The last three semesters have gone by faster than I could have ever imagined. It feels like yesterday that I was in the van on the way to Kenilworth for service day. At the same time, I can tell that over the course of these three semesters, I’ve changed, grown into a different person than the one I was then. Scholars was never a difficult course, but it wasn’t without its difficulties. I considered dropping out, faced with the choice of taking CHEM135 despite having already taken CHEM131 as I transferred majors, but in the end I decided to stick it out, and I’m glad I did. Overall, I think that my time in the SGC program has helped change how I think about the world, the purpose of science, and the future.
CHEM132 was my first lab course, and while I didn’t exactly love the late Thursday time, the lab reports were some of my first applications of the things we learned about the scientific method. Without SGC, I would have required much more assistance with the idea of a null hypothesis, something I was barely familiar with. My time in MATH140/141 had some influence from SGC as well, the discussion of logic and fallacies furthering my mathematical intuition by helping me see beyond the numbers and symbols to the logic that lay beneath them. Becoming familiar with the ‘argument from adverse consequences’ concept greatly improved my accuracy with guessing how long it’d take to class, and I now do my best to estimate how long it’ll take me to get somewhere or do something with detachment from the consequences of being late. My current roommate was someone I met through Scholars, and we’ve had discussions about things in Colloquium and how it relates to our education in engineering and atmospheric and oceanic science. Both this and the class activities helped to foster my interest in nuclear energy, which has led me to contribute more in class to advocate for its use. With that aside, it still doesn’t really encompass where SGC and being a STEM student at this university have changed the way I see the world.
I started off in biology, and changed to engineering, a large change that was motivated by my increased confidence in math, but both are very much concerned with the field of science. SGC was very much a part of this change, and that by helping me really understand what science was, it changed the way in which I wanted to approach it. The lectures covering the institution of science, its methods, its goals, made me realize that what I really wanted was to convert that knowledge into something real. Ironically, learning about science had steered me away from ‘doing’ science, but in a way it makes sense. The portrayal of science in the media, a core focus of the course, tends to portray scientists more similar to engineers, or at the very least exaggerates the overlap between research and application. Understanding science and its methods is still crucial if it’s to be applied in any useful way, so it wasn’t like I was making SGC less relevant, rather, I changed how I wanted to interact with science. As for global change, it doesn’t seem that a lack of science is the problem. We have mountains of data and evidence for climate change, and plenty of climatologists ringing alarm bells as loud as they can, without meaningful change. More research will be absolutely necessary in the fight against climate change, but as of right now, it seems far from the greatest bottleneck.
This program has fundamentally changed the way I view not only climate change, but the idea of science itself. I don’t have the heart to be a politician, so in terms of where I can make a difference, the focus lies in technology. I’m no Silicon Valley technophile thinking we can develop some magic machine that will fix the climate and then get back to maximizing shareholder value, but it's impossible to deny that innovation will by necessity be a part of the fight against climate change. In fact, I think that after my time with SGC, I see climate change more as a particularly severe symptom than its own unique disease. It’s in the fisheries destroying the populations that sustain them, the governments pouring billions into displays of military power while its former soldiers starve- but it’s not just institutions. It’s in the driver weaving through traffic just to arrive a minute sooner, in the student cheating on an exam for a better score. We’ve created a world in which self-destruction is not only justified and rewarded, but is sometimes even necessary. After all, if you’re the only one to produce less fish, build fewer planes, arrive a little later, or take a hit to your GPA, you’ll be strictly worse off. It’s always the most, the fastest, for the least work, and to slow down is to be left in the dust. In a world with such incentive, it’s no wonder that we’ve become dedicated to mining away the foundations beneath our feet, butchering our golden geese, shoveling tomorrow into the furnace to fuel today.
With all that, why is it that I still believe in the ability of technology, the ability of science, to help us out of the mess? Part of it is personal. Call me an optimist, but I want to believe that someday we’ll build a world in which sustainability, in its truest form, receives greater reward than shortsighted self-cannibalism. In the meantime, we can still do our best to reduce the harm we inflict on the planet and ourselves, whether that be through regulation or through innovation. Technology is a double edged sword, after all, the Industrial Revolution signalled the start of an era where efficiency often came at the expense of the environment unless otherwise regulated, but I still believe that when developed and applied with intent, technology can be used to make things better.
Science and technology are tools, only able to inform decisions and not make them for us– but that doesn’t mean they’re without ideology. In a world where science may say concerning things, things people don’t want to hear, it becomes all too tempting to believe a convenient lie instead. Especially given how inscrutable the modern institution of science can be, it’s easy to see why it could be hard to trust. Even worse, that distrust isn’t entirely unjustified- while science is ideally wholly devoted to finding the truth, it’s funded, practiced, and publicized by people, and as such, science is to some degree inseparable from the culture and context under which it’s conducted. To be wholly objective in all aspects is an impossible ideal. So what is it that makes science trustworthy, what reason is there to accept uncomfortable realities? While one could make a moral argument for the inherent value of truth and knowledge, I don’t think we even need to look that far. After all, accepting the Earth as being no longer the center of the universe laid the foundations to set foot on the moon. The engineers who build the devices we’re typing and reading this on would love to live in a world where they can simply ignore quantum physics and build ever-smaller chips without worry, but that’s not the world we live in. Only by embracing the inconvenient truths of nature have we built the wonders we have today, and only by understanding the necessity of continuing to do so can we build a better tomorrow.