 Stewart went to high school with Teller, yeah Teller, from Penn and Teller, we were chatting and he told me that he went to high school with Teller, from Penn and Teller, what are the odds? Probably less than you think. Ladies and gentlemen, Stewart, Firestein. There's a button. Who'd have thought? A button. Thanks very much. It's going to be hard to top that introduction now, isn't it? I'm afraid. This is a wonderful venue to be at. It's my first time here. I can't tell you how pleased I am to be able to speak to an audience like this, and I can't believe a number of people. It's nice to see you all coming out for ignorance, uncertainty, and doubt. You can always use your support. So there's an ancient proverb which says that it's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there's no cat. That seems to me to be a perfectly apt description of science and the scientific way we do things, the way scientists do things, which I think is somewhat different than what many people may feel is the case. I think there's a notion that science is a very ordered progression of events. It's a very rule-based sort of system, something we call, I guess, the scientific method that governs how we do things, and is very orderly and concise way, and we gain facts and we write them down and so forth and so on. But the fact of the matter is, it's mostly kind of farting around in black rooms looking for black cats that may or may not actually be there. And it's this difference, I thought, that occurred to me at some point in the perception of how we do science versus the way we actually pursue it that got me interested in this notion of ignorance, and I wound up writing a book about it, but the book itself is actually based on a course that I teach at Columbia University called Ignorance. Columbia is, as you can imagine, quite proud of me for putting this course in our bulletin. But that course grew out of, I think, the notion, this difference that I sensed in the way science is perceived and pursued that comes out to some extent from my dual role at Columbia as both the head of a laboratory that works in the field of neuroscience, specifically in the sense of smell or olfaction, and also as a professor who teaches a course there. So working in a laboratory with graduate students and post-docs thinking up and doing experiments is really, it's just a time of your life. There's nothing better I can think of doing. It's fascinating, it's endlessly interesting, it's engaging, and it's kind of, well, I guess, exhilarating somehow. So in addition to that, though, as my role as professor, I also had to teach a course with the daunting name Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience 1. This course, as you can imagine, was a rather large course. It was 25 lectures that I had to prepare, and that was kind of a challenge. It was interesting as well. There's a lot of material to put into it and so forth. But I have to admit, it wasn't really exhilarating. And so the question was, what was the difference? Well, this course, this textbook that you see pictured here, it comes in at a little over 1,400 pages. It remarkably weighs a whopping seven and a half pounds. The students refer to it as the hernia book. I'll mention just as a matter of perspective that seven and a half pounds is about little more than twice the weight of an adult human brain. It's not clear why this book is about the brain. So just to put it in another kind of perspective, here's, let's see, do I have that? No, I don't have the pointer. So the big book there, the big white book, the two books on end or the big white book is the Principles of Neuroscience and the other book is Darwin's Origin of Species. You can see we've come a long way. So what I began to realize was that in teaching this course and using this book, I had given students a kind of a notion perhaps that we pretty much knew everything there was to know in neuroscience and that's certainly not the case. And further, I think they had the idea that science is basically about accumulating facts and putting them in big books like Principles of Neuroscience. And that's also not what it's about. And indeed, that last slide, which you could bring up again if you will, was a quote from Marie Curie, who in a letter to her brother, upon receiving, mind you, her second graduate degree, wrote him that one never notices what has been done. One can only see what remains to be done. And I thought, well, this is really what we have to teach students. This is what we have to talk about, the what remains to be done, because that's what the science is really about. I have to say this is one of my favorite pictures of Marie Curie. Sorry, but she just took off. Can you put that up again? Sorry. Because I'm convinced that that glow behind her is not actually a photographic effect. Actually, her exposing the plate, I think. So remarkably, this is true. Her papers are maintained in the Bibliothèque Francaise in Paris and they are in a concrete room in a lead lined box and you have to put on a radiation suit if you want to go work with them if you're a scholar. They're still so hot remarkably. So I thought this was the idea that we should really begin teaching the what's not known, if you will, the ignorance. And so I started this course on ignorance, actually, which I'll talk about perhaps in a few moments and that eventually became this little book. Now, I should say that I use the word ignorance at least in part to be intentionally provocative and I don't mean some of the bad things that the word connotates. It has many bad connotations, especially in common usage and I don't mean those. So let's get those out of the way. So I don't mean, for example, the kind of ignorance that's just sort of stupidity or willful stupidity, even worse, a kind of a callow indifference to fact or data and indifference to the reality of what's going on around you. The ignorant are uninformed, unenlightened, unaware. I know that's sort of a cheap shot, I know. But to be honest with you, I really did look around for a graphic for a while and then I finally thought, there's really not much you can do better than that. So I don't mean any of those kinds of ignorance. What I do mean, though, is a kind of ignorance that was talked about by James Clerk Maxwell, probably the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, who said that thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science. And so it was this idea of thoroughly conscious ignorance that I thought was really the important thing to think about and that's kind of what this class is sort of about, which I called ignorance, and it consists primarily of having members of the science faculty, both from Columbia and elsewhere, come in and talk for a couple of hours in an evening with a group of students about what they don't know, what they'd like to know, why they want to know this, rather than that, for example, why it's more important to know this than that at the moment, what will happen if they know this, what will happen if they don't know this, what didn't they know 10 years ago that they know now, what didn't they know 10 years ago that they still don't know, and all of those sorts of questions. I call them sort of case histories in scientific ignorance and we also, sorry to mess that up, well, it doesn't matter, we also attempt to have a variety of discussions about not only the limits of science or knowledge or things like that, but the limits of ignorance if they are, and models of science. So there's several common models of science, that's one of them, one of them is the idea of scientists patiently piecing a puzzle together. I think that's kind of wrong because the fact is that with puzzles the manufacturers guarantee the solution and we have no idea about that really in this world. Another one is this notion of an onion, if we can have a slide back up again, that somehow the science is a question of peeling away layers of an onion to get to some fundamental truth and other popular and rather attractive one is that of the iceberg where we only see the tip of the iceberg, there's the great unknown that's not available to us and so forth. And these are all very nice but I think they're fundamentally in a way not quite the right image for science because they're all a bit static, they're all a bit, if you just chip away you'll get there. I prefer something maybe a little more poetic if you will but I prefer this kind of an image which is sort of the ripples on a pond. So if you think of our knowledge as what's inside that ripple and that grows and grows, but as it grows so does the circumference increase, the circumference that's in touch with the ignorance all around it and so that as knowledge grows so grows ignorance as well. And I think that's a critical idea in science that we generate and produce ignorance. This was sort of captured quite well in an interesting toast by George Bernard Shaw. He was actually at a dinner-fedding Albert Einstein so this was his toast in which he says science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more which I find kind of a glorious sort of an idea actually and I'd like to say just to name drop a little bit more that apparently he actually cribbed that from Emmanuel Kant who about 100 years earlier came up with this idea of the principle of question propagation suggesting that every answer begets a fresh question. Of course in his inimitable way Shaw increased that by an order of magnitude. That's okay, I think he's probably right. And so this is the notion then really that yeah, this is my other favorite guy but that science continues to create and develop the unknown and that of course there are known unknowns as we've heard a couple times today and there are unknown unknowns as stated so well by Donald Rumsfeld when he was kind of confused at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan after 9-11 and the bungled response there but his worry was correctly not only are there things we don't know but there are things we don't know, we don't know and indeed I think that's an issue that's of some importance and needs to be considered. This is somewhat more eloquently perhaps by J.B.S. Haldane a famous mathematical biologist who said not only is the universe queer than we imagine it is queer than we can imagine although I don't think it's queer than that suit that he's wearing. That's another story. So we do have to confront this. Nicholas Rescher a wonderful philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh coined the term cognitive Copernicanism which he means to say that in the same way that Copernican idea showed us that we're in no particularly special place physically it may be that our mental landscape has nothing special about it cognitively either and there may be things that we cannot quite grasp or there certainly are things that we currently can't grasp but we'll perhaps eventually be able to do so and that this is the notion of being able to actually study ignorance if you will that we could talk about kind of the way epistemology studies knowledge, we could study ignorance in the same way and a lot of that is in the book and I'm going to leave that for there because another issue has come up that I would actually like to use this forum to discuss and that issue came up in a review of the book a very decent review, a very kind review by none other than Michael Schirmer who might even be in the audience I'm not sure was here earlier for sure and Michael was very kind in the review said very nice things but also brought out a very important point that I hadn't really considered carefully and that was that hitting on the signer inside the idea and saying that science generates ignorance that it's an important part of it sort of opens the door to a kind of an abuse of that idea it opens the door to charlatans and quacks and cranks and all the rest of that to suggest that science maybe is uncertain or doubtful somehow or another and so I'd like to kind of look at that idea today with you and see if we can work our way through that in a way so assuming that you agree with me that scientific progress among other things generates greater and greater ignorance hopefully better and better ignorance then we can ask ourselves whether ignorance in some way equals uncertainty whether uncertainty therefore in some way equals doubt and does that mean that science basically generates or creates uncertainty and doubt and the answer I think is a resounding oops wait leave that up leave that up a resounding no I don't know well it's a resounding yes I think this is the earlier there's a second version of this presentation that we should be using but that's alright this is close enough so it degenerates a resounding yes but the important thing is that uncertainty is not the same thing as unreliability and I think that's a key point that has to be made and kept in mind and I'm going to talk about that for just a moment so alright science being a search for better ignorance I'll use one more quote from Erwin Schrodinger a great physicist and I believe philosopher who claimed in an honest search for knowledge you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period I think that's quite true but let's see what that actually means if we can so taking a kind of a perspective on this using the weather not so much climate change but just the weather we could track as a colleague of mine named David Helfand an astronomer does Columbia track the the evolution from primitive ideas to more scientific ideas so among primitive humans the idea of a hurricane for example might be that the wind is angry maybe only slightly more evolved than that would be that the wind god is angry and maybe you can somehow mollify the wind god or something but the scientific idea of course that we've come to now one hopes is that the wind is a measurable form of energy now quite arguably the first two of those phrases okay the first two of those phrases are a complete and total explanation they're useless they're non-informative they don't tell you what to do they don't have a place to go but they are a complete and total explanation the third one on the other hand is not at all a complete explanation it's just the beginnings of one it means we can make some measurements we still don't really know how to predict the weather in any clear way or even how to understand turbulence and wind and so forth and so on but it's clearly the more useful the more potent and engaging answer similarly we could go to the case somewhat popular by his name is Inda Naseem Taleb in his book The Black Swan you should leave this slide up I'm going to go through a couple of things with it so in the case of The Black Swan let's take this as an example the theory is that all swans are white because that's what everybody had always observed but it is also true I don't know how well you can see this I don't know if that prints too small but it is true that one black swan but it does not invalidate the data and I think that's what's important to also realize the data that's true under a particular regime remains true under that regime the regime may change but the data remains true and in fact in this particular case by virtue of a new observation that of a black swan the data that we had about white swans actually improved not denigrated because now with the appearance of a black swan we can ask a whole raft of brand new questions that we didn't even know to ask before how is it that there's such a preponderance of white swans rather than black ones there's an advantage to being a white swan rather than a black one etc etc house pigmentation of feathers controlled how many colors could swans actually come in so the point is that new questions are now available that we couldn't have even have asked before we knew there were black swans and so the theory doesn't go up in flames if you will close the theory doesn't go up in flames what happens is there's revision and this is the second critical point about science in science revision is a victory and that's a critical idea this is what we do revision, science is a work in progress always we welcome revision we consider it a triumph and a victory this is not the case in most other belief systems in particular I would say religious based ones where revision is usually a kind of an embarrassing bit of a wiggle of some sort or another but revision I think is critical so we can go back now to Schrodinger's prescription here that we have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period in any search for knowledge so this sounds like a fairly simple and straightforward prescription but actually it's somewhat more difficult to put into practice and I think the problem here is that the human mind has not evolved to deal with doubt and uncertainty let alone ignorance and we can see this actually quite simply in a couple of examples using visual illusions things known as ambiguous figures so you're probably familiar with most of these here's one that looks like a very attractive woman looking away from us this is from a cartoon in the New Yorker in which she claims that she's turning into her mother and the reason is that you can also see this as an old hag so you can sometimes see it as a profile of an old hag or you can see it as a very beautiful woman looking away but it is, the critical observation here is you can never see it both ways at the same time you see one or you see the other and you flip instantaneously back and forth in your mind there's no middle ground or middle place another example that's sort of famous is the Necker cube which for many of you should probably look as if it's coming out of the screen and down into your right if you're just one way of doing this or change the lighting a little bit sometimes it works sometimes not but it will flip so that it now looks like it's coming out of the screen and up into your left and it doesn't really require lighting you can do this, you can flip back and forth but once again you'll see that you're flipping back and forth you never rest at some intermediate place there's never doubt anywhere about this particularly telling example of this I discovered recently in of all places this little basement, it's very appropriate for this meeting, this funny little basement museum called the Musée de Magique the Magical Museum it's a very district of Paris down a scary looking flight of steps and this exhibit is there and it's called The Two Brothers by a fellow named James Hodges I've been able to track down who he is so watch what happens here, this is a movie and what's going to happen is that disc is going to rotate and it's going to rotate I hope very slowly and you will suddenly see the second brother appear so what's remarkable about that let me see if I can run that again for you you do it you see one brother and then it begins to move I hope let's see yes there we go but you'll see there's no intermediate moment there's no transition, bingo it's there and no matter how slowly you do this you'll never see anything in the middle and so this is kind of the problem I think that we face in dealing with the public and their attitude towards science because they've been taught by the press by an educational system that gets it wrong I think in many ways all the way up through college not just early education but all the way up through university and through courses that I in fact have taught myself that the values of science are fact, surety and conviction and that's not the case the values of science are in fact ignorance, doubt and uncertainty and our ability to live with those without thinking that makes it unreliable is crucial because this in fact ignorance, uncertainty and doubt is precisely what should give us confidence in the scientific method is the best way to learn about the world not to have the last word I'll give it to Baklav Havel poet and playwright and first president of Czech Republic and in a quote that's probably well known maybe to many of you as well but I think has particular interest in this regard he says keep the company of those who seek the truth and those who claim to have found it thank you very much Stuart Firestein