Toby R. Ault
Suppose you find some mysterious-looking seeds in the garage of your grandparent’s house. You bring a few of them home and plant them just outside your window. As you lie awake that night, your mind starts racing with curiosity.
Will they sprout overnight? How high will they grow? How much water do they need? Could they be magical beans that grow into the sky and take you to the land of giants?
Many years later, you are clinging to the railing of an arctic-bound ship with just one hand. In the other, you hold the tether of a weather balloon. Nauseous, freezing, and barely able to see through the sea spray and sleet, your mind transports you back in time to that dark and stormy night when you tried peering out at your beans and a thunderstorm thwarted your efforts. What did those beans grow into? You try to remember, but before you’ve even finished the thought, you realize that you don’t know the answer because you are still climbing that beanstalk into the clouds. All these long years of coursework, fieldwork, lab work, all the months of planning and preparing, all the days spent restlessly waiting for the journey to finally begin, all of them have led you to this point. And yet you still wonder…
Are there giants in the clouds?
A gust of wind nearly tears you off the ship’s deck as it bobs from side to side in the massive waves of the North Pacific Ocean.
Da***it, Jack––just release the balloon!
You let it go. The huge white latex orb disappears into the clouds, its train of instruments swinging below. You rush inside the cozy cabin to start tracking its position on your computer. The nausea fades into the background as your curiosity and excitement reach full volume.
When I was a child, I wanted to be a scientist more than anything. It’s not the kind of thing that wins you lots of friends when the other kids are trading baseball cards, making bootleg tapes of LL Cool J, and hosting sleepovers to watch Mike Tyson, Rambo, and Terminator II. It is the kind of thing, however, that leads to encase your pet gerbils in Plaster of Paris and bury them in your backyard after they die to see if you can make fossils; to disassemble your Estes model rocket engines to make improvised fireworks; to reprogram your video games to make the weapons in Doom 2 more powerful; to destroy your computer’s operating system to try and optimize it for said video games; and to win state science fairs by developing an algorithm for estimating the height of model rockets using a state-of-the-late-1970s programmable calculator.
But I would be lying if I told you that I found my way into science all on my own. As the son of a science education professor and education evaluator–and the grandson of a biochemist who helped discover the cure for childhood Leukemia–I’ve always thought of doing science as “the family business.”
I would also be lying if I claimed that my path into doing science professionally was at all linear. I struggled immensely in Junior High and the first half of High School to just pass my classes. For a long time I wasn’t sure if I’d even get in (or want to go) to college. Maybe, I told myself, I could just drop out, hitchhike to Central America, and open a creperie for international tourists and backpackers (queue: Jimmy Buffet).
In the spring semester of my Sophomore year of high school, my grandpa, a biochemist and one of my childhood scientific heroes died. At his funeral’s reception his friends shook my hand and told me about his legendary accomplishments. He helped discover the anticoagulant Coumadin; he was a devoted mentor, friend, and colleague; he had a cot in his lab and caffeine pills in his basement. There was no real edge between his professional identity and his personal life. Friends were collaborators, students were children, grandchildren were chaotic dynamical systems with unique initial conditions.
I also learned more about his early life–the years he spent failing his classes and being told he was a “terrible” student who would never have been expected to succeed in academia. This all gave me a tiny seed of hope that I too could, someday, find my way back to the “family business” of being a scientist. I stayed in school, my grades improved, I went to college, and ultimately I majored in Mathematics (partly because I had an undiagnosed learning disability that made it impossible to keep up with the reading in other majors). After college, I became interested in the global environmental crisis of climate change, and I’ve spent my entire professional life doing research on this subject.
Recently, I have begun to reflect on just how fortunate I was to have been born into a supportive family that valued science. Yet at the same time, I have also started to see how badly we need more participation in the physical sciences––especially climate science––to solve some of the hardest research questions being asked today. The reason is simple: science works best when a multitude of perspectives, ideas, and opinions are brought to bear on a particular problem. In climate modeling, for example, we use ensembles of simulations to gain a broader perspective of both the range of plausible future outcomes, as well as the changes in the future that are most likely to occur. The same is true of science itself: we learn more about what is possible and where there is consensus the larger our ensembles of scientists.
While my background and training have given me a certain set of skills and abilities as a climate researcher, they are not what makes me a scientist. Being a scientist, in my view, is a choice you make to stop believing what you think you know and start thinking of ways to prove yourself wrong. It’s a bit like what the ancients used to call a philosopher, except that now we have more than just our minds to peer into the fabric of reality. It’s a belief system that forces you to notice that you don’t actually know that much about what is “true,” but drives you to rule out a lot of ideas that are definitely *not* true.
And that’s most of what being a scientist is: finding out what isn’t true so that you’re left with something that *might* be true. Or, at least, it might be less untrue than the alternatives. But be forewarned: most of what you think is true right now is probably mostly wrong, and most of what you find to be plausibly true in the future will also probably be wrong.
Yet somewhere in all of this wrongness you’ll find some little seed of an idea that nobody has ever had before. This will be your very own magic beanstalk that grows into the sky and lets you climb to places that no human has ever gone before.
There might not be giants in the skies, but if you don’t go look for them, you’ll never know what undiscovered realms are hidden in the clouds.