The Simple Joy of Being Wrong

Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor

In elementary school, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up—that wheezy childhood standard—I consistently answered: “A scientist.” I didn’t know what that involved, but it definitely looked cool in classic Doctor Who episodes. The Doctor collected evidence, tested hypotheses, and by Act III, he inevitably found a solution that saved humanity from itself. What could be cooler than that?

By middle school, I discovered that my giddy childhood enthusiasm didn’t match the process. Science class consisted significantly of memorizing lists, performing “skillz drillz” exercises, and satisfying state-mandated competency checklists. My brief dive into seventh grade Science Club also showed me one of science’s less-appealing aspects: fundraising. We spent most of the academic year trying to pay down debts the club ran up the previous year.

This left me profoundly discouraged. There was no messianic world-saving going on! We didn’t even stick with any program long enough to understand it. One week, we’d demonstrate the states of matter by applying heat to an ice cube until it melted, then evaporated; the next, we’d dissect a pickled frog. Our teacher, with deadlines imposed by the state Department of Education, couldn’t linger on anything enough to spark understanding.

Because of this, I lost interest in “science.” I understand, as an adult, why teachers needed to imbue students with a satisfactory corpus of knowledge, because to operate common technology and participate in modern society, I had to have a basic understanding of thermal dynamics, biology, and meteorology. But I never understood any subject better than necessary to parrot answers back on the test, and I promptly forgot everything afterward.

Science fiction usually depicts rococo science. Star Trek often implied that Spock and McCoy could pull an all-nighter to invent a vaccine and instantly stop a pandemic. Nevertheless, it conveyed that science wasn’t memorized lists and data tables, it was a systematized version of “let’s try something reckless.” But the “science” I learned in school had no reckless experimentation. Every “experiment” had a pre-ordained conclusion, and a scripted take-home lesson.

Instead, I found my long-sought experimentation and recklessness in writing and literature. Sure, every English class expected me to savvy part of the literary canon, so some prescriptive learning still happened. But in writing particularly, I could try something new, and succeed or fail on my own terms. This adolescent Shakespearean sonnet clunks badly? Heigh-ho, into the bin, and I’m already trying the next fracas!

Richard Feynman

Paul Lockhart complains that students studying math in public (state) schools never have an opportunity to be truly wrong. They never have an opportunity to face a problem, self-indulgently play with potential solutions, and ultimately find the answer themselves. Schoolbook math, in Lockhart’s view, has become desiccated and lifeless, a mere husk. “Math is not about following directions,” he writes, “it’s about making new directions.”

I often wonder how my life would’ve differed, had I discovered the unsolved, and possibly unsolvable, problems underlying scientific thought. I discovered physics at age twenty-five, in the person of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. His writings, many of them surprisingly comprehensible to outsiders, emphasize how much physics relies on metaphor, analogy, and imprecision—the fun, dangerous qualities I found in poetry.

Parenthetically, I realize that Feynman, personally, was more fraught than his mythology implied. That’s a topic for another time.

Feynman’s approach to physics was characterized by irresolution, play, and risk. Sometimes literal risk: he tested his hypothesis that a vehicle’s windscreen was sufficient to deflect the glare of a nuclear explosion by watching the Trinity test from a pickup truck’s cab. Feynman exemplified the sensory immersion of just trying something that I wanted from science, but found in literature. What if I’d discovered physics sooner?

My science teachers, dedicated educators all, nevertheless taught me that science is known and precise, and nothing is worse in classroom science than being wrong. But being wrong—stepping beyond the limits of knowledge which state contractors can write into Scantron tests—is the heart of science. And that’s what school denied me: the opportunity to experience the unmitigated joy of writing my own hypothesis, testing it, and maybe being wrong.

How many others like me exist? How many would-be historians got discouraged by pop quizzes laden with names and dates, when they’d rather discover the contingencies that made history happen? How many poets who never found their voices because somebody compared them unfairly to Robert Frost? How many people never got to just try something, and maybe be wrong?