Keith S. Taber
As long ago as 1932, Albert Einstein warned about the dangers of scientific specialisation. Indeed, he drew on a Biblical analogy for the situation:
"The area of scientific investigation has been enormously extended, and theoretical knowledge has become vastly more profound in every department of science. But the assimilative power of the human intellect is and remains strictly limited. Hence it was inevitable that the activity of the individual investigator should be confined to a smaller and smaller section of human knowledge. Worse still, this specialisation makes it increasingly difficult to keep even our general understanding of science as a whole, without which the true spirit of research is inevitably handicapped, in step with scientific progress. A situation is developing similar to the one symbolically represented in the Bible by the story of the tower of Babel. Every serious scientific worker is painfully conscious of this involuntary relegation to an ever-narrowing sphere of knowledge, which threatens to deprive the investigator of his broad horizon and degrades him to the level of a mechanic."
Albert Einstein, 1932
Einstein suggested that the true scientist needs to have a basic grasp of current knowledge across the natural sciences to retain what he labels the 'true spirit' of science. I doubt many scientists would agree with this today, as, inevitably, few if any professional research scientists today could claim sufficient "general understanding of science as a whole" to, by Einstein's criterion here, avoid "the true spirit of research" being handicapped. Moreover, I doubt there are many (any?) who could claim to be the kind of polymaths that were still found two to three centuries ago, when some individuals made substantive contributions to research across a range of scientific disciplines.
The level of the mechanic?
I am sure Einstein did not intend to be derogatory about mechanics per se, but he, in effect, made a distinction between the work of the scientist and the technician. The technician may sometimes be a supreme craftsperson with highly developed technê (technical knowledge) and finely tuned skills. Scientists depend upon technicians, and often lack their expertise and level of skill in carrying out procedures.
School science teachers rely heavily on their school laboratory technicians (in those countries where they exist) and often would actually lack the knowledge and skills to source and prepare and maintain all the materials and apparatus used in practical work in their classes. But the research scientist is primarily concerned with a different, more theoretical, form of knowledge development: epsitêmê.
Professional teachers and classroom technicians
This is a distinction that resonates with many teachers. Professional teachers should be assumed to have developed a form of professional knowledge that is highly complex and enables them to critically use theory to interpret nuanced teaching situations, and make informed decisions. Too often, however, teaching is seen and discussed as only a craft where teachers can be trained and should have imposed on them detailed guidance about what and how to teach.
I have certainly seen this in England, where sometimes civil servants take advice from a small group of supposed experts 1 to develop general 'guidance' that they then think should be applied as a matter of policy by professional teachers in their various, diverse, teaching contexts. Similarly, formal inspections, where a small number of visitors spend a few days in a school or college are used to make judgements and recommendations given more weight than the collective experience of the professional staff embedded in that unique teaching context.
Of course technê and epsitêmê are rudderless without another domain of knowledge: that which helps us acquire the wisdom to live a good life – phronêsis (Martínez Sainz, 2015). The vision of the education system as something that can be subjected to atomistic, objective, evaluation and ranking, perhaps reflects the values of society that has somewhat lost sight of the most important aims of education. We do want informed citizens that have high levels of skills and that can contribute to the workforce – but unless these competent and employed people also go on to live meaningful and satisfying lives, that is all rather pointless. That is not a call to 'turn on, tune in, drop out' (as might have been suggested when I was young) but perhaps to turn on, tune in, and balance priorities: having a 'good' job is certainly worthwhile, but it only really is a 'good job' if it helps the individual live a good life.
Authorship – taking responsibility for scientific work
The technician/scientist distinction is very clear in some academic fields when it comes to publication. To be an author on a research report should signify two very important things (Taber, 2018a):
- an author has substantially contributed intellectually to the work reported;
- an author takes responsibility for what has been reported.
Regarding the first point, it is usually thought that when reporting research purely technical contributions (no matter how essential) do not amount to authorship. Someone who transcribes a thousand hours of interviews verbatim into a database for a researcher to interrogate does not get considered as an author for the resulting paper even if they actually spent ten times as long working with the data as the person who did the analysis – as their contribution is technical, not intellectual.
But the other side of the authorship is that authors have to stand by the work they put their name to. That does not mean their conclusions have to stand for ever – but in claiming authorship of a research report they are giving personal assurance that it is honestly reported and reflects work undertaken with proper standards of care (including proper attention to research ethics).
Read about research authorship
But, in modern science, we often find papers with a dozen, a hundred, even a thousand authors. The authors of high energy physics papers may come from theoretical and experimental physics, statistics, engineering, computer programming, … Presumably each author has made a substantial intellectual contribution to the work reported (even when in extreme cases there are so many authors that if they had all been involved in the writing process they would, on average, have contributed about a sentence each).
Each of those authors knows a good deal about their specialism – but each relies completely on the experts in other fields to be on top of their own areas. No one author could offer assurances about all the science that the paper conclusions depend upon. For example, the authors named because they programmed the computers to interpret signals rely completely upon the theoretical physicists to tell them what patterns they were looking for. In Einstein's terms, "the true spirit of research is inevitably handicapped". The many authors of such a paper, are indeed like the proverbial committee of blind people preparing a description of an elephant by coordinating and compiling a series of partial reports.
Researchers at CERN characterise the elephant boson? (Image by Mote Oo Education from Pixabay)
It is as if a research report were like the outcome of a complex algorithm, with each step (e.g., "multiply the previous answer by 0.017") coded in a different language, and carried-out by a team, each of whom only understood one of the languages involved. As long as everyone is fully competent, then the outcome should be valid, but a misstep will will not be noticed and corrected by anyone else – and will invalidate the answer.
Making the unfamiliar familiar…by comparing it to Babel
Teachers and scientists often find they need to communicate something unfamiliar, and perhaps abstract, to an audience, and look to offer a comparison with something more familiar. For this to work well, it is important that the analogue, or metaphor, or other comparison, is actually already familiar to the audience.
Read about making the unfamiliar, familiar
Einstein offers an analogy: modern science reflects the story of the Tower of Babel.
Read about scientific analogies
Einstein presumably thought that his readers were likely to be familiar with the the Tower of Babel. It has a reputation for being a place of debauchery, as in the lyric to (my 'friend') Elton's song,
"It's party time for the guys in the tower of Babel
Extract from Bernie Taupin's lyrics for 'Tower of Babel', a song from the Elton John album 'Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy'
Sodom meet Gomorrah, Cain meet Abel
Have a ball y'all
See the letches crawl
With the call girls under the table
Watch them dig their graves
'Cause Jesus don't save the guys
In the tower of Babel"
Taupin here conflates several biblical stories for dramatic effect (and suggests that the sins were so extreme that the sinners were beyond salvation, despite Jesus's promise to save all who truly repent). According to the Bible, the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were so wicked that God destroyed the cities. (The term 'sodomy' derives from Sodom.) A sense of the level of wickedness is suggested by how the mob demanded the two Angels sent by God be handed over to be sexually abused… 2
But the alleged 'sins' of the people in the Tower of Babel were quite different in nature.
Pride comes before the falls
The original account is indeed, as Einstein suggested, Biblical. According to the narrative in Genesis, the descendants of Adam and Eve were populating the world, and formed a settlement where they set out on building a city with a brick tower to reach into the sky.
The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563) (Source: Wikimedia) and the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank near Manchester (Image by petergaunt2 from Pixabay)
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Supposedly, God saw this, and was concerned at how the people working together in this way could achieve so much, and pondered that "this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them". God responded by disrupting society by confusing the people's common language, so they could no longer understand each other, and they abandoned the city and tower, and spread into different communities with their own languages. (This is reflected – at least, in a 'mirror universe' sense – in the New Testament account of how the Holy Spirit enabled the apostles to have the 'gift of tongues' so they could spread the Gospel without impediments from language barriers.)
The tower is believed to be one of a number of large towers known as ziggurats which functioned as both temples and astronomical observatories in Babylonian society (Freely, 2011). So, the Tower of Babel might be considered as something like our Jodrell Bank, or the Hubble telescope of its day.
So, the wrong-doing of the people in the Tower seems to be having made rapid progress towards a technological civilisation, made possible because everyone shared the same language and could effectively cooperate. That may seem an odd thing to be punished for, but this is in the tradition of the Old Testament account of a God that had already exiled humans from the paradise of the Garden of Eden as punishment for the sin (the 'fall' of humanity) of disobediently eating fruit form the tree of knowledge.
Talk, it's only talk
From Adrian Belew's lyrics for the King Crimson song 'Elephant Talk'
Babble, burble, banter
Bicker, bicker, bicker
Brouhaha, balderdash, ballyhoo
It's only talk
Back talk
The tower only become known as Babel in retrospect, from a term referring to confused talk, as in 'to babble'. This also inspired the name of the fictional 'Babel Fish' which, according to Douglas Adams, was probably the oddest thing in the Universe (as well as the basis for a mooted proof for the non-existence of God),
"It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish."
Douglas Adams, from 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'
Have scientists been dispersed from a golden age of mutual comprehension?
Einstein's analogy has some bite then: we develop knowledge together when we communicate well, but once we are split into small specialist groups, each with their own technical concepts and terminology, this disrupts our ability to progress our science and technology. Whether that is a good thing, or not, depends what we do with the science, and what kinds of technologies result. This is where we need phronêsis as well as technê and epsitêmê.
Wise progress in society relies on different forms of knowledge (after Figure 2.2 from Taber, 2019)
Einstein himself would later put much effort into the cause of nuclear disarmament – having encouraged the United States to develop nuclear weapons in the context of World War 2, he later worked hard to campaign against nuclear proliferation. (Einstein wanted the US and other countries to hand over their nuclear arsenals to an international body.)
Hiroshima after the U.S. bombing
(Source: Wikimedia)
One wonders how Einstein might have reflected on his 1932 Tower of Babel analogy by the end of his life, after the destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent development of the (even more destructive) hydrogen bomb? After all, as Adams reflects, the poor old Babel fish:
"by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation".
Sodom and Gomorrah afire by Jacob de Wet II, 1680 (Source: Wikimedia); and an atomic bomb explodes (Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
Work cited:
- Einstein, Albert (1932), In honor of Arnold Berliner's seventieth birthday. In Ideas and Opinions (1994), New York: The Modern Library.
- Freely, J. (2011) Light from the East. How the science of medieval Islam helped to shape the Western World. I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd
- Kierkegaard, Søren (1843/2014) Fear and Trembling. (Translated, Alastair Hannay) Penguin Classics.
- Martínez Sainz, G. (2015). Teaching human rights in Mexico. A case study of educators' professional knowledge and practices [Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge].
- Taber, Keith S. (2018). Assigning Credit and Ensuring Accountability. In P. A. Mabrouk & J. N. Currano (Eds.), Credit Where Credit Is Due: Respecting Authorship and Intellectual Property (Vol. 1291, pp. 3-33). Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society. [Can be downloaded here]
- Taber (2019) MasterClass in Science Education: Transforming teaching and learning. London, Bloomsbury.
Notes
1 Perhaps 'supposed' is a little unfair in many cases? But, often official documents are drafted by civil servants and published as authored by faceless departments – so we may never know who the experts were; what they advised; and whether it was acted on. * So, the current English National Curriculum for science includes some 'howlers' – an incorrect statement of the principle of conservation of energy; labelling of some mixtures as being 'substances' – for which no individual has to take responsibility (perhaps explaining why the Department for Education is happy to let them stand until a major revision is due).
Read about scientific errors in the English National Curriculum
* An exception to this general pattern occurred with the 'Key Stage 3 Strategy' materials which actually included some materials which were acknowledged as authored by most respected science educators (genuine experts!) in Robin Millar and John Gilbert.
Fear and loathing in Sodom
2 According to the Biblical account, the Angels led Lot and his daughters away to safely before God destroyed the cities – with fire and sulphur. (Lot's wife famously looked back, having not had the benefit of learning from the Orpheus myth, and was lost.)
Lot had offered hospitality to the angels in his house, but the mob arrived and demanded the angels be handed over so the mob could 'know' them. Lot refused, but offered his two virgin daughters instead for the crowd to do with as they wished. (The substitution was rejected.) I imagine Søren Kierkegaard (1843) could have made much of this story, as it has echoes of Abraham's (no matter how reluctant) willingness to sacrifice his much-loved son Isaac to God; although one might argue that Lot's dilemma was more nuanced as he was dealing with a kind of 'trolley-problem', risking his daughters to try to protect guests he had offered the safety of his house, rather than simply blindingly obeying an order.
Sacrifice of Isaac (c. 1603) by Caravaggio (public domain, accessed from Wikimedia Commons), an episode open to multiple interpretations (Kierkegaard, 1843)
"It wasn't only me who blew their brains
I certainly admit to putting chains
Around their necks so they couldn't move
But there were others being quite crude
That was quite a gang waiting for the bang
I only take the blame for lighting the fuseNow you say I'm responsible for killing them
From the Lyrics of the song 'It Wasn't Me' (written by Steve Harley), from the Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel album 'The Best Years of Our Lives'.
I say it was God, He was willing them"