MACROSCOPE
Science as Play
Pierre Laszlo
Sir Isaac's Fun and Games
The written recollections of Newton's half–niece include the
following story. On January 29, 1697, Newton, then Warden of the
Mint, came home after a hard day's work to find waiting for him a
mathematical puzzle now known as the brachistochrone or
roller–coaster problem. The challenge was to find the curve
over which a mass rolling downhill under the influence of gravity
will move between specified starting and finish points in the
shortest time. Newton found the solution, the cycloid curve, before
going to bed. He said it was "child's play," a phrase that
suggests he took on the problem as much for amusement as anything else.
Similar entertainment (for both children and adults) comes from
puzzles, in particular jigsaw puzzles, which present their players
with two–dimensional fragments, each with a characteristic
shape, from which to reconstruct an overall picture. Piecing
together real–life jigsaw puzzles is part of what
archaeologists do. They have to reconstitute, for instance, an
ancient vase from the set of recovered shards, a task that requires
a lot of guessing and testing. Guessing the solution of a scientific
problem is typically much more involved. Yet it has many
similarities with a jigsaw puzzle. When putting together a solution,
the scientist inspects each piece for a possible fit with its
neighbors and, bit by bit, constructs a whole argument.
Those most facile with jigsaw puzzles are able to divine what piece
will fit even before trying it. Similarly, the best scientists are
the ones who make the best guesses. That is, just having the ability
to guess is not enough; one has to come up with the right
answer—and before the competition does. One example of such a
guessing game in science involved Dorothy Wrinch and Linus Pauling.
Both were trying in the late 1930s and early '40s to guess the
structure of proteins by building physical models of them. Pauling
outguessed Wrinch. His theory, with alpha helices and beta sheets as
the well–ordered structural modules, was correct. Her cyclol
theory, which was based on rings, turned out to be wrong.
But scientists do not play only at outguessing one another; they
also play with toys (as do engineers, a point made recently in these
pages by Henry Petroski; see "Early Education,"
Engineering, May–June 2003). A fellow chemist, Joseph
B. Lambert, who is a professor at Northwestern University, shed some
light on the roots of this tendency in a letter he wrote to me a few
years ago:
When I grew up, every kid put in some serious
sandbox time, and it often involved building (what seemed like)
complex sand structures around which fantasies were composed and
competitions took place with neighborhood kids. The organic
chemistry labs (at Yale during the junior year) were fun in the
same way. We constructed molecules and competed with each other
in the class on speed and yield. We mixed things up, and
chemical transformations took place. We separated, we isolated,
we analyzed. The odors were pleasant, and the physical process
of working with our hands, as with sand, was satisfying. The
biweekly organic labs became the high points of my week. By the
end of the year, I knew that I wanted to be an organic chemist,
as I realized one could play in the sandbox for a living.
Indeed, many scientists amuse themselves by tinkering with the
various toys of their trade. They come up with ingenious devices to
get a particular job done or divert a piece of commercial equipment
from its original purpose for novel scientific uses. The apparatus
that Robert Millikan and graduate student Harvey Fletcher cobbled
together to measure the charge of the electron (involving, among
other things, a perfume atomizer bought at the local drugstore) is a
classic example of such inspired tinkering. A more recent one is
found in the work of Salvador Moncada of the Wellcome Research
Laboratories in England. He adapted a device intended for measuring
vehicle emissions to studying the production of nitric oxide in
biological tissues. As any experimentalist will testify, getting
such things to work not only conserves grant money, it's also good fun.
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