Show and Tell

It's the end of the semester at Harvard.

Classes are over. Exams are done or soon to be done. The calming rush to the break has begun. Even the weather, once strangely Floridian, has surrendered to cold, usual habits.

A delicious demo at the Science & Cooking Fair.

At SEAS, each day brings yet another fair (your pick of elegant programming or pasta 2.0); exhibition (innovations like email you can squeeze or cable TV right on your laptop), or end of class project demo (racing ATVs powered by screwdriver motors or racing cell lines on a microfluidic track).

You might say that engineers like to show off.

Then again, demonstrating solutions, innovations, and engaging with an audience is part of the design process.

For the attendees the events are inspiring, fun, eye-opening, and sometimes overwhelming. Upon leaving the CS 50 fair---jam packed with students, squeeze balls, and heavy bass beats (and several costumed angry birds)---many felt as if they had just left a late night club on Landsdowne street.

I wouldn't want to be that egg.

During the fray of back-to-back expos, I myself tasted egg free garlic aioli; learned about a smart course/concentration selection tool that takes dumb data and transforms into useful intelligence; delved into the inner workings of a new, safer cranial drill; and met Lit majors who built Andoid apps and biologists who created online anatomy tools.

In the words of our dean, that we are attracting concentrators from all fields is downright "cool."

After each showcase, I heard a similar refrain from friends and colleagues who had the chance to peak into the inner workings of active learning: "I would love to take that class!"; "I want to see even more---let me know when anything else is coming up."; "I mean, wow, this is not the same Harvard of even five years ago."

These reactions---for a field that most high school students know almost nothing about ("Intel survey of teenagers shows that they don't know what engineers do, limiting from choosing those careers.") may suggest that we are winning the war on scientific and engineering literacy.

It's a good, if not great, start---but only a start.

The fairs, after all, only show a part of the inner workings of engineering and the applied sciences. The latter elements (especially the applied sciences) are harder to get your hands around.

At Harvard, we pride ourselves on our distinguished history of basic science and theory. Soil mechanics. Radio. NMR. Environmental modelling. The mechanics of cracking and breaking.

Even theoretical physics can be fun.

Today, a good number of our faculty remain committed to teasing out the limits of applied math (modeling how a flower grows and forms); rethinking common concepts like the stability of emulsions; or bending and twisting the laws of physics.

However impressive and important, these are not the easiest findings to display and play with (let alone write about).

When reporting on more theoretically-minded findings, a common joke in the SEAS Communications Office is that the following line will inevitably have to be invoked: "To achieve the breakthrough the team conducted some very sophisticated modelling."

Meaning, if we went into the details, the amount of math we would need to show and terms we would need to define would be harrowing.

The challenge of making theory tangible brings to mind a fantastic editorial by Bruce Wightman, "A Better Rationale for Science Literacy."

I think there may be a better reason that science literacy should be a major component of higher-education curricula. There is something transcendent about studying science. The humanities and social sciences, for the most part, concern themselves with the creations of human beings, our behavior, or the structure of our societies. In contrast, the sciences force us to confront the smallness and irrelevance of human beings; they serve as an antidote to self-obsession. Physics teaches us that time and matter are not absolutes; biology, that astonishing complexity can arise from a long, natural, stepwise process. The scope and existential implications of these ideas are immense.

Yes ... a lot of engineering is hands-on, touchable, and even tasteable---and by being so, it readily inspires. At the same time, to get to those apps and neat demos, required a lot of theory, wild physics, and all the intangible things that don't fit well in a display. They too are vital.

Equally emphasizing theory is also an anecdote to those worry that too much emphasis on engineering (a practical science) means that we are taking away from the traditional values of academia, or learning for its own sake.

In A Crimson article about the Occupy Harvard movement, alum and journalist Christopher Hedges sounded the warning cry:

In his speech, Hedges stressed the importance of the liberal arts education and expressed concerns about the increasing focus on science and technical fields at Harvard, saying that Harvard has begun to transform into 'a giant sort of engineering school with a few liberal arts courses.'

While he was way off base on his facts (engineering students comprise a mere 12% of the undergraduate student body), he and many others commit a far deeper error about engineering and the applied sciences. So much of their value comes from the quest to understand the way the world works, whether that has any practical import or not.

Wonder, it turns out, is reason enough to go exploring. And not just for ivory tower academics.

Mining on the moon may be a good reason to raise taxes.

When asked to explain why he would spend tax dollars on mining minerals on the moon, Newt Gingrich gave a savvy, yet sensitive response.

Just as the moon shot inspired him as a kid, he too wanted to inspire today's kids to go into science and engineering by giving them a grand, seemingly impossible challenge.

In an era where jobs, taxes, and the economy rule, the idea that a fiscal conservative would appeal to knowledge for is own sake was, well, amazing. And so, bravo!

In the coming years, more fairs that allow the Harvard community and the public to get their hands around engineering will likely debut. That's fantastic.

At the same time, we should not forget the quieter, less showy aspects that fuel discovery. Back to Wightman:"But first and foremost, they should become scientifically literate because, to borrow Darwin's phrase, "there is grandeur in this view of life."

Idealism, it turns out, is absolutely compatible with innovation.