Take a pebble from a beach.
Hold it in your hand.
Turn it this way and that.
Think on what you’ve found.
What do you know now that you didn’t before?
Given what you know, are there ways to know more?
It is perhaps something of a truism to say that the total collection of well-established facts has exploded since the beginning of the twentieth century and continues to do so every more rapidly. This applies to virtually every aspect of human understanding. Part of this is due to new events that create new facts of themselves, some of which also stimulate investigations that add more facts. Part of this is the increasingly nuanced investigation and understanding of areas whose basic features or existence are already known.
There is, clearly, in both keeping track of the rapid developments of current affairs and the slower developments of any single area of science too much information — that is too many disparate facts — for anyone to be able to work on multiple distantly related topics as the immortalised scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often could and did. Science has become extremely specialised: the amount of in depth topic knowledge required to carry out a research project in a given area may well require the reading of more pages of previous work than Rutherford needed while working in Manchester to determine that atoms are composed of a central nucleus surrounded by a largely empty region; and the use of more advanced mathematical tools (even if largely applied indirectly via computer algorithms) than Maxwell, then at Marischal College, Aberdeen, which merged with King’s College, Aberdeen in 1860 to become the University of Aberdeen, used to describe Saturn’s rings and deduce that they could be neither solid nor liquid and conclude that stable rings would be formed of independent particles (of variable size).
Given what is known, and what unknowns persist, specialisation, often extreme, is inevitable.
Imagine a shingle beach. Acres of pebbles of all different shapes and sizes and colours. Some are pleasing to the eye; some of curious shapes; some very regular, with an inherent symmetry of structure; some will bounce several times if flicked carefully over a calm stretch of water; some of these promising stones will turn over and flounder with a splash instead of bouncing. All are unique; any could catch the eye and be of picked up. In a single visit to a beach, only a few will catch anyone’s eye; even the most dedicated stone skimmer on a beach with many good, smooth flat stones will only inspect a fraction of those there and perhaps only accept a few as worthwhile taking down to the waterline. An individual’s efforts within scientific research can be likened to the in depth study of a handful of pebbles from all the beaches in the world: knowledge of these, in varying levels of details is the sum one’s life work.
And, when one starts to think about a pebble, more questions arise: what is it made of — what is its chemical composition? where and how was it formed? what is it resilient to, and what will damage it? how does it compare to other pebbles that share at least some features? how can one describe it in simple but representative terms? There is potentially a lot to find out about each individual pebble. To answer these questions requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of tools.
This is not to argue that one should try to analyse every pebble on any or all beaches in the world: it is to provide an analogy of the current state of human knowledge (a fraction of the pebbles on one or a handful of beaches) compared to all possible knowledge (all the pebbles on all the world’s beaches), and any individual’s in depth knowledge (a handful of pebbles).
The analogy deepens: stand on a beach with a few pebbles clutched in your hand. Many others are within sight, but many more are obscured, either buried or simply beyond clear vision. The amount that an individual can know is limited; the unknown is enormous. A fraction of the pebbles skimmed or tossed into the sea may be returned to the beach or revealed by a receding tide: knowledge can be lost and rediscovered. (This may require reassessment and reinterpretation, often to rather different conclusions than on its first inspection; old ideas are discarded as their descriptive or predictive power fails or limitations are identified, some are lost or discarded forever.)
Any individual researcher, in any field, only knows their handful of pebbles well. They will know the basics about a fair number that they can see well; but will only have the faintest ideas about the rest of the beach.
Any project at any level is a pebble. Over a research career, one picks up some, is given others, drop, throw away or put down others. Some will skim very well; others only bounce a few times; others disappoint by sinking with a splash, despite their seeming promise; sometimes timing will result in an unfortunate interaction with an incoming wave; some discarded earlier are sought out and picked up later, or sought out, but found to have been picked up by someone else while your focus was elsewhere.
As the body of knowledge of expands, so the impossibility of mastering even a fraction of it becomes more apparent, and the prior knowledge required to add to the collection also increases. Specialisation is the inevitable outcome of the passage of time. The usefulness of any given area of knowledge is often unclear; but together knowledge develops and progress (of some sort) is made.
Let those standing on the promenade see those few examining the pebbles on their part of the beach recognise what they are doing, and remember that, like a shingle beach, knowledge — as developed by the practice of science — is never static. Our best understanding develops and changes as more questions are asked: sometimes this happens slowly, sometimes more rapidly. Remember that and listen.
