Ignorance

I was captivated by an insight that came to Firestein while he was teaching college biology. Science courses typically teach what scientists know about their disciplines, but what’s most exciting to scientists is what they don’t know.

So Firestein had the brilliant idea to design a course where scientists would share their “ignorance”—the questions that keep them up at night and propel new research. It helps that the author used to work as a stand-up comic!

This short and delightful book provides a window into how scientists actually work and think, and the degree to which not knowing something about the world is the true engine of scientific progress. Combining Firestein’s own research experiences with broader analysis and narratives from other scientists and the larger history of science, it is an essential guide to understanding the scientific mindset.

How does science actually work? In the quest for understanding nature, taking the brain as an example, scientists are traditionally believed to carry out experiments to accumulate new facts which added together reveal new knowledge. Stuart Firestein puts forth a revolutionary view: that piling new facts one on the other is not how scientists work. Progress is measured in how far each step is able to remove our ignorance of that aspect of nature, and how much new ignorance it reveals that stimulates the next efforts along the way.

Firestein highlights this view with real-life stories of how four scientists… show more.