Fun with science

The Indian Science Congress is a venerable ritual. It is an annual Kumbh of Indian scientists, a professional circus, though the Kumbh is better organised and has deeper memories. Today the Indian Science Congress sounds dated and yet it had its moments of romance.

The Science Congress itself is an outgrowth of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, one of the greatest scientific institutions ever created. The Asiatic Society also seeded in turn the Great Surveys and the Science Congress becoming that invertebrate anomaly, a group of amateurs that helped create a specialised, professionalised science.
Today the Science Congress is reported more for the Prime Minister’s speech. What follows then is a series of editorials and op-ed pieces on how science must be made relevant, harnessed to productivity and made a vehicle of the nation state. There is a puritanical tone to the whole exercise. Science is seen as a special form of life requiring a scientific temper. And scientific temper is almost seen as an injection, an immunisation programme against religion and other forms of superstition. Third, science is unilaterally seen as a productive system requiring investment. In all these readings, science is both a milch cow and a sacred cow, to be given special treatment.
Indian science and scientists rarely talk of the critical studies of science movement, of the relation of science to modern violence. The works of Robert Lifton, on the Nazi doctors (The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide), Zygmunt Bauman on the Holocaust (Modernity and the Holocaust), the various studies of science projects or even the work of dissenting scientists like C.V. Seshadri and A.K.N. Reddy are happily ignored. The relation of science to democracy is never discussed and all we have are the predictable studies on investment in science and growth or hosannas to the new God — the innovation chain. Such an ignorance forces one to invoke John Ziman’s statement that “a scientist knows as much about science as a fish about hydrodynamics”. Ziman did not deny that the fish can swim. He only maintained that as the waters get murky, the fish get sluggish without sensing the cause of their sluggishness.
This particular illiteracy then produces a standard litany of science. This has several variants. The first is the race for the Olympic medals of science and a complaint that India has not produced Nobel laureates in high numbers. As a country, we feel excluded from modernity without a place in the who’s who of science.
The second variant is a kind of nationalist jingoism, particularly voiced by the diaspora, where science inflates their ego through nuclear power. Science is a way of commanding respect from other nations. It becomes a substitute for a collective machismo.
The third is what I call a bully’s approach to science which attacks any mild superstition through a witch hunt. It might be a Ganpati drinking milk or some dream of perpetual energy but no attempt is made to look at the new superstitions, for example, the relation between science and war.
The fourth looks at innovation chains, considers science as the root of invention, ignoring the everyday inventors who are outside science. I think it is a pity that scientists are unable to speak for themselves in more authentic voices. Few articles talk of science as a way of life, as an idiom of playfulness. One wonders why science is not seen as ecstasy or enjoyment, as musicians see music. Why do scientists refer to investment, recognition, evaluation but rarely ever to joy, sharing, conversation, the sense of surprise and the celebration of the unexpected. Few newspapers (except this one which has, as my fellow columnist, Jayant Narlikar) carry any clear-cut essay on science, or a biography of a Bose, a Patrick Geddes, a Bhaskar Saha, a Krishnan or a Raman. My complaint is not that science is not a creative activity but that the joy of science, the music of numbers, the mystery of nature rarely comes out in the reflections of our scientists. The biographies of our scientists sound like good conduct certificates or hagiographies. One never gets to understand a scientific life or the evolving nature of scientific activity from them.
I think it is time we return joy and laughter back to science, go back to the openness of questioning. Let us teach our children to enjoy science, obtain a sense of mystery, feel a sense of puzzlement rather than feeling puritanical about science or spouting official clerical lines.
One needs to be honest about science and tell our children that our scientists knew little about Bhopal when it happened, or that while we celebrated the Green Revolution, we did not understand the full ecological and sociological consequences it could spawn. In doing so, we create a more self-reflective science. We also realise that the mistake is as central to science as serendipity and surprise. Once we do that, we become less jingoistic about the nature of our heroes. We do not complain that few streets have been named after S.N. Bose but realise the brilliance and playfulness of the man, celebrating that the Boson has been named after him.
What I want is a return to the cheerful science, not a dismal science that one sees in Science Congresses and editorials. I hope we create a knowledge society that is at ease with itself, which is tolerant, that is open to doubt and ambiguity. Once we acknowledge this, we create a science which is a way of life rather than a statement of method. My appeal is to celebrate science not for war or development but as a festival of enjoyment, a ritual for knowing and a celebration of adventure, wherever it is. I think this is crucial because in relaxing about science, a pompous India might learn to relax and enjoy itself. The question to me is not whether India can compete with China but whether India can enjoy life and science more than the Chinese.

The writer is a social science nomad