The Scientist as Hero, indeed

A few years ago, a friend of mine had been raving at me about Kim Stanley Robinson, so I picked up his Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). Briefly, it chronicles a truly fascinating method of colonizing Mars, and all of the trials and tribulations involved over the course of some two centuries. I tried reading the trilogy then, and found it interesting, but interminably slow at parts. I got the general idea (though I never did finish Blue Mars), but I just put the books aside until another time.

A few months ago, I picked up Red Mars and tried rereading it in earnest. I read the books in small blocks of time chipped out of my anatomy studying, and found that the books were really quite enjoyable. KSR takes quite a bit of poetic license in some arenas - for one, predicting technological advances and a speed of innovation that are ridiculously accelerated. But his ideas are always fascinating, his humor is oddball but amusing, and his landscapes are impressive.

What makes his books more than just another random SF trilogy, though, are his characters. Robinson has a knack for creating eminently likable people of a wide variety of temperaments. Part of it is that he stereotypes characters, but then draws out what makes them so stereotyped, and uses this to make a point. He has the Mind Doctor, Michel, who needs more doctoring than anyone else, the Engineer, Nadia, who has a compulsion to build lasting things, the Politician, the Revolutionary, etc, etc. All of the characters are beautifully constructed, and a joy to read about.

The best character by far, though, is the Scientist, Sax Russel. In the beginning of Green Mars KSR had one beautiful passage that left me speechless at his aptness in describing how scientists like to look at the world:

About a year later Nirgal and the other children began to figure out how to deal with the days when they were taught by Sax. He would start at the blackboard, sounding like a characterless AI, and behind his back they would roll their eyes and make faces as he droned on about partial pressures or infrared rays. Then one of them would see an opening and begin the game. He was helpless before it. He would say something like, "In nonshivering thermogenesis the body produces head using futile cycles," and one of them would raise a hand and say, "But why, Sax?" and everyone would stare hard at their lectern and not look at each other, while Sax would frown as if this had never happened before, and say, "Well, it creates heat without using as much energy as shivering does. The muscle proteins contract, but instead of grabbing they just slide over each other, and that creates heat."

Jackie, so sincerely the whole class nearly lost it: "But how?"

He was blinking now, so fast they almost exploded watching him. "Well, the amino acids in the proteins have broken covalent bonds, and the bonds release what is called bond dissociation energy."

"But why?"

Blinking ever harder: "Well, that's just a matter of physics." He diagrammed vigorously on the blackboard: "Covalent bonds are formed when two atomic orbitals merge to form a single bond orbital, occupied by electrons from both atoms. Breaking the bond releases thirty to a hundred kcals of energy."

Several of them asked, in chorus, "But why?"

This got him into subatomic physics, where the chain of whys and becauses could go on for a half hour without him ever once saying something they could understand. Finally they would sense they were near the end game. "But why?"

"Well," going cross-eyed as he tried to backtrack, "atoms want to get to their stable number of electrons, and they'll share electrons when they have to."

"But why?"

Now he was looking trapped. "That's just the way atoms bond. One of the ways."

"But WHY?"

A shrug. "That's how the atomic force works. That's how things came out-"

And they would all shout, "in the Big Bang."

They would howl with glee, and Sax's forehead would knot up as he realized that they had done it to him again. He would sigh, and go back to where he had been when the game began. But every time they started it again, he never seemed to remember, as long as the initial why was plausible enough. And even when he did recognize what was happening, he seemed helpless to stop it. His only defense was to say with a little frown, "Why what?" That slowed the game for a while; but then Nirgal and Jackie got clever in guessing what in any statement most deserved a why, and as long as they could do that, Sax seemed to feel it was his job to continue answering, right on up the chains of because to the Big Bang, or, every once in a while, to a muttered "We don't know."

"We don't know!" the class would exclaim in mock dismay. "Why not?"

"It's not explained," he said, frowning. "Not yet."

Later in the book, Sax discusses with a few characters about why he cannot abide by his 'Great Unexplainable', and works always to reduce the boundaries of it. Robinson shows a deep understanding of what drives true scientists - the wish to know, to understand, to explain.

I am an engineer, so my desire for understanding is tempered by a desire to use knowledge usefully, but I can understand Sax's frustration at not being able to answer, "Why?" I don't think we will ever know all of those why's from science... even the answer, "That's how it came out in the Big Bang," isn't really an answer, but rather just a more ultimate Why. Nevertheless, there is a certain joy and satisfaction in being able to quantify the universe, and to point at something that occurs, and say, "Aha! This is happening because of X."

I view this as a means to an end, a way to then change things given our understanding of how they work. The Scientist, though, pursues the answer as a means to its own end, on the premise that more knowledge is a good end to itself.

I wonder if teaching this fundamental value of natural knowledge to the non-scientists of the world would be a good thing. I think it would be. Thoughts?