Of Scientists and Birds

Richard Feynman said: “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” While the wit and humor is well-taken, one realizes (with some degree of pain too) that that precisely is the problem dear Watson!

My mother used to read out selected editorials to me when I was lingering between don’t-yet-find-the-newspaper-appealing-enough-to-take-it-up and sufficiently-infatuated-by-certain-forms-and-genres-of-information that came out in the vernacular newspaper that we take at home. It was from one such piece that I first heard the name of this Nobel winner physicist and his autobiography (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!) and the anecdote of how, while sitting under a starry sky, he had looked up and muttered to his ladylove that the stars twinkle for all humanity underneath but only he knows precisely why they twinkle. At that young impressionable age, when I was half in love with almost any man who would take the trouble of looking up at the sky and sigh out loud, I found this piece of muttering fascinating (what conviction!) – and yet a subtle, almost hidden within some corner of my mind, nagging feeling remained (did the words contain some sort of arrogance?). I could never be sure.

And now, confronted with the former expostulation of the great 20th century scientist, I was almost sure that it was the latter, even if one were to give him some passage on account of his sense of (masculine) humour. But for a few like George Canguilhem, Bruno Latour, Thomas Kuhn, Sundar Sarukkai, Donna Haraway, C. K. Raju, most scientists have indeed thought of HPS (History and Philosophy of Science) and HSS (History and Sociology of Science) as almost meaningless and a substantial waste of time, almost as relevant to them as astronomy is for the existence of the stars, or the knowledge of cellular biology for the cells. The point is that they have continued considering themselves as faraway stars and flying high birds and nondescript and invisible cells. Well, if their work and they themselves were indeed thus – tiny, minute, microscopic, invisible and somewhat inconsequential – we (that is, we who consider HPS and HSS important and relevant enough) might have granted them their whim and their witty quotations. But the problem is that they crack the “mystery of life” – the genome – and plan to clone human beings, us, and crack the “mystery of death” (am referring to E. F. Keller’s essay) by coming up with the fundamentals of atomic fission and then they decide to experimentally drop the “baby” (their code for the A-bomb) on two Japanese towns (I say experimentally because by then Japan had surrendered to Russia and it was decided between the three great powers that it would still drop the bomb since millions had gone into its construction – so why not check the workability? And actually the two sites had been not targeted in anyway whatsoever during the war, since Oppenheimer’s strict instructions were that they needed to see and measure the exact impact the “baby” would have on a fresh site! Taking away a lady’s virginity and measuring the exact degree of shame and pain? Well, so much for science.

Smaller cases: Dams are built on rivers and inevitably only the farmers, the adivasis and the dalits are displaced. Contraceptions are devised and inevitably the subaltern and working class women are targeted. When mines are built and minerals appropriated by big companies and the state, it is inevitably the tribals whose homelands are evacuated. Yet no 'design'?

History is not a leveler... it shores up power gradients and guilt and anger...

Class, caste, economy, history and sex …. They exist and no one scientist on this planet till now has been born who was not born into few of these affiliative categories…and these categories precisely exist to perpetrate and perpetuate difference. And to do just science, ethical science, one is bound to be bothered. It needs to be taken as the Hippocrates’ Oath. It should matter more than ornithology does to birds, because the scientists is not the transient bird, the little bird that can come and go without altering basic human life in anyway (and that too we know, it does…it does lie in a netted relationship with human species). But, granting the scientists their male egos, if they want the Nobel unlike the sparrow or the duck, or want patents unlike the crow or the robin, or want to be immortalized unlike the ostrich or the cuckoo, they had better take both ornithology and history of science a little more seriously.

The bird at best will shit on our expensive dress and we can shoot it down with an air-gun and fry it for dinner … red wine…

They might press a button and the world might go up in nuclear smoke … we’ll all be dead long before we can put them to trial …

So, it’s best they realize, and we remember it.