Tehachapi News

It was delightful for me to read the post about memories of childhood in the Bakersfield Californian blog by my dear friend “Alicen,” and the several comments from others sharing their childhood memories. Granting not all of us had anything like “idyllic” childhoods nevertheless most of us seem to be able to call on some memories of the past as children to get us through some rough times as adults. As we grow older much of life tends toward the cautionary words of Mr. Raymond in “To Kill A Mockingbird” that children eventually grow out of their sense of injustice and weeping over this and have to come to grips with the world as it is, a world of adults in which the innocence of children gives way to the “practical” issues of life.

Harper Lee prefaced her literary masterpiece with a quote from the great essayist Charles Lamb: “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.” And, this supposition applies to scientists as well.

Over the decades my personal list of those with whom I share information on a variety of subjects in the scientific community has grown substantially. But most of us understand the need for brevity in such communication, though a few like me enjoy allowing our imaginations to become somewhat playful in these exchanges of information and points of view. Apart from these fruitful and interesting exchanges with individuals I find some of their personal thoughts often expressed in the science journals. Just recently one of my old friends at Stanford called my attention to something we had been discussing that had found its way into the journal Nature: “Desegregating science and the public: Explaining research through playful analogies can enliven discussion with nonspecialists. The limits of these analogies can be used to explore the limits of explanatory scope intrinsic to scientific hypotheses.”

A few years ago a friend and concert pianist from Japan was my houseguest. He was born in Romania but had taken up residence in Japan, had gotten married there and for years considered that his home country. But his memories of Romania as a child were filled with stories right out of Bram Stoker’s famous novel; he had known “witch’s” as a child, and though very well educated and gifted those stories about vampires and werewolves, charms and incantations remained with him, and he told me there were times when he had good cause to wonder where such things and science might yet come together? Since I am a writer, he understood my being given to many a “playful analogy” when expressing opinions of various thoughts in the scientific community, and he thanked me for some of the work I had done like my critique of TKM with the emphasis on children and how they view the world.

“Wouldn’t it be a marvelous thing,” he said, “if we could only retain the sense of wonder we had as children about so much before we had to grow out of those things that make childhood so marvelous?” Of course, he knew Harper Lee had called attention to this very thing in her novel, but he also knew it always bears repeating. There is nothing in science to compare with a child’s view of the world; it would be like trying to watch a butterfly in flight for the first time completely unaware of all the science that has gone into “explaining” butterflies. And as science begins its inevitable incursion on childhood, the “mystery” of the butterfly, the sense of childhood wonder at such a marvel is exchanged for the science explaining butterflies.

The wonders of our planet, our solar system and the universe still abound even for adults; and few of us can look at the Milky Way on a clear night without being filled with a sense of wonder even as was the Psalmist. Ah, that is where the “explanatory scope” of science must yield to analogies, playful or otherwise. This is where my pianist friend keeps his childhood memories of Romania alive through the myths and legends, and even my friends in the scientific community often express their wistful longings for the wonders and mysteries of childhood, that while these have given way to mysteries and wonders of another kind cannot recapture how some of these were viewed as children.

A few years ago when a university professor in Czechoslovakia and I were sharing our thoughts on the subject of love, as an atheist he was of the opinion it was an entirely bio/electro/chemical process. But he did qualify his opinion allowing there was much to the subject that for lack of scientific explanation could well be called “mysterious.” And so it is with many things in science when it hits a wall, a wall that some interpret as the mysteries of God, but children in their innocence filled with a sense of wonder and not yet having become either scientists or theologians are charmed by the mysteries surrounding them.

When NEWSWEEK's Ana Elena Azpurua interviewed Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas in Austin at one point she asked, “Would it be accurate to say that you are an atheist?” He replied, “Yes. I don't believe in God, but I don't make a religion out of not believing in God. I don't organize my life around that.”

Reading the interview I agreed with Weinberg, but also considered the many things people choose to organize their lives around. For many it is their idea of God in different forms, for others it seems to be power and wealth, some organize their lives around collecting stamps. Over the past years, for me it has been organizing my thoughts in written expression. But if I had the choice, I would rather organize my life around being a child once more, knowing the truth of Harper Lee’s world seen through the eyes of children and Thoreau’s observation that children play at life with more wisdom than adults live it.

Growing old, aging, has taken me quite by surprise and not all of it is pleasant. As a state senator friend of mine for many years and I agreed some time ago, we feel at times we have lived too long and know too much. After all, it is only in childhood that angels and butterflies find their proper place and occupations and somehow deep within me there is still that child that in his innocent wisdom knows what the real priorities of life should be.