Just in case you were wondering whether I have gone completely crazy just by reading the title, i'd like to reassure you, this is just a regular question popping more and more frequently in my head.. I have not really been asking myself this question a lot for many years. Somehow I knew I wanted to study marine biology without feeling much of a scientist (I love the sea, I learnt it was a subject, and decided i was gonna go for it..), and when the time came to write the letter to apply for the course I remember my mother telling me I needed to mention 'curiosity'. And somehow (weird what your mind remembers) I knew I had some uneasiness then. Okay I was told I wasn't curious enough, but I maybe also knew it myself. I don't think I ever was one of those 'annoying' kids asking constantly "why".
Yet, even if I wasn't born curious I surely became. And at uni I quickly learnt how to try to answer those questions in a reasonable and very methodic manner (read about the scientific method here), and then I also quickly learnt that the answer is usually just another question. And that's how we 'earn our bread' - adding just one (or if we are lucky two) little pieces on a puzzle made of millions of pieces. And sometimes in the process of adding the very hard earned piece, we remove one or two... So yes, this is what 'science' is to me. And when at the 13 ITRS I was invited at a lunch break discussion on just this topic, I couldn't answer. To my surprise, many of us (scientists) didn't have an aswer for it. It is complicated to put into word, without sounding too 'omnipotent' with phrases like 'the search of the thruth' - frankly - we aren't getting any close to that... maybe science is the kid that keeps on asking 'why' after every observation, and then tries to devise a very complicated experimental design (with so many replicates that will require more hours than those in a day to measure, or some weird shaped equipment that will require many trips to the DIY store just to find the right materials (to be used in the most improper way), or maybe just a lot of trips to the beach with a quadrat, sinking in the mud or maybe receiving weird looks from the tourists.. ) but now, scientist don't have the time to make such observations that lead to the "why" question and probably wouldn't even get paid to answer those questions in fact, I wasn't that surpised when on a nature briefing that came out a while ago there was a post on the fact that 'disruptive science' has been in decline. the article didn't give much of an explanation to the why, but the lunch break meeting at the conference did spark some interesting thoughts on that... scientists are now having to answer to pressing issues - climate change and all the associated environmental consequences, restoration targets, food provision, environmental degradation... so a scientist is becoming much more a kind of 'scientist on demand' and curiosity is being killed by higher authorities (politics) demand. It goes without saying that funding for research is going that direction too, think of all European new goals and targets that have to be met, so getting paid for answering key questions about how the world around us function is not really an easy task... But my question is: how can we solve ""the crisis"" without knowing how the world around us really works ??
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