interest to me.

Sacrilege! Who dedicates themselves to a poorly-compensated career in a field they aren’t at least mildly obsessed with? And why, if I’m supposed to be specializing in science am I so jazzed about writing a book on mixed martial arts concurrently with another one on financial psychology? Am I cursed with generalitis?

A rowdy debate down the pub with my dearly beloved cousin Jonathan answered my question in the negative this evening. As with so many interests, mine does not fall in the categorized subject fields of academic departments but rather on a plane cross-sectioning them all at a certain angle. Do bear in mind that I just got back from the pub.

It was one of those discussions that starts with quantum physics poorly understood by both parties and then descends into extensions of those tenuously grasped principles into areas where they just don’t apply. “Why couldn’t my thinking about something change the likelihood of it happening?” he insists. I refuse to cave: “But how is the specific pattern of neural firing that represents your desire to make something happen at all related to the physical objects you’re trying to affect?”

So many of the conversations I have in daily life leave me belabouring the same question: “What’s the mechanism?” Eventually, as stress mounted this evening we agreed to leave it at the last point of agreement, that we don’t know everything yet. That there are things we didn’t know before that would have made the things we know now seem like magic, and that wonders never cease.

My level of adrenaline in these debates does more than make me an argumentative loud-talker. It’s an indication of where my real allegiances lie. Following arguments from logical step to logical flaw has been the source of some of the greatest joy in my life. Sustained rational thought is the basis of a rich inner life.

Giving others the tools to use their own reason, to discipline their own minds, comes as close to a professional drive as I’ve experienced. I do love science, I realize. I love it as an expression of reason. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must send out another résumé.

Image: Office for Emergency Management. War Production Board. circa 1942. (Wikimedia Commons)