364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure

**Sean Carroll** (0:00)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things that I often rant about a little bit, when I'm talking about science education, how we teach science in elementary school, secondary school, undergraduates. I do try to say I'm not an expert on the field of science education, and I do think that experts deserve a voice here. So I have a limited set of things that I'm willing to rant about. But one of them is that we sort of teach the product of science and not the process of science. As we'll talk about in today's podcast, our guest today is Stuart Firestein, and he brings up a good analogy. It's like you're teaching a history course. Imagine you have an art course in your secondary school, in your high school or whatever, and all they do is show you works of fine art. They don't actually teach you how to paint in your art course, right? Imagine you were trying to learn piano, and your piano teacher just showed you a bunch of, or made you listen to a bunch of beautiful piano solos. You're not being taught the process of doing it in the science courses that we teach. You're given facts, F equals MA.
Here are the different kinds of rocks. Here is the way that natural selection happens or whatever, and then you're tested on your knowledge of the facts.
But the process of doing science is so different than that. And I do think that our inability to get across the process, even if people aren't going to grow up to be scientists, has led to a real public misunderstanding of how science works.
Science is not about facts. You know, facts are the output. That's true. But we have along the way a whole bunch of ignorance and failure and things we don't know the answer to. And it's important to appreciate both what we have learned and what we have not yet learned. Because it's not just random. It's not like, oh, we don't know anything, anything could happen. We know a lot. There's a lot that we don't know. And that structured ignorance that we're trying to uncover the facts hidden amongst is what science is all about. And, you know, different people, philosophers and historians and whatever, will have specific, much more careful and detailed ideas about the process of how science works. And that's great. But I do think that we should try to get that process across to a broader audience much more effectively. And today's guest, Stuart Firestein, as advertised, has been really active in trying to do exactly that. Stuart has been for a long time a successful biologist. He was chair of the biology department at Columbia, working on neuroscience and olfaction, how you smell things.
But in the last few years, he's really become really energized in getting people to understand that science is this process that involves a lot of failure. So he has a book on ignorance, he has a book on failure, he has a book most recently, the most recent book is called It Could Be Otherwise, Science In the Age of Uncertainty. And in fact, this book is basically an encapsulation of the mindscape motto that if you ask a physics question beginning with is it possible that, the answer will always be yes. And that is what Stuart is saying. He's investigating the idea that there's a lot of things that are possible outside what we know, right? And sort of knowns, unknown, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns distinction becomes very important here. So we're going to have a conversation, sort of an informal, rollicking conversation about failure and ignorance and possibility and how these concepts are really, really important for how science is done. It would be nice if everyone in the world understood that that's how science is done. And that doesn't mean that anything goes. Some things don't go, but a lot of things go. So let's go.
Stuart Firestein, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

**Stuart Firestein** (4:16)
Well, thanks for having me. It's my pleasure to be here.

**Sean Carroll** (4:19)
I think the audience should know that, you know, we're friends. We've met before. And as we were organizing the podcast, Stuart said, as a joke, I hope we're going to have martinis during this podcast. And I said, with dead seriousness, yes, that sounds like a great idea. So here we are. The audience can't see. But here's to you, Stuart. Cheers.
It could be like, this could be a going thing. Like I'll be thinking, wow, this is going to be a two martini podcast someday. But this will just be a one.