The Game of Science

Today was the first class meeting for my Copernican Revolution course.  We had a two hour lab period, of which the first 45 minutes was the typical course introduction (snore...).  But then I started talking to them about Gestalt Psychology and shifts of perception.  Maybe not what they were expecting.  We looked at the standard faces or vase image, which they all probably recognized. Then we looked at another image that they had never seen before. I let them come up with some wild guesses before I told them it was a cow. They didn't see the cow. Then I made them see the cow.

What, you may ask, does gestalt have to do with astronomy?  Well, it has a lot to do with scientific revolutions.  The Ancient Greeks saw the Sun and Moon as planets, and the Earth as very much a non-planet.  We see the Earth as a planet, the Sun and Moon not so much.  We are SEEING the same things, but we see them AS something different.  When I first showed the second picture my students and I were seeing the same image, but I saw it AS a cow and they did not.  Then I showed them how to see the cow, and now they, like me, cannot NOT see the cow.  That's how it goes.  Today it seems obvious that Earth rotates and orbits the Sun, but to get here we had to be taught how to see the cow.  Copernicus and others taught us how to do that, even though we (and by we I mean humans generally) resisted. 

So now my task is to try to help my students NOT see the cow.  We need to observe the night sky (simulated) without building all of our "knowledge" into what we see.  Then we can start constructing models.  That's what real scientists do.  They don't know already that it is a picture of a cow.  They can't see the cow when they start.  They have to discover the cow, and then teach others to see the cow.

To simulate how this works, we played a game.  Seriously.  It's a thing called the Game of Science and it was developed by Masters and Maloney at IUPUFW.  Each group of 4-5 students gets a game board, playing pieces, and descriptions (lists of moves) for several complete games.  They have to try to play through the games (with nothing more than the list of moves, in cryptic code, like "4 -> 6 [C]") and try to figure out what the rules of the game are. 

My class today did great.  They got right into it, and pretty quickly branched into two competing camps with different theories about how the game worked.  I brought them all together for a "conference" (just like scientists!) where they could give their theory of the game and defend it.  In the ensuing discussion I could have vanished and most of my students wouldn't have noticed.  Awesome!  They were doing exactly what I wanted them to do, and I didn't even need to be there.  Those days are the best.

Anyway, there was some controversy over the rules.  We didn't come to agreement.  And I didn't tell them the answer.  There is a good reason for that: I have never seen the rules to the game.  I don't know any more than they do (although I've done it several times, and I'm pretty sure I know how it works - but I didn't even give them that).  That's how science is.  It is not at all like what they are trained to do in typical science courses, where they can work the problem and then check their answer with the back of the book.  There is no "back of the book" when you are doing real science, there is only the world.  Sometimes the world is good about telling you that you are wrong, but it never quite tells you that you are right and it NEVER shows you the answer in plain text.  It's all about building confidence.  At some point your theory works so well that you become supremely confident in it.  That's about the time when you run into what is called an "anomaly" (there was one of those in the game, too) and things get fun again.

I also tried to point out that they did not approach their task as either automatons or blank slates led purely by the empirical data.  They made use of prior experience (they have all played board games, and most of them quickly concluded that this game was a lot like checkers - which may or may not be true).  They also had to get creative, especially when faced with the "anomaly".  This, too, is part of science.  Scientists attack any new problem with a set of assumptions about what constitutes an acceptable solution and what strategies are viable.  Those assumptions are based on their education and previous research experience (and maybe their religious convictions, political beliefs, personality, ethnicity, musical taste, etc, etc).  But science is also a fundamentally creative activity, a fact that few non-scientists seem to recognize.

I felt like it was a smashing success.  I just wish we had more time to argue about the game.  We could have gone on for another 30 minutes, at least, before reaching consensus.  But that's not so bad.  More than a century passed between the publication of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and widespread consensus that the Earth really does orbit the Sun.

Where do we go from here?  We watch another game being played.  This one involves stars and planets moving around in the night sky.  Maybe we can figure out the rules for that game.  But we just might run into a situation where we have two competing theories about how it all works....