Students must question the unknown to nurture interest in science
Nobel Laureate Prof. Leland H. Hartwell speaks on science and education in keynote address at the inauguration of the International Research Conference (IRC) of the Kotelawala Defence University
Simple, succinct and eloquent, uplifting the mood amidst two days of showers, was the guidance all about science and education given by a Nobel Laureate recently.
Joining on Zoom from Arizona in the United States of America, with a backdrop of greenery and a serene waterway, it was a rare opportunity for Sri Lankans to hear Prof. Leland H. Hartwell speak about his work as well as how students should be nurtured in science young.
He was delivering the keynote address at the inauguration of the two-day 16th International Research Conference (IRC) of the General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University (KDU) and participating in a Q&A session the next day. The link up with Prof. Hartwell, currently teaching at the Arizona State University, had been facilitated by
KDU’s Deputy Vice Chancellor (Defence & Administration), Brig. Chintaka Wickramasinghe, through Prof. Indika Rajapaksa of the University of Michigan, USA.
The other keynote address was by Central Bank Governor Dr. Nandalal Weerasinghe.
‘Achieving Resilience through Digitalization, Sustainability and Sectoral Transformation’ was the theme of the IRC organised by its Chair Dr. Aruna Dharshan De Silva who held the question-and-answer session with Prof. Hartwell which was chaired by Senior Professor Mirani Weerasooriya.
Prof. Hartwell stressed that it is “very important” to get students interested in science and they do that by asking their own questions.
“Science is most interesting when we begin with a phenomenon like cell division and ask questions about it. How is it controlled? How is the accuracy maintained? In the past, education has largely been about providing students with information about what we already know. But science is not about what we know but what we don’t know. So I think it’s very important to engage students in asking questions about things that are still a mystery and how we might begin to tinker and plan experiments to try to answer our questions,” he said.
Currently, he has chosen to use as a subject sensory perception and cognition. This was largely because it does not require any fancy equipment, just a computer. “How do we see, how do we hear, how do we make sense of what we see and hear. How do we remember them? We are studying how we create stories and communicate stories to one another, which I think is the basis of science because stories are a series of causal events and science is interested in causality.”
Keen to help in what many others are doing as well, he said it is important to introduce this kind of questioning – Enquiry Science – into much younger ages. He is engaging the middle school, usually where children decide whether they are interested in science or not and that’s around the ages 10-13 years.
He points out that the way to think about the unknown is by starting with the known. So we need a definition of the known. Science has a very rigorous definition of the known – it’s what we can predict. The accuracy with which we can predict the future, is the way we evaluate our science.
Next Prof. Hartwell cites two “wonderful” examples – we are very good at predicting eclipses and that shows that planetary motion is part of our known. So we can now look at what phenomena exist as part of our unknown. Earthquakes are as dramatic as eclipses, but we cannot predict them. So they are part of the unknown. They are still a mystery and a subject of active science.
When asked by Dr. De Silva whether interest in science is waning, Prof. Hartwell was quick to respond with “I am not sure how interests changing. I think we are very interested in many of the problems facing the next generation – climate change, extinction of animals, various problems with food security. These are science problems as well”.
Social problems are science problems, he said, pointing out that human behaviour is largely unknown and so we consider it part of the arts. But human behaviour is the cutting edge of the unknown in science that we need to apply ourselves to, if we are going to solve the problems that we face in the future.
The issue may not be so much the lack of interest in science but the lack of interest in the subjects that science has been preoccupied with in the past. The need is to become interested in the subjects that science needs to dedicate itself to in the future.
When asked by Dr. De Silva about his switch of interests from mathematics, physics and light mechanical drawing to biology, Prof. Hartwell said that it is very important for students to begin their university education very broadly, find those things that interest them and then find their major.
“Success in science or any field only comes if you are highly motivated and very interested in it. If you are locked in a subject that you are not, you are just not going to be successful. We need to give everyone the opportunity to change their interests and go where their interests are leading them and making them motivated,” he added.