THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE—from Rock Dog Podcast
Words by Tharushi Bowatte (she/her)
Your honour,
I am a woman in STEM. Even worse, I have a science communication podcast.
Am I a pervert if I think science is romantic? Perhaps science is just the vessel for the romance. Regardless, the romance is certainly immense.
In first-year, I took CHEM114. It remains the hardest paper I’ve ever done. But it was also the site of the most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me: learning that an electron is at once a particle and then a wave.
Electrons are the negatively charged particle/wave orbiting the nucleus of an atom. They can get passed around between elements, leading to the unique chemical configurations that make up every solid, liquid, and gas we know of. They don’t come in either particulate or waveform, but sometimes in the former and at other times the latter. That’s exactly how I feel! Neither here nor there. Wave-particle duality tells me the universe is inherently abstruse, contradictory, and nonsensical. Gosh, I’m blushing.
Being a receptacle for the romance of science can be overwhelming. Scientific knowledge can be like a steroid. My brain gets so jacked. Like a gym rat, I get all sentimental about the work I’m doing, how far I’ve come and how far I can go. Of course, like a gym rat, things can get unhealthy. Forget the quizlet dreams, how about basing your entire self-worth on grades? To my comrades in STEM: Take care of yourself. Don’t let the romance devolve into obsession. Stay with the magic.
Am I being ironic if I think science reveals magic?
A river starts as a dribble at the highest peaks. In the excitement of the storm, it cuts through the land (there’s an argument to be made that soil is just displeasing cake) and fans out into the sea. The river says, “maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way.” The friends are one million invertebrates dressed in colours unknowable to our human eyes. Hey, we’re the friends too! Humans have always settled next to water bodies. “Aha! A water body!” we say as we fumble around in our water bodies. If 60% of me is water, then it makes sense that I feel a bit wild when the moon’s all big and yellow out the car window. Lunar magic pushes the tides onto the shore. Every wave a pensive sigh.
Just wait until you hear about the Cambrian explosion. Or katabatic winds. Or the moa hypothesis… There’s a lot to take in. Nobody said science is easy. They often lie, though, and pretend it’s rational. I disagree. Science is very rhetorical and when weaponised, it can be vicious. Nonetheless, what I like best about science is that it reminds me how insignificant I am. Isn’t existence pretty futile? Isn’t it nice to be the result of stochasticity? To just randomly be here! I grasp onto this and hold it to my chest. I am here despite it all. A conglomerate of flesh and fluids in a universe of infinite possibility.
So what is science, then?
Perverse
Romantic
Futile
Ironic
Magical
Vicious
I think science is a conversation. It’s all of the above and more. Rock Dog podcast is my conversation with and about science. I push my words into a microphone made of metals extracted from deep Earth. If extreme pressure and an arbitrary combination of elements had not been slow-cooked underground over geologic timescales, I could not leave 30-minute sound fossils for future ears. Technology is our dangerous collaboration with time. The good thing about time is that it is not linear. It expands and contracts. Different timescales occur simultaneously. Whether I am a blip in the grand story of Earth does not matter. I was here. With you. With everything: crystals, love, ungulates, erosion, proverbs, whispers, volcanoes, space, linen, and clouds. We are and were at once a particle and then a wave. At once an ancestor and then a descendant.
Check out some of the episodes I’ve put out so far:
What’s the deal with Rock Dog? I talk about why I started Rock Dog and what I think ecocriticism is.
What is the Anthropocene? I introduce the concept of geological timescales and some of the ways scientists have generated a narrative of Earth’s history. I then critique the concept of the anthropocene, which is a trending buzz word in the world of ecocriticism.
Is Bird of the Year Nationalist Propaganda? I examine the rhetoric behind our monomania with native birds and problematise how this has been used to construct our national identity. At its best, Bird of the Year is a fun educational campaign. At its worst, it reveals Aotearoa’s inability to swallow its colonial past.
Episodes to come:
Narratives of Ecology. I’ll be talking to fellow interdisciplinary traveller (a conjoint-BA/Bsc student) Margarita Montes about how different narrative forms can mediate or express ecological concepts. We discuss the urgency of interdisciplinary thinking in the context of climate catastrophe, and how ecology as a discipline provides evidence of human–non human interdependencies.
Can the law protect the environment? On Earth Jurisprudence and the Whanganui River. I’ll describe the emerging literature on Earth Jurisprudence, a conception of law which acknowledges the reciprocal nature of the relationship between the environment and humans. I question whether Earth Jurisprudence is an appropriate pathway when much of its concepts have been plagiarised from indigenous legal customs. I’ll use the Whanganui River as a case study of how our current legal system obstructs decolonising law.