Columns

It can be exciting, even exalting on occasion, to ask primitive, naive questions to Nature on your own without too much reliance on often-inaccessible expertise and sophisticated equipment. The earliest such occasion that I can remember was the "Easter Egg Hunt" once a year at home. It was such joy to make a shrewd guess and uncover a clutch of brightly colored hardboiled eggs, and such dismay to walk past another, soon to hear someone else shriek with delight to discover it. The satisfaction of getting surprising answers is, anyway, most of what lured us all into science as avocation and in some cases (for better or worse) also as bread-winning effort. Answers obtained by straightforward probing are experienced as surprising discovery whether or not someone of like inclination had similar experience 100 years ago and the results are in our libraries (if only anyone could find them), or had similar experience on another planet and the results are accordingly in libraries forever inaccessible to us. What others may have done or not doesn't matter for purposes of relishing experience and of honing discovery skills.

SAS Adventures in Discovery tries to articulate such exercises, using mostly simple observations and readily accessible equipment. Each of the anticipated first 20-30, if the column lasts so long, is a puzzle that I explored during 2001 in the spirt of John Rader Platt's 1962 essay, "The Art of Creative Thinking" (In The Excitement of Science, Houghton-Mifflin, Boston). He recommended, and I have sincde then pursued, a chess-game's worth of effort (a "Gamesworth") as a regular daily workout. My notebooks might resemble those of a big game hunter who chooses to go barefoot with bow and arrow rather than using the helicopter gunships available to professionals. The intended focus of attention in this column, rather thanacquisition of big game, is the asking of questions and the experience of personal discovery, however humble the subject matter and however crude the methods. I deliberately stress everyday familiar subject matter and simplicity of means.

Because the material for such a column has to be drawn from hasty and flawed personal experience, it must be asked whether there anything of communicable value in it. How many people get excited by watching their neighbors' adventure-travel vacation videos? Not many, maybe because mere retelling leaves so little to the reader to do on his own. I might, however, enjoy to adventure along a similar course in my own way if only the narrator could just point me toward a field with lots of accessible surprises, in which I can try my own skills. That I might make a lot of un-necessary mistakes (after all, the guy could also have provided an accurate map to show where each surprise lies in wait) is not felt as a hazard or a burden, but as an opportunity. In the spirit of discovery I want to make my own mistakes and learn to find my own way out of them, for practice if nothing else, but also for intimately learning why what's so is so and why other imaginations aren't so. And for the sport of it.

This column tries to provide directions to places full of lightly hidden surprises that anyone can uncover, and maybe even uncover more effectively if not too burdened with apparatus and technical sophistication in that area.

Even more brazenly: As an amateur in everything except my narrow professional involvements, I claim the right to sport a little nonsense, so long as it is not deliberate and it motivates inquiry. As Charles Darwin remarked in The Origin of Species, "False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness." Thus I trust you to check (and report) errors glossed over in my rush to cobble together a column on schedule. The first aim of Adventures in Discovery is not to be "correct" at the outset, but to celebrate an independent sense of curiosity and wonder in ordinary observations. It differs from, for example, Jearl Walker's wonderful Flying Circus of Physics in that there is less stress on "the answers" than on ways of asking Nature.

I have not seen this sort of communication tried before in public and I don't know if it will work. Give me some constructive feedback.

Revised versions are accumulating on my web site, marley.biosci.arizona.edu/~art, while the originally presented drafts accumulate at www.sas.org in the E-Bulletin archives.

Art Winfree
winfree@email.arizona.edu