{"id":1614,"date":"2012-04-13T09:26:26","date_gmt":"2012-04-13T09:26:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/2012\/04\/13\/dr-r-neerunjun-gopee-18\/"},"modified":"2019-11-12T04:21:34","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T00:21:34","slug":"dr-r-neerunjun-gopee-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/dr-r-neerunjun-gopee-18\/","title":{"rendered":"Should We Be Afraid to Think and Ask Questions?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr R Neerunjun Gopee<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Every college-going student will have at some stage learnt the saying \u2018where ignorance is bliss, \u2018tis folly to be wise.\u2019 The battle against ignorance continues to this day, and will never cease as long as there are humans who dare to ask questions that other humans dare not ask or are prevented from doing so for, most often, religious reasons.<\/span><\/p>\n

That religion has been an obstacle to knowledge is well known, preferring ignorance which leads to fear, superstitions, taboos and practices that have blighted the lives of countless numbers of human beings through the ages, and even animals for that matter that are \u2018sacrificed\u2019 in the name of some God or the other. As one sage remarked, \u2018why do they catch a goat or a lamb to sacrifice, why don\u2019t catch a lion?\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

The onus of fighting ignorance and obscurantism has fallen mainly on science, and it is to their honour and credit that scientists are the first to recognize that the more they seem to know, the more there is to know. The playwright George Bernard Shaw, in a dinner toast to Albert Einstein, declared that in science, every new discovery raises 10 new questions, as is pointed out in an article in the April 2012 issue of Scientific American by Stuart Firestein, Professor and Chair of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. The title of the article is \u2018What Science Wants to Know\u2019, and we learn that in the ensuing 350 years after Isaac Newton, \u2018an estimated 50 million research papers and innumerable books have been published in the natural sciences and mathematics\u2019, constituting a veritable \u2018impenetrable mountain of facts.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

It goes without saying that given this situation, one has to specialize and even sub-specialize \u2013 but even then it is almost impossible to keep abreast of all the developments in one\u2019s speciality. This should make one more humble, although some people develop the opposite attitude of arrogance, when they are clearly ignorant about so many other things happening not only within their speciality, but in other fields of human knowledge and endeavour. One cynic has defined a specialist as \u2018someone who knows more and more about less and less until finally he knows everything about nothing!\u2019 Cool, isn\u2019t it?<\/span><\/p>\n

The starting point of knowledge is two-pronged: curiosity and ignorance, and Firestein goes on to explain that science leads us to develop a \u2018cultivated, high-quality ignorance\u2019, as captured by the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell when he said, \u2018Thoroughly conscious ignorance\u2026 is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge.\u2019 And every such advance pushes further the frontiers of knowledge by extending the limits of our ignorance. Knowledge, it has been said, is a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose centre is everywhere. Knowledge, in other words, is infinite.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here we must make a distinction between lower knowledge, which is the objective, scientific knowledge we are talking about, and higher knowledge, which is subjective knowledge or, as the sages call it, Self-knowledge: another story altogether. But the quest for both involves asking questions, and no question is excluded. As has been observed, there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the roles of a teacher is to arouse pupils\u2019 curiosity by paying heed to their questions, and the younger they are the more direct or \u2018natural\u2019, and sometimes even apparently stupid are their questions likely to be, such as the one that was asked by the youngest of Captain von Trapp\u2019s daughters to Maria when she had just finished the waltz with the child\u2019s father in the film The Sound of Music, and the couple were looking into each other\u2019s face, \u2018why are your cheeks so red?\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Richard Feynman, who won a Noble Prize in physics, used to say that he preferred to teach in the lower classes because children asked him questions for which, at times, he didn\u2019t have an immediate answer, and so had to search the answers to these questions before he addressed them again.<\/span><\/p>\n

I myself remember that very senior teachers used to take my class when I was in the lower forms. It seems that nowadays there are only star teachers who are specialists in teaching only upper forms, and will not teach lower forms. If that is true, I wonder if that is one of the ills of our educational system? I\u2019m only asking the question\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

In certain down-to-earth matters, one may have the definitive answer, but in the search for knowledge, most times it is not possible to have a yes-no answer, and one has to explore deeper. As Firestein says, \u2018answers tend to be the end of the process, whereas questions have you in the thick of things.\u2019 In this great adventure that has been going on for the past 15 generations, as he concludes.<\/span><\/p>\n

On board everybody, towards the ocean of knowledge\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

* Published in print edition on 13 April 2012<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr R Neerunjun Gopee<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3377],"tags":[1036,103,10860,19801,19799,19800],"class_list":["post-1614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-technology","tag-albert-einstein","tag-dr-r-neerunjun-gopee","tag-george-bernard-shaw","tag-isaac-newton","tag-stuart-firestein","tag-what-science-wants-to-know"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/MT-Logokk.jpg?fit=1200%2C880&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-q2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}