Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, and
Other Metaphors for Modern Science:
- or -
Where's the User's Manual for This Thing?
Winter Lecture, Arts & Science Program
William E. Harris
November 30, 1999
INTRODUCTION
The discipline that we call Science often appears to the general public to be a huge, monolithic, and somewhat mysterious business, which exerts all kinds of powerful but ill-understood effects on society. Accurate and thoughtful discussions of its inner workings are rare. And in fact, there is no denying that is sometimes just as mysterious to those inside it as those outside. No one hands you a user's manual when you enter graduate school or start your first research project. How does science actually get done? Why does it have the undoubted successes that it does?
The longer I've thought about the question of how science works, the more it tends to turn into another question, which is to ask who scientists are. And I've come to the conclusion that in some sense, we scientists are people who suffer from a rare form of Multiple Personality Disorder. By this, I hasten to mean that I am not thinking of classic fictional characters like Baron von Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll, who foolishly give physical form to their dark alter egos with disastrous results. The picture I want to build up here is intended to be much closer to the way scientists really do function today.
Questions about the nature of this huge social enterprise that we label science are, of course, pretty big ones, and it is easily possible to spend a whole career investigating the rich variety of approaches to the philosophy and sociology of science that are being explored and debated. So I will be quick to say that all I'm going to offer are a few short ideas, rather shakily supported by direct experience and by a variety of statements that others have made about this issue.
The first half of my discussion is intended to present very brief
excursions into three different metaphors that are often presented when
the subject of scientific process comes up. All of these have elements
of truth, but all of them are also, in my view, limited in their
reality quotient. In the second half, I will build up a view that
seems to me to represent more closely what is really going on.
CURIOSITY AND THE CHESHIRE CAT
Probably the most widespread way that science is presented - one which is reinforced through early school days, in most textbooks, and through many places in the popular media - is that the outside world of nature is seen as a marvellous playground full of fascinating things to discover and explore, and all we have to do is look around. In this picture, scientists are portrayed as creatures of plain old curiosity. And, in fact, there genuinely is a lot within science that supports this view. To draw from my own subject (astronomy), it would be easy to come in and tell you about things like exploding stars; galaxies at the edge of the universe; giant planets around other stars; black holes; nebulae where new stars and planetary systems are being formed today -- amazing stuff that seems little short of magic. And every discipline within science has its own utterly fascinating attractions and astonishments of this sort.
One of the best representations of this metaphor is Lewis Carroll's fictional character, Alice [though she was based on a real person, Alice Liddell, who was about the same age when Carroll made up the first version of these stories for her]. Alice's pre-eminent characteristic is that she has curiosity. She has, in fact, an endless supply of curiosity, which leads her through a bizarre but mostly happy set of adventures through Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
We're frequently invited to view scientists as people like this: curious, rather naive, unworldly sorts of individuals who love chasing after their own ideas, free to explore all kinds of entrancing Wonderland creatures, with no thought given to usefulness, effects on society as a whole, and so on. In fact, in lots of TV shows and Hollywood movies, it's become pretty much stereotypical that scientists are so driven by this curiosity motive that it's obsessive and unhealthy.
[Incidentally, my favorite sections of Alice in Wonderland include her encounters with the Cheshire Cat - who is a sort of enigmatic, oracular figure who appears and disappears without warning, seems to know everything, but will never give a straight answer to a question: scientist readers will recognize the Cat immediately as a personification of Nature. After meeting him in the woods a couple of times, Alice complains that he's coming and going too suddenly. The Cat cheerfully responds by performing a cinematic fade-out:
... this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.
Oddly enough, what this passage frequently reminds me of is the way we
tend to teach science: our books most often present the results of the
subject in a nicely cleaned up, orderly, logical way, with very little
to say about the history or the people involved. The whole active body
of the subject - that is, the process of discovery - has faded away and
we are left only with the grin. We write textbooks like this and then
wonder why people don't understand how science works!]
In the end, though, this curiosity metaphor has serious problems. There's Alice herself: by the end of the story, she is still getting into one crazy mess after another. She hasn't developed any kind of judgment or selectivity to go along with her inherent curiosity and enthusiasm. For the sheer fun of the Lewis Carroll stories, of course, we wouldn't want it any other way; but for the real process of science there's something rather limited about this view.
Similarly, the term ``curiosity-driven research'' has been used in recent years for some rather sad political ends, as if this form of exploration were not just useless but also wasteful and undesirable. In fact, my experience has been that even the scientists who are doing the most esoteric kinds of work, for which it seems virtually impossible even to imagine any kind of practical application, are not people who are simply poking around aimlessly. More often, they are researchers who are extremely focussed and organized about what they are doing. They want to find the answers to their questions, and are willing to put an enormous amount of directed energy into doing it.
And then, of course, there is the plain message from the historical
record extending as far back as we want to look: the purest, most
curiosity-directed research (in the words of author Robert
A. Heinlein) ``has an annoying habit of paying for itself many
times in the long run''.
PARADIGMS LOST
But there are other schemes for viewing the way that scientists operate. Certainly one of the most well known of these was solidified by Thomas Kuhn in his classic book ``The Structure of Scientific Revolutions''. Kuhn invites us to view scientific work as operating within paradigms: a paradigm is just a framework, or point of view, within which questions are asked and discussions are held. (For example, a broad current paradigm in astrophysics is that the whole universe is not infinitely old, but began at a certain moment in an event called the Big Bang. This statement, based on several pieces of observable evidence, leads to a whole well developed picture of cosmology which dominates present-day thinking in the subject.) Any paradigm is seen as resting on various assumptions which are not questioned or sometimes not even looked at.
But paradigms can be overturned or replaced at certain points in history, usually because of the work of particularly visionary people. For example, the Newtonian worldview or paradigm which was developed step by step in the 1600's, was one in which Nature behaves by a set of simple, well defined physical principles (such as F = ma, conservation of energy, the law of gravity, and so forth), and that these rules apply everywhere in the universe, of which the Earth is simply a small part. It replaced an older, medieval paradigm in which the Earth was more of a distinct place, separate from the unknown rules governing the rest of the cosmos, about which only the gods knew everything. Similarly, the Newtonian view was replaced in turn almost three centuries later by Einstein's picture that space is curved by matter, that time is relative, and that very strange things indeed start happening if you travel around near the speed of light.
These paradigm shifts have the power to change the way that people see and think. On a social scale, that is their importance. Their influence can be very broad: In the late 1800's, Charles Darwin's deep new thinking about biological evolution created a monumental paradigm shift in biology which worked its way out into all of society.
This way of looking at the historical development of science unquestionably has a lot of validity. What tends to bother me, though, is that this view seems rather too politically based. In some areas of science, paradigm shifts may seem not to rest on very strong reasons. When we adopt a new framework, are we really just exchanging one limiting and repressive way of thinking for another? Such a changeover tends to resemble certain other scenes from Alice in Wonderland, such as the Mad Hatter's Tea Party where at random and unexplained times the players all get up and move to different seats. Or, even better, there's the incident later in the book where Alice comes across a rosebush with white roses. The political authorities, though, have decreed that it was supposed to be a red rosebush, so these gardeners busily set to work painting the flowers red, arguing amongst themselves all the while. One can imagine that there will be another group of painters coming along next with buckets of yellow paint, perhaps, once the authorities change their minds again. And after several cycles of this, everyone might start forgetting what the original color really was. So are paradigm shifts just about storylines, politics and power structures, as the postmodernists would have us believe?
We could spend a long time pursuing the business of paradigm shifts and
their relation to the society of the time. But I am left thinking that
this whole business is not what brings people into science, or what
drives it in the first place.
MAKING MISTAKES AND LOVING IT
Earlier in this century, another philosopher of science, Karl Popper, put his finger on an essential feature of the operation of science. It has to do with the rather odd property of scientific statements or ideas that they cannot be proved! We don't actually prove things in natural science. The reason for this is simply that Nature is always trickier and more complex and more extensive than our best ideas will allow for, so even our best ideas fall short of the truth. Only in pure mathematics do we have the ability to make statements that can be rigorously proved. But we can do something else instead: good scientific ideas have the paradoxical property that they can be shown to be wrong; that is, that they are falsifiable.
What this means is that we make progress in science by a rather perverse route: we can move forward by ruling out wrong ideas - running experiments, putting them to the test and seeing if they hold up. If they don't, then we discard them, and what's left over after we've tested lots of ideas has a much better chance of being on the right track.
This view forever changed the old, stereotypical picture that scientific progress is smooth and inevitable - the old nonsense that ``science marches on'', like some army which always knows where it's going and where everyone thinks alike. Instead, ``progress'' begins to look like a zigzag random walk, and our robotic army begins to look more like a herd of cats.
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The history of any field of science involves lots of steps in different and often unexpected directions - maybe with an occasional big leap created by a particularly influential genius like Galileo or Einstein or Darwin. But we very often find ourselves at a point where we actually don't know where to go next. Our formerly reliable routes may have just run out of steam, or stopped yielding anything new. Where do we go next? We're lost in the woods. How do we find our way past point A through the forest, when the only things we can see are the trees? |
It turns out that we have only two choices. One is to sit and wait for an Isaac Newton to come along and tell us the right thing to do. But that's not much of a general strategy; most of the time, we would be left doing nothing.
| The key is that to discover something new, or find the right route forward, we have to try new approaches. But we don't know beforehand which of them will work. So, our second and much more dependable choice is try everything. We simply fan out in all directions and then get everyone to come back and report. One of the routes - very often an unexpected one - will lead to a new point B, and the others won't. |
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The essence of it is captured beautifully (in the absolute minimum number of words!) by Nobel laureate chemist Linus Pauling:
The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.
Our political leaders, when they fund science, are trying to do the best they can on a limited budget. They may often wonder why we couldn't have put our money on that one successful route and not wasted it on all the others that didn't lead anywhere. But as one of our own Canadian Nobel laureates, John Polanyi, says:
It is notoriously difficult to select from among unmade discoveries those that will be the most useful.
In other words, at every stage of the game you desperately need to have lots of people out there trying lots of different things. This is part of what makes the working process of science such a social and cooperative enterprise, and what makes things like scientific conferences such tremendous fun - when everyone gets together to discuss what's new, present papers, and argue in the hallways over what seems to be progressive and what doesn't.
This rather scattered ``route'' to discovery - not a broad highway, but rather a tangled woodland path - is, incidentally, the only truly reliable one that we humans have ever developed. From time to time, the possibility of finding a more rigorous ``logic of discovery'' gets talked about: that is, can we work out some well defined procedure for defining new ideas which could then be applied everywhere to make rapid and unerring progress? In a very real sense, such a goal is like trying to bottle creativity, and has always failed. Despite thousands of years of trying, we flatly do not know how to generate new ideas on demand. The best instruction manual we can give goes like this: immerse yourself in the subject, read everything about it, talk to lots of people, try a variety of new things, and wait for that essential inspiration, that essential new connection, to be made in its own good time. It will surprise you. Karl Popper puts it very well:
The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it.
This whole view, of course, puts a huge amount of emphasis on innovation. (Please notice that politicians and managers are very, very fond of that word. It is the watchword of the day in our culture.) To make progress, we need lots of new ideas. You can set it all up like a little four-point table:
Ideas can be anywhere on the scale from ``Right'' to ``Wrong'', but also anywhere on the other scale from ``Innovative'' down to ``Boring''. The best combination is, obviously, Right and Innovative. But that pair is really reserved for the occasional Einsteins. Generally, the best we can hope for is to be Wrong (which we are most of the time, at least partly) but Innovative. Boring and Right is OK, but it ranks far below Innovative and Wrong in the present culture of science.
One of the most appealing expressions of this attitude is something that I ran across in the excellent recent book Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh. It's the story of the recent work of the British mathematician Andrew Wiles which led to his famous proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. A prelude to Wiles' work was made by two Japanese mathematicians in what was called the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture, which itself was a major accomplishment. Here is what Shimura had to say about his colleague Taniyama:
Taniyama was the epitome of the absentminded genius ... [and] sloppy to the point of laziness. Surprisingly this was a trait that Shimura admired. ``He was gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction. I envied him for this and tried in vain to imitate him, but found it quite difficult to make good mistakes''.
What a wonderful phrase that is: ``make good mistakes''! Most of what we do is wrong, most of the time! But that's OK. The yellow brick road of progress is paved with good mistakes. In addition, the route of simply trying everything and seeing what works carries a beautiful bonus along with it: Serendipity is our fellow voyager. By searching for that path through the thicket, we run across other connections, other roads that were not on our agenda.
There are many aspects of this whole view of science that are insightful and even liberating, and there's no doubt that it has a healthy ring of truth to it. But it's still not the whole story. The problems I see with it are -
- Most of our experiments don't actually ``falsify'' anything; they simply add to the body of evidence. It's very rare that we actually have an issue that is sharp enough to be answered yes-or-no in a single experiment. More often, we simply accumulate evidence, and gradually the right track starts to emerge; this takes time, and there may be no particular single turning point in the discussion.
- Although it's occasionally fun to show that some old established view is actually wrong, it's really a lot more fun just to find something entirely new, something that no one has seen before.
- Lastly, the culture of innovation leads to a kind of condition that I think of as the `tyranny of the new'. In following the banner of innovation too eagerly, people spin off new ideas without giving them enough critical thought, and everyone begins expecting that new things are the only ones that matter. We need a culture in which the progressive old directions, and the potentially progressive new ones, can coexist.
So this approach, to my mind, still doesn't capture the essence of what
scientists are all about.
PROFILE OF A SCIENTIST: VISIONARY, SKEPTIC, CRAFTSMAN
How do we get onto the right track? All this talk about paradigms and innovation and falsifiability tends to concentrate on the machinery of science rather than on the people who are actually doing it. And the bottom line is, that science is not something that we've discovered, like some mountain that was there before we came along. It's something that we've built - more like a house that keeps on growing, with the furniture renovated from time to time, and new rooms and wings being steadily added. And the nature of anything we build strongly reflects who we are, as people. As an alternate approach, then, let's think more carefully about what our ideal scientist might be like.
First, we need to bring back Alice - or, a somewhat different version
of her. Simple ``curiosity'' isn't quite the right label for the
essential characteristic that we want. Consider this statement:
Inside each one of us is an artist ... And that's what an artist is, a child who has never lost the gift of looking at life with curiosity and wonder.
(Marjorie Lismer Bridges, 1977)
As a description of an artist, very few people would argue with that statement. I wouldn't argue with it either, because I think it's right. But now compare this (from chapter 1 of your favorite physics text):
A scientist is a person who retains some of the childlike sense of curiosity and wonder about nature.
(Harris Benson, 1991)
Now clearly a genuine artist is more than just what's said in the first quote, while a scientist is more than what's said in the second one. Each of them also needs to know how to give tangible form to their particular vision. But these statements do capture the very deep connection between the arts and the sciences. That connection is in the sense of wonder, coupled with the ability to recognize new things and make new connections.
Shown below are two of my favorite pictures - even though in the first one, I don't know who the person is, or where or when the picture was taken. This little girl is discovering her shadow. Her whole posture portrays total, focussed attention, complete absorption in this fascinating new thing.
The second example is from a family in Burlington, Ontario. Here, the little girl is getting her first, forever transforming, view of the stars.
The sense of wonder usually begins at a very young age and only needs a few special events like these ones to ignite the flame forever. There are many other labels we can put on this inbuilt frame of mind: active openness to new ideas, the ability to see connections between apparently unrelated things, the insight to find places where solutions to problems might lie, the ability to define entirely new problems: a spirit of inquiry. Lewis Carroll's Alice took something ordinary (the mirror in her living room) and transformed it into something entirely new (a gateway to the Looking Glass World).
I want to stress that the quality called sense of wonder is far more than simple curiosity. It is, in fact, no less than a basic human drive. When it's fully engaged, it can compete quite effectively with other basic human drives - even food, sleep, and shelter. And it can spur people to do really quite amazing things. What other reason would you have, for example, to spend weeks in a bug-infested jungle patiently recording the behavior of some shy bird? Or years investigating a tribe of gorillas? Or months patiently scraping dirt away from buried fossils? Or hovering as close as possible to an active volcano? Or travelling to a mountaintop hundreds of miles from civilization just to spend night after night in freezing cold observing the stars? There are lots of other ways to go after fame and fortune that don't involve the same levels of danger, deprivation, or tedium. The only explanation for this kind of behavior is that you are so fascinated with the questions you have set for yourself that you just can't imagine anything else you would rather do. This qualifies as vastly more than simple curiosity.
One other very important feature of our visionary is her directness. Alice doesn't ask questions in order to sound clever, to intimidate others, or to play intellectual games. She asks a question because she wants to know the answer. That is the way we all asked questions when we were children, and that is the mind-set we still have to hang onto now as adults.
But personal vision, insight, enthusiasm, and perseverance do not by
themselves translate into science. We need someone who will put our
raw ideas to the test; who will adopt a critical, ``show-me'' attitude
to anything we put in front of him; who will insist that we get our
facts straight and get more evidence to back up our initial
perhaps-foolish claims. In other words, we need a Skeptic.
More to the point, we can't even look on this fellow as a separate person. We have to take him all the way inside us and make him an integral part of what we do. His role is utterly necessary to the business of science, but it's also a tough and thankless one. The Alice part of our persona is always eager to run ahead to the next exciting idea or vision; but the Skeptic is always tugging back, relentlessly insisting on more tests; more evidence; deeper thought; finding flaws - or even fatal errors - in even our favorite and most dearly held ideas. But this attitude of continual self-criticism is what keeps the whole business of science reputable and workable.
Alice and Sherlock of course don't always get along very well. Often, they are like oil and water. Carl Sagan, in his recent book The Demon-Haunted World expresses their dichotomy very nicely as ``skepticism and wonder ... the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method''.
Two old sayings summarize things nicely:
Minds are like parachutes: they function best when open
but
Don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
However, we are still not where we need to be. We can be people who
are perceptive, visionary, skeptical, and tough-minded, but still not
know how to put our keen thinking into practice. So we need one
final element of our team: someone who can tell us how to get from
point A to point B, who knows all the tricks of the trade and can do
the sophisticated work that we may need. In other words, we need a
Craftsman who knows the tools and techniques of our
business.
Every particular discipline within science - and the arts! - has its own body of lore, of tools and ``know-how'' which any professional needs to acquire at least to some extent. Things like designing and running lab equipment, knowing what's in the literature, computer usage, analytical and mathematical techniques, and even management skills come under this category. In short, we have to have the expertise to get the job done. The people in this category - the true Craftsmen - are extremely valuable in every field. In fact, their business is usually a whole field of research in itself: keeping pace with the latest techniques allows us to keep improving what we do, and from time to time opens the door to entirely new kinds of experiments that were never possible before.
The Visionary, the Skeptic, and the Craftsman make up the essential parts of our complete scientist. (To borrow a term from Jungian psychology, these three are the archetypes of our field - the deep personality prototypes that lie under the surface. In mathematical terms, we could describe these three as the eigenfunctions or, perhaps, the basis vectors i, j, k of our coordinate space.) With all three of these personae working together, we have a truly powerful team. With it, we know what we want to do and how to test it. We know where we are going and how to get there. Alice provides us with the ideas, the questions, and the keen desire to find the answer. The Craftsman will tell us what tools to use and what way to go about things. Finally, the Skeptic will tell us if our results are any good, and if we must, to go back and try again, revise our ideas, get better tools, say things more clearly, correct our mistakes. we must be very clear, though, who is in charge. Alice is without question the driver: she sets the goals, she defines the questions, she charts the direction we go in. The roles of the Skeptic and Craftsman are not in question, but they cannot set our agenda.
Vision, technique, and criticism: these are the essential human-centered elements of the scientific process. When we put it like this, however, it seems more true than ever what a deep unity exists between the arts and the sciences. Vision, technique, and criticism live and move and have their being on both sides of the fence, and it is only the particular direction we choose to point these tools that determines what field they end up serving.
What parts of this complete package can be learned, and what can't? To a large extent, the whole purpose of a training experience like graduate school and the other early years of a research scientist's career is exactly to develop the Craftsman side of this multiple personality. That is, you simply need to learn how to work within your chosen field.
To some extent, it is also possible to learn how to be a healthy Skeptic. This way of thinking does not come naturally to most of us: we would rather not turn a critical eye on our own ideas. But there is no doubt whatsoever that if we don't do it, someone else will. It is simply a step in the process that has to be faced squarely. With the right training and some experience, it's possible to develop this critical habit of mind without losing your balance.
But the essential sense of wonder, if it's not there to begin with, is not something that anyone really knows how to teach - only encourage. We offer no course labelled ``Creativity and Vision 1A03'', because we simply do not know how to teach those things except by example and reinforcement.
It is no accident that the Craftsman is the most common public face of science: scientists are usually shown as people who have command of all kinds of advanced, esoteric tools and bodies of knowledge. Less often, they are shown as people of vision. Still less often, they are shown as razor-sharp skeptics. That, of course, is not too surprising. People will admire and support craftsmen; they may stand in awe of visionaries; but they will be uneasy about skeptics, or even reject them.
THE DARK SIDE: GOING OFF THE RAILS
By now it may seem that keeping these three very different personalities constantly coexisting inside one head is a pretty difficult job. At different times, each one of them will want to take a turn at running the whole show. And there are times for each one of them when that's quite appropriate: for example, when you are in the grip of a dazzling new idea, you need to give Alice full rein while you explore it. A bit later, though, it will be time to turn things over to the Skeptic and find out if it will stand up to scrutiny. The danger comes about when one persona begins to dominate permanently and the other two wither away to minor figures in the background.
(1) If Alice dominates, we have a person who may have lots of ideas and insights but does not have the discipline and selectivity to see them through and find out which ones are on the right track. Such people may become rather naive ``butterflies'' who flit cheerfully from one attractive flower to the next, but with short-lived results. The worst scenario is that such people can actually fall prey to the Dark Side, using their enthusiasm and brilliance to support totally wrong directions.
(2) If our Skeptic takes over, something different goes wrong. If you live constantly with this rather severe cast of mind and don't temper it with the spark that Alice provides, then after a while, no one's work (including your own!) looks ``good enough''; you become obsessed with the admittedly seductive process of criticizing and finding flaws. Such people can become permanently lost to cynicism, no longer fueled by the joy and exhilaration that should always be part of the scientific enterprise. You can rely on the Skeptic to give you rigor and solidity, but don't look to him for directions.
(3) Finally, if the Craftsman takes over, you can become sidetracked with the methods and tools themselves, and forget why you originally started this business. Other people, with a stronger sense of direction, will be only too happy to come by, adopt your tools and techniques, and finish off the research that you might have originally intended to do. Admittedly, it's fun to play with and improve your toys. Some people even develop whole careers out of this route, making themselves masters of methodology. These people are often in great demand, but only in teams of researchers where other people are setting the priorities and purposes.
It is, indeed, a lot to ask for a single person to have all these
abilities, and to keep them all in order. That's the second big reason
why science is a social, community process and why most research is
done in teams. If you're good at ideas but not so good at (say)
computer programming, then meet up with a colleague who is, and get
together. And if both of you need a sharp critic on your team, then
find one. It has happened over and over again in the history of
science that truly new tools and experimental tests were invented in
response to the need to investigate some new idea - or, conversely,
that new research directions were opened up because new techniques
suddenly became available. These ``parts'' of your combined
personality don't even need to be people in offices down the hall;
after a while, your best friends and colleagues may be anywhere around
the country, or the world.
My conclusion, then, is that we need all three, and we need them in symbiosis. The three must constantly both talk and listen to each other. They must stay in dynamic balance where they belong. By gathering together people with these characteristics, we need not worry whether or not what they are doing fits into some particular model for the structure or method or machinery of science: we know that they can figure out what to do for themselves. The way that we do science is still changing and developing. But as long as science is done by human beings, the Visionary, the Skeptic, and the Craftsman are going to be with us.
The pursuit of science is more than the pursuit of understanding. It is driven by the creative urge, the urge to construct a vision, a map, a picture ... that gives the world a little more beauty and coherence than it had before.
John Archibald Wheeler (1998)
This essay is a written and somewhat extended version of a talk given to the McMaster Arts & Science Program on November 30, 1999. I have attempted as far as possible to preserve the informal style of the presentation, and I am grateful to the Director of the Arts & Science Program, Dr. Barbara Ferrier, for the opportunity to put these ideas into concrete form.
The original idea for this topic came from my reading of Carl Sagan's superb recent book, The Demon-Haunted World. In it, Sagan explored two of the key elements that make up a scientist (the visionary and the skeptic) and developed the way in which these personalities play off against each other, and against society at large.
The illustrations are from several sources. The caricature of Sherlock Holmes was done by Rick Showalter while he was on staff at Kitt Peak National Observatory (NOAO, Tucson, Arizona), and the craftsman sketch is an icon of Norm Abram from the popular PBS television program The New Yankee Workshop, the Website for which is at www.newyankee.com/. The photo of the little girl with her shadow was taken by Marlene Russell and appeared on the cover of the weekly bulletin for the United Church of Canada for June 15, 1997. Stephen Barnes of Burlington, Ontario kindly provided the photo of his young daughter at the telescope. Finally, the illustrations for the Lewis Carroll stories (Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) are, of course, the classic ones by John Tenniel. Complete and well presented versions of the Carroll/Tenniel texts can be found on the Web at www.ba.infn.it/~cirillo/lumenvitae/wonderland/wonder.html and www.research.digital.com/SRC/personal/birrell/alice/ .