Surgeons often tell of how their necks and backs wear out from looking down on patients at the operating table day after day, year after year. When it comes to the discipline of science, this looking down—the analytical posture—is the standard. From textbooks to many lab experiments, we generally look down to gain and organize our knowledge of the natural world.
But Walt Whitman reminds us that science is about more than that—he writes:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Don’t neglect the importance of scientific knowledge. But if you desire scientific understanding, well, then you must occasionally stand under nature, not over it. You must, at least from time to time, look up.
Have a wonderful day.
