Name: 【TED】Stuart Firestein: The pursuit of ignorance (Stuart Firestein: The pursuit of ignorance)
Uploaded: 2015-04-09T09:09:54.000Z
Duration: 18 min 34 s
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Adverbs of degree

it's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room,

Adverbs of manner

I find this a particularly apt description of science

bumbling around in a dark room, bumping into things,

trying to figure out what shape this might be,

there are reports of a cat somewhere around,

Now I know this is different than the way most people

that scientists use this thing called the scientific method

and we've been doing this for 14 generations or so now,

and the scientific method is a set of rules

for getting hard, cold facts out of the data.

I'd like to tell you that's not the case.

but what's really going on is this. (Laughter)

[The Scientific Method vs. Farting Around]

between the way I believe science is pursued

So this difference first came to me in some ways

where I'm both a professor and run a laboratory in neuroscience

where we try to figure out how the brain works.

We do this by studying the sense of smell,

the sense of olfaction, and in the laboratory,

it's a great pleasure and fascinating work

and exciting to work with graduate students and post-docs

and think up cool experiments to understand how this

sense of smell works and how the brain might be working,

and, well, frankly, it's kind of exhilarating.

But at the same time, it's my responsibility

to teach a large course to undergraduates on the brain,

and it takes quite a while to organize that,

and it's quite challenging and it's quite interesting,

but I have to say, it's not so exhilarating.

is called Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience - I. (Laughs)

It's 25 lectures full of all sorts of facts,

it uses this giant book called "Principles of Neural Science"

it weighs a hefty seven and a half pounds.

that's the weight of two normal human brains.

So I began to realize, by the end of this course,

that the students maybe were getting the idea

that we must know everything there is to know about the brain.

And they must also have this idea, I suppose,

that what scientists do is collect data and collect facts

When I go to a meeting, after the meeting day is over

and we collect in the bar over a couple of beers with my colleagues,

We talk about what still has to get done,

what's so critical to get done in the lab.

Indeed, this was, I think, best said by Marie Curie

who said that one never notices what has been done

This was in a letter to her brother after obtaining

her second graduate degree, I should say.

I have to point out this has always been one of my favorite pictures of Marie Curie,

because I am convinced that that glow behind her

It is true that her papers are, to this day,

stored in a basement room in the Bibliothèque Française

and if you're a scholar and you want access to these notebooks,

you have to put on a full radiation hazmat suit,

Nonetheless, this is what I think we were leaving out

and leaving out of the interaction that we have

with the public as scientists, the what-remains-to-be-done.

This is the stuff that's exhilarating and interesting.

So I thought, well, maybe I should teach a course

something I can finally excel at, perhaps, for example.

So I did start teaching this course on ignorance,