Today, thoughts on trying to explain entropy,
music, and football. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
My wife and I are enjoying
supper in a restaurant, surrounded by tanks of
brilliant, colorful fish. I savor the food and I
savor the sight. I know neither the recipe for the
sauce nor the genus of the fish. My knowledge is
purely sensate.
We talk about a fine choral concert the night
before. Between sections, singers came out and read
program notes. They drove me to distraction by
explaining the music. The sound was wonderful. It
was all-in-all of itself, and I was overpowered by
a craving to stay centered in the sensate joy of
it. The meaning of a cantus firmus melody line,
woven into renaissance polyphony -- egging it on
and defining it -- does not lie in explanations.
Yet we've become a nation of explainers and
explainees. How can anyone bear to watch football
with the sound on? Ice-skating is an art which,
like ballet, combines movement and music. But
television won't let you experience it without a
running thread of explanation -- drowning out the
music and breaking the flow of motion into analyzed
axels and lutzes.
Today, we ask why scientific illiteracy rises so
alarmingly. An answer dawned on me in that
restaurant: The more scientific illiteracy we see,
the harder we try to cure the problem with
explanations. The trouble is, an understanding of
science does not -- and never can -- come from
explanation.
Understanding a cantus firmus line in music comes
from hearing it. An understanding of that fine
sauce on my fish could not have come from a recipe
book. Good English is not forged in explanations of
the grammar it's based upon.
It is a mind-set, not an explainable set of
principles that makes a scientist. It is taking
pleasure in questions and finding, within yourself,
the resources to answer them. Science is mental
awareness. It is the confidence to distrust
explanation. The more we reduce science teaching to
a set of explanations, the worse we sabotage
understanding.
Years ago two teachers explained entropy to me. One
said, "Entropy has no meaning. It's just a tool for
arranging thermodynamic tables." The other said,
"Entropy is an index of the order of the disunity
of the universe." Neither explanation was worth
anything by itself. But the tension raised in my
mind by the two taken together made a
thermodynamicist of me.
Science is a process that only has value where
knowledge doesn't yet exist -- where there is no
explanation. By putting endless explanations at the
center of science education, we deny students the
very process, the very soul, the cantus firmus
without which -- there is no science.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
