Science and Vocation

This is blog is based on a Paper I presented at the ‘Unfinished Business’  Women and Power conference, 2016

Adoption of a lifelong passion is always unfinished business.  As an entrepreneur, my days’ work is never finished.  As an advocate, determined to help those who have trouble hearing or who are deaf, I am reconciled to leaving unfinished business.  As someone interested in making the world a better place, I realise that my input is limited.  I am just a brick in the wall.

Indeed, this is also the path and context of being a scientist.

As a scientist, it would be somewhat arrogant and ignorant and inappropriate to say “I know it all”.  So, in the context of unfinished business there are similarities between a vocational goal and careers in science.  I’d like to launch a discussion on the challenges of unfinished goals in both daily career life, and the longer term issues of when and how to let go

My vocation has been to work to help people hear.  I don’t see this in the context of a particular profession, although Vocation (the word deriving from the Latin, vocātiō, meaning “a call, summons”[ is generally defined as a profession to which a person is specially drawn towards.  Originally, this was a religious concept, but the words is now used more broadly. Universities and colleges advertise vocational courses, which is almost a contradiction in terms.

I went to an Anglican school, and thought that I left school without a vocational calling.  However, my interest was in helping people hear – I just didn’t have any idea how I was going to do that, so I became a scientist.

My career unfurled across a variety of professions, but always with the same goal.  Is that a vocation?  It’s not a Profession.  There has always been a science thread.  And my work and contribution will be just a brick in the wall in the long term view of science and technology.

In my career, I have taken a vocational path as a scientist, entrepreneur, and volunteer with a single theme.

I am going to explore some parallels in science and vocation through history.

Firstly, I want to introduce Nicholas of Cusa who was born in 1401.  Nicholas was the son of a prosperous German boat owner and ferryman in the Rhineland of what is today Germany.  He was well educated and rose to become a Cardinal in the catholic church.  He was a theologian, career churchman, lawyer and astronomer.  I would describe him as a mathematician and free thinker: He was clearly politically astute and spent part of his career as a papal envoy.  This was no mean feat as he had been one of the leaders in the recognition that the early mathematical interpretation of the Universe as being orderly, with earth at the centre was in conflict with 15th century observations and measurement.  The reaction from many scientists was to say that errors must have been introduced into the translations of Ptolemy’s work in the preceding 1200 years.  It’s interesting to think how long the influence of the Greek philosophers, and then astronomer Ptolemy lasted.  Nicholas, however, published a treatise in 1440, which, rejected all the earlier ideas. His book recognised that “the inability of the human mind to “conceive the absolute or the infinite. You have to love the title of his book, De docta ignorantia (Latin: On learned ignorance/on scientific ignorance).  It’s a book on philosophy and theology

Earlier scholars had discussed the question of “learned ignorance”. For Nicholas, docta ignorantia means that since mankind can not grasp the infinity of a deity through rational knowledge, the limits of science need to be passed by means of speculation.  What a great statement. Nicholas’s mode of inquiry blurs the borders between science and ignorantia. In other words, both reason and a supra-rational understanding are needed to understand God. He even thought about hearing:

“For reason’s measurements, which attain unto temporal things, do not attain unto things that are free from time-just as hearing does not attain unto whatever is not-audible, even though these things exist and are unattainable by hearing”.

Philosopher-scientist Nicholas was never accused of heresy, but rather reconciled his theories to the omnipresence of God.  What a diplomat.  Think of the trouble Galileo got into by being less diplomatic.  I tend to go straight to the point.  I would have been more like Galileo.  Nicholas  explained that there is a complexity in the Universe that the human mind is incapable of conceiving. He described the Universe as being “without limit”, but not “infinite” as that description is reserved for God.  Hmmm.

He goes on to explain that “nothing is fixed, all is relative.  The centre is everywhere and nowhere”. This man was inventing the field of quantum physics 500 years before Heisenberg was born. Nicholas’s astronomical views (speculations, rather than observations) are scattered through his philosophical treatises. He was thinking outside the square – outside of traditional doctrines, though they are based on symbolism of numbers, on combinations of letters, and on abstract speculations rather than observation.

But isn’t it amazing that today we are spending billions of dollars trying to answer the God question.  The Universe is today thought to be without limit, but the human mind struggles to imagine that.  Imagine that, just as the scientists in the Renaissance couldn’t imagine the disconnected Universe.

Nicholas was a bit of an all-rounder, in the days before science became very compartmentalised.

In medicine he introduced an improvement which in an altered form has continued in use to this day. This improvement was the counting of the pulse which up to his time had been felt and discussed in many ways, but never counted.

Nicholas of Cusa proposed to compare the rate of pulses by weighing the quantity of water run out of a water clock while the pulse beat one hundred times. The manufacture of watches with second-hands has since given us a simpler method of counting, but the merit of introducing this useful kind of observation into clinical medicine belongs to Nicholas of Cusa.

Nicholas lived at the beginning of what is often referred to as “the Scientific revolution”, the Renaissance, during which time the previous 2000 years of Greek Philosophy were at last challenged and transformed.  The Greek writings were authority – the status quo.  Suddenly, there was innovation and originality of thought. If the period started with Nicholas of Cusa foreshadowing quantum physics and measuring the pulse, it reached new milestones with invention of the printing press around 1440; William  Harvey’s work on circulation of the blood in 1628; The invention of the telescope in the early 1600’s; the invention of the compass and the fifteenth and sixteenth century voyages of discovery; the astronomical observations of the broadly talented Copernicus in the 16th century, which indicated  that the sun, and not the earth was the centre of the Universe; Sir Isaac Newton’s   concepts of, acceleration, laws of motion, law of universal gravitation.  Newton also believed that all of science could be expressed mathematically, a concept some scientists are moving back to today.

Imagine this pace of change and unprecedented access to knowledge.  Perhaps Van Loon’s Lives could be extended to have even more conversations in this period.

When we look at scientific history, we see differences to social history. Much of history is a continuum.  Science history is held in check, by previous ideas and peers. John Brockman asks the question, “When does an idea retire?” Should it retire?  Author Ian Mcewan thinks not.  He thinks that while some ideas may be wrong, they still contribute to a discipline

Newton proposed that all of science could be expressed mathematically. Today, as in the Renaissance, scientists are striving to find a theory of Everything, a set of theories explaining the basic laws of the universe, and of course eloquently explored by modern scientist, Professor Stephen Hawkins.  This has been further reduced in the minds of some to the search for a single unifying theory. Followers of the Hitchhikers Guide will know that the answer is 42, but for others billions of dollars are being sought to look for a unifying theory, just like in the Renaissance, but more expensive.  In the process, we have found quarks, and Higgs bosun particles, and black holes, but we may be further from a Theory of Everything than Plato – who kind of started all that.

I started this paper by implying that my vocation was based in science.  It’s interesting that up to 16th century, science was not regarded as an independent discipline.  Since monasteries were the homes of scholarship, it is no surprise that philosophy and science emerged together. What we would today regard as scientific publications invariably remained in manuscript form, although popular publications emerged with the invention of the printing press.   A standout for hearing science and otolaryngology was the published work of Bartolomeo Eustachi, after whom the Eustachian Tube is named. He is the first who described the internal and anterior muscles of the middle ear and the complicated figure of the inner ear.  His outstanding Anatomical Drawings were not published and printed until more than a hundred years after his death, when it became a best seller.

Today we have rediscovered the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa.  There is a complexity in the Universe that the human mind may be incapable of conceiving.  Man will probably know only a tiny fraction of the Universe, and science is no more at terms with the concept that the Universe has no boundary, than was Ptolemy.   The Renaissance featured some great thinkers, who progressed scientific knowledge, within careers that encompassed broad areas from anatomy to philosophy concurrently.  Their vocation was the pursuit of knowledge, and their job never finished.  But they opened our minds.  How did science get portioned off and then further subdivided?

 

The University of Bologna founded in 1088, was the first university to be established.  Early Universities were stimulated by the rediscovery of Aristotle, and a community of scholars, accelerated the process and practice of attempting to reconcile the thoughts of Greek antiquity, and especially ideas related to understanding the natural world, with those of the church. This often involved going to Arabic translations from the Greek writings and then translating into Latin, the academic language of early Universities.  The efforts of this “scholasticism” were focused on applying Aristotelian logic and thoughts about natural processes to biblical passages and attempting to prove the viability of those passages through reason. This became the primary mission of lecturers, and the expectation of students. It also lead to the partitioning of areas of study, and the development of scientific method, as we know it today. Thus today, science is thus much more specialised and the structure actively discourages questions of meaning and purpose.  Our scientific world view has become much narrower than the interconnected world views of Aristotle and Plato.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it is a challenge to encourage students to study science.  Perhaps it has come too far from natural philosophy for young scholars to have adequate meaning for the emerging scholar. We have parallel hierarchies in science and vocation. Science was established as a separate discipline.  This has been further broken down into narrow discipline areas that we may call The Sciences, and someone working in the sciences is known as a scientist.  The vocational parallels are that of Vocation, vocational skills, and separate vocational professions

Our vision of the world changes.  Our vocation changes.  In the end, vocation is more about who you are than what you do.

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