Reconciling with Sciences, finally!

Science and Social Science

A decade ago, this was all I thought. Science versus Social Science. Trust me, this occupied my headspace more than any other adolescent’s probably. And there was a reason for it. I grew up loving all that was Social Science. Then Class XIth happened and I had to make a decision, which turned out to be a bad one. Unwillingly, I took up Science and I flunked. Next year, I finally moved to what I loved and topped the school. Those three years made the division clear to me. Science was science and something that had given me a horrendous year and Social Science was Social Science, always my natural calling where I felt at home. And never twain shall meet, I thought.

Naturally, my calling led me to more years of studying what I loved and that’s how I spent the next five years doing my Graduation and Post Graduation in Political Science. And anyone who knows me also knows how much I loved being a Political Science student. I was proud of choosing a discipline that made me think and question everything. I was going back and forth in time to understand why things are the way they are today. I was coming up with my own explanations of things. I began to look at societal realities through multiple lenses which hitherto was invisible to me. In doing so, I also began to feel more empowered since it felt I had accessed those parts of my inner self which I didn’t know existed. All this power came from one thing – questioning. The course work, the lectures, and the debates and discussions were merely but very importantly nudges towards me trying to look beyond what was presented in front of me. Looking back, I was on a thinking overdrive for most of those five years and most of the time frustrated and amazed at the same time. Frustrated at my inability to change much at what I could comprehend but amazed at being able to comprehend what lay in front of me.

Science, in all these years for me, was a buried skeleton. My education had taught me to respect it but I maintained my distance from it, still wary of being made to feel like a fool in front of it. Meanwhile, another wonderful thing that happened to me in those five years was my tryst with this geeky little world of quizzing. Among the many contributions of this tryst to my life, the most significant was its nudge towards pushing me towards the world of knowing. For a brief period, the naïve and innocent me wanted to know everything at once. In this quest to know as much as I could, one thing that became clear to me was that everything was actually connected. The more you know, the clear the connections become to your mind. The boundaries between Sciences and Social Sciences weren’t as hard and impenetrable as my education system had told me. All that existed out there was a world of knowledge to be chased, a world with its many mysteries to be explored and understood. Soon, propelled by curiosity, I found myself at the other end like a kid who had unwittingly trespassed into the neighbor’s garden.

Long back when I had made the choice to go the Social Sciences way, I think it had a lot to do with my own inner turmoils and confusion as a teenager. Science intimidated me with its claims to have the ability to know the exact truth. Or at least that’s how it was sold to me. I remember being seduced by this speech from my teacher on how unlike numbers and chemicals which always mix to give the same result, social sciences deal with human minds whose uniqueness means predicting outcomes is foolhardy. I enjoyed how throughout academia, even the most fundamental terms that might be called the building blocks of Social Sciences continue to be debated and redefined. That’s the truth that speaks to me, one that’s subjective in nature.

That, however, was before the little kid had walked into the other garden chasing questions. My second tryst with sciences, which began only a couple of years ago, helped me see things in a different light. This world, I realized, was conjoined with that world in its need to know and understand through asking questions. They may be asking different questions and to different things but the point of beginning of that inquiry and the eventual objective, I have felt, are the same. The reason I have been able to reconcile with Science in the last few years is because now I see most scientific inquiries as philosophical inquiries and just like those in social sciences, they all emanate from the same source - our desire to know and our discomfort at not knowing. So, I think when we shine a light on the dark and vast space, it's because we are trying to make sense of our own selves, our place in the universe and trying to comprehend our realities better, something that science isn’t the only one trying to do. All inquiries of social sciences too are aimed towards that objective if you look closely. We humans are intrigued by the world that’s within us and the one that’s outside, both of which are equally infinite. Most developments in Science and the heated debates in Social Science are mere by-products of curious souls trying to make sense of those two worlds.

Truth be told, I feel I have been able to warm up to science at this age largely because it has brought me face to face with that vulnerable side of Science that I didn’t know existed. In a strange way, It was relieving to realize that Science too doesn’t know everything in contrast to what my high school teachers asserted. It tries to explain what’s happening through whatever limited knowledge it has. Although considering the magnitude of the task in front of it, those are nothing more than little stabs in the dark. But to its credit, it remains in pursuit and that is what has attracted me towards it in recent years. I have begun to see Science as a keen student, so keen in its pursuit of truth that it remains unafraid of the prospect of its next discovery leading it to revise everything that it and the world has known till now. And that’s brave. What’s braver is to pursue answers to questions that might not even have answers. In this way, Science has exposed itself as naïve, vulnerable and often clueless to me. And maybe that’s why I don’t feel embarrassed now to not understand much of what I read because somewhere I picture Science looking at the vast empty space out there and looking as clueless and unsure as me.

But it doesn’t stop questioning. And so shouldn’t I either.