Observing Phenomena, or My First Try

I have always thought of myself as a sci­en­tist.
As a lit­tle girl I can remem­ber want­ing so badly to walk on water that I spent two entire after­noons fig­ur­ing how much salt needed to be added to a beaker of water to make a mar­ble float (how much for a bouncy ball in a plas­tic cup. for a bowl­ing ball in a bucket. me, walk­ing across my bath­wa­ter). Even though I ran out of salt long before that bowl­ing ball was float­ing, I can remem­ber acknowl­edg­ing– maybe for the first time– that I had dis­cov­ered some­thing that I thought was “real.” As I get big­ger and learn more about the Every­thing, I keep revis­it­ing that mind-blowing moment of touch­ing the fringe of “truth”- where for a moment you know some­thing in the world:but maybe noth­ing at all. Per­haps the rea­son we are so in love with the sci­en­tific process– that metic­u­lous attempt to prove some­thing– is that it has never lied to us:because it has never claimed to have all the answers. Sci­ence lies on the fact that truth is rel­a­tive, that no mat­ter how many times I walk on salty bath­wa­ter, salt and water may one day drown me.

Wait, I’m also talk­ing about some­thing big­ger than that here.

I’m talk­ing about col­lec­tive obser­va­tion. I’m talk­ing about exper­i­men­ta­tion. I’m talk­ing about us help­ing each other into the warm lap of truth and nuz­zling our faces against its huge, trans­par­ent knees. The Nobel lau­re­ate in Chem­istry John Polanyi talked about you and me in his love story about the sci­en­tific process:

“Sci­ence, by con­trast, is story-telling. This is evi­dent in the way we use our pri­mary sci­en­tific instru­ment, the eye. The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a begin­ning, a mid­dle, and an end. What we see is as a con­se­quence, cul­tur­ally con­di­tioned. This is open to mis­un­der­stand­ing. It might be con­strued to mean that our con­clu­sions are sim­ply a mat­ter of taste, which they are not. Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the real­ity we sketch is uni­ver­sal. It is this, at its most basic, that makes sci­ence a humane pur­suit; it acknowl­edges the com­mon­al­ity of people’s experience.”

I am privy, too, to your sci­ence. I see you observ­ing your sub­jects, tal­ly­ing your lit­tle find­ings. You pour over pages and pages of human expres­sion to find some con­stant, some glo­ri­ously sim­ple equa­tion prov­ing (finally!) that you are as much me as I am you. What you do not know but have always known, what I have been scared to tell you for so long, is that I love your try­ing. Observ­ing your attempts is my exper­i­men­ta­tion. Climb­ing into your skin through your back, press­ing my face into the mold of your face, look­ing at the color that your eyes think is green:THIS is my phenomena.

I’m so glad that you’re here. This is for Us.