The Joy of Not Knowing
Wednesday, January 03, 2007

This article was originally written for the NESTA website Inspire Me section. Since NESTA has revamped its website it has vanished and I've had a number of requests for it so here it is again.

The Joy of Not Knowing

Richard P Feynman, one of the great physicists and communicators of science of the twentieth century, used to tell a story of how as a boy he noticed that the ball in his play wagon would appear to roll to the back of the wagon when he pulled it forward and to the front when he stopped. He asked his father to explain why and his father said, “The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard.” And then he added, “This tendency is called inertia but nobody knows why it’s true.”

Feynman called this a “deep understanding” - an acknowledgment of the difference between knowing the name of something and really knowing something. It is a fine example of how science can be taught with the mystery intact.

The event that most changed my own view of knowledge occurred at the age of eight having moved to a new school in Mid-Wales. The teacher asked our class if we knew what caused travel sickness and I answered that it was something to do with vibrations on hairs inside your ears, a bit of knowledge I’d picked up from mums A-level biology textbooks. Not only did the teacher, preferring a vibrating-belly theory, deny there was any such mechanism but, confronted with my bratty insistence, fetched another teacher to tell me I was wrong. Producing the textbook a few days later did nothing to win her to my case.

A year later my mum returned from a parent teacher evening having been told that I wasted my time in the library checking everything my teachers said. Unwittingly the school’s bad teaching had resulted in a positive effect. Having realised that teachers didn’t know everything, I discovered that that not being told the answers could be an enjoyable mystery.

I use the word mystery when recounting these learning experiences because how we handle teaching the limits of our knowledge lies at the heart of both of them. Magic tricks are also a source of mystery and it was around this age that I learnt my first trick, a simple thing my father did with two cigarette papers playing the parts of the two little dicky birds Peter and Paul flying away and then returning again.

To most people today magic and science would seem to occupy opposing views of the world, the one concerned with trickery and deceit and the other with revelation and truth. The truth is often more complex as the story of a famous stage illusion will show.

Professor John Henry Pepper became the director of the Royal Polytechnic Institute in 1854 and introduced crowd-pleasing attractions such as the Signor Buono Core who walked through fire and was known as the Italian Salamander. His most famous illusion was ‘Pepper’s Ghost Illusion,’ a carefully constructed combination of mirrors and lighting that combined to produce ghosts on the stage.

The ghost illusion was first demonstrated on 24 December 1862, in an adaptation of a Dickens Christmas story. Pepper had originally intended to follow the demonstration with a lecture on the science behind the effect. But when he saw the effect the illusion had on the audience he realised that he had a winning attraction and kept the science a secret.

Audiences were fascinated. Intrigued spectators returned again and again to ponder the illusion. Keeping the explanation a secret ultimately communicated the science behind the illusion to many more people than an immediate explanation would have done. The Pepper’s Ghost Illusion was extraordinarily popular and was seen by nearly a quarter of a million people. It was licensed to theaters around Britain and a decade later Pepper took the effect to America.

There is something that all those who intend to communicate the wonders of science can learn from Pepper’s decision to keep the mechanics of the illusion a secret. There are times when the wonder must be left alone.

Jim Steinmeyer is one of the greatest living illusion designers having worked with the top stage magicians as well as designing illusions for Disney theme parks and stage effects for shows such as The Invisible Man. He has said, “Unfortunately, science often serves the purpose of actively teaching us to stop wondering about things, of causing us to lose interest.”

There is very little room for mystery in our current science teaching. But signs are that things are changing. We are coming to realise that great scientists become interested in science not because of the things we know but the things we don’t know.

Working with magicians, teachers, youth groups, and toy and game designers I am interested in activities that teach science by explaining some phenomena while keeping the mechanisms behind others a mystery. An activity can sometimes be like a story with an unexplained cliffhanger at the end, a mystery to take away and ponder. It’s often a case of looking for the moments of magic in a scientific story. An example of this is the transition of water from liquid to solid. While this is a mundane effect if it occurs overnight in your fridge, it’s a magical effect if you can pour a small cup of water into your closed fist and open it to reveal snow. This is a simple scientific trick used by both teachers and magicians.

Seneca, Rome's leading intellectual figure in the mid-1st century AD, enjoyed the mystery of the street magic of the time: “If I get to know how a trick is done, I lose my interest in it.” This is more than just appreciating the beauty of a mystery well performed. Seneca understood that knowing how something works can lessen our interest in it, but good scientists and good magicians take pleasure in both knowing and in not knowing.

Good teachers balance these two pleasures so that they work together like cogs that drive our learning. Acknowledging this fact could lead to major changes in the way science is communicated. It could also lead to a new generation of intrigued and fascinated schoolchildren - inquiring individuals who could be the Feynmans of tomorrow.

posted by stuart nolan @ 11:16 PM, ,


Digital Creativity Publication

I recently published a paper in Digital Creativity journal called Building magical realms: responses to pervasive and locative media technology. This reports on a whole heap of workshops with young people exploring new tech and letting them in on the secrets of participatory design and futurology. Their responses to how us grown-ups go about imagining the future are worth listening to.

posted by stuart nolan @ 3:07 PM, ,