Michael: Everything you learned in high school science is wrong. Kevin: Whoa, hold on. That's a bold start. Are you telling me mitochondria are not the powerhouse of the cell? My entire world is built on that fact. Michael: The facts are probably right. But the entire point of it? That’s wrong. The goal isn't to get the right answer. The goal is to find a better question. Today, we explore why being ignorant is the most important skill in science. Kevin: I have to say, I've been perfecting that skill my whole life without realizing it was a career path. This is fantastic news. Michael: Well, you're in good company. That's the radical idea behind the book we're diving into today: Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein. Kevin: And Firestein is the perfect person to write this. He's the Chair of Biology at Columbia, a top neurobiologist, but he didn't even start his science career until he was 30, after nearly two decades working in the theater. He's an outsider who became a top insider. Michael: Exactly. He brings that artist's perspective to the lab, questioning the very foundation of how we think about discovery. And his first big target is our obsession with facts, which is where most of our science education begins and, unfortunately, ends.

Kevin: Right. Science class was basically a giant memory test. Memorize the periodic table, the stages of mitosis, the laws of thermodynamics. The final exam was just a regurgitation of facts. It felt like the opposite of discovery. Michael: That’s the exact problem Firestein ran into. He talks about teaching this massive undergraduate neuroscience course at Columbia. The textbook was 1,414 pages long. It was a doorstop. And he realized that by teaching all these established facts, he was unintentionally sending a message: "Neuroscience is done. We know everything. Here it is." Kevin: Which is the complete opposite of his daily life in the lab, where the entire job is to confront what you don't know. Michael: Precisely. In the lab, it's all about the unknown. He uses this old proverb to describe the day-to-day reality of science: "It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room. Especially when there is no cat." Kevin: That sounds… deeply inefficient. And a little depressing. It sounds like a terrible career choice if you put it that way. Michael: But that's where the thrill is! The book argues that we've got it all backward. We celebrate knowledge, but knowledge is often the end of the road. It’s a fact, a period at the end of a sentence. Ignorance—thoughtful, high-quality ignorance—is the engine. It’s the thing that creates the next question, and the next. Kevin: Okay, I'm trying to wrap my head around this. So, knowledge isn't the goal, it's just the fuel? You need some facts to even know what questions to ask, right? You can't ask good questions about genetics if you don't know what a gene is. Michael: Absolutely. And that’s the key distinction. Firestein isn't celebrating being uninformed. He's talking about what he calls "knowledgeable ignorance." It’s the ignorance that comes after you've learned the facts. It's the awareness of the gaps. The most brilliant illustration of this comes from the mathematician Andrew Wiles, who famously solved Fermat's Last Theorem. Kevin: A problem that was unsolved for over 350 years. I can't even imagine the pressure. Michael: Wiles described the process of discovery, and it’s just a perfect metaphor for this idea. He said it’s like entering the first room of a dark mansion. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. You trip over things. For months, you're just groping in the dark, slowly getting a feel for the layout of the room. Kevin: That sounds incredibly frustrating. Just months of confusion. Michael: It is. But then, after maybe six months of this, you find a light switch. You flick it on, and suddenly the whole room is illuminated. You can see exactly where all the furniture is. You understand the space you were in. And at that moment, Wiles says, you see the door to the next dark room. Kevin: Wow. That’s a powerful metaphor. So knowledge—the lit room—isn't the destination. It's just the platform from which you can see the next, even bigger, area of darkness to explore. Michael: You've got it. The lit room is what's known. But the whole point of lighting it up was to find the door to what's unknown. Science isn't about collecting lit rooms. It's about the process of moving from one dark room to the next. It’s about expanding the boundary of the unknown. Kevin: That completely reframes it. It makes science sound less like an encyclopedia and more like an endless exploration. Michael: It is! It reminds me of that famous quote from Marie Curie, who discovered two new elements and basically invented the field of radioactivity. After all that, she wrote in a letter, "One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done." For the greatest scientists, the prize for solving a problem is getting a better, more interesting problem to work on.

Kevin: Okay, I'm sold on the 'why.' This is a much more romantic and exciting vision of science. But I'm stuck on the 'how.' How do you actually do this? How do you get paid to be ignorant? My boss doesn't seem to value that skill in my performance review. Michael: (laughs) Well, science has actually built systems to professionalize ignorance. A grant proposal, for instance, is one of the most important documents a scientist writes. And what is it? It's a detailed, multi-page, highly-researched document that is fundamentally a statement of ignorance. It's the scientist saying, "Here is what we don't know, here is why it's important that we don't know it, and here is my five-year plan for trying to find out." Kevin: So it's a proposal for a well-organized expedition into a dark room. Michael: Exactly. It's a marketplace of ignorance. You're judged on the quality of your questions, not the certainty of your answers. Firestein tells this great joke to illustrate one of the key strategies. A policeman sees a scientist on his hands and knees under a streetlight. The policeman asks, "What are you doing?" The scientist says, "I'm looking for my car keys." The policeman helps him look for a while, and finally asks, "Are you sure you dropped them here?" And the scientist replies, "Oh no, I dropped them over there, in the dark. But the light is so much better here." Kevin: (laughs) That's brilliant. So, it's strategic laziness? "I don't know the answer to the huge, universe-defining question, so I'll just work on this smaller, more measurable thing over here where I actually have the tools to see something." That sounds… surprisingly practical. Michael: It's a legitimate strategy! You work on a problem that's solvable. You go where the light is. Sometimes, just finding anything, even if it's not the keys, can lead you to a new place. Another strategy is to work with what you think are facts, even if they turn out to be wrong. Kevin: Wait, how does being wrong help? Isn't that the opposite of progress? Michael: Not always. A wrong idea can be an incredibly productive engine for discovery. Take the famous tongue map. Kevin: Oh, I know this one! The tip of your tongue tastes sweet, the back is bitter, the sides are salty and sour. I learned that in elementary school. Michael: We all did. And it's completely, 100% wrong. Kevin: What? No. Michael: It's a total myth. It came from a Harvard psychologist in the 1940s who mistranslated a German paper from 1901. The original paper just showed very slight, almost negligible, variations in sensitivity. But it got canonized in textbooks and became a "fact" through sheer repetition. Kevin: So my whole life has been a lie. But how is that a good thing for science? Michael: Because that wrong fact was a placeholder. It was a simple, testable hypothesis. It prompted decades of research from scientists trying to prove or disprove it, to find the specific cells for "sweet" on the tip of the tongue. In the process of proving the map wrong, they ended up discovering the much more complex and fascinating reality of our taste receptors. The wrong idea generated decades of good questions. Kevin: That's wild. The 'fact' was just a temporary scaffold they built to climb up to a higher level of understanding, and then they kicked it away. Michael: A perfect way to put it. And sometimes the strategy isn't about being wrong, but about pursuing something that seems completely useless. It's about following pure curiosity. This is where some of the biggest breakthroughs in history have come from. Kevin: You mean things that weren't aimed at curing a disease or building a better gadget? Michael: Exactly. In the 1960s, a microbiologist named Thomas Brock was just poking around the boiling-hot sulfur springs in Yellowstone National Park. He was driven by a simple, seemingly academic question: how could any form of life possibly survive in an environment that hot? Kevin: That sounds like a very niche hobby. Not exactly a project you'd expect to change the world. Michael: For about thirty years, it didn't. He discovered these amazing organisms called thermophiles, or "heat-lovers," that had special enzymes that didn't break down at near-boiling temperatures. It was a cool biological curiosity, but that was it. A scientific dead-end. Kevin: Until it wasn't. Michael: Until the 1990s. A scientist named Kary Mullis was developing a revolutionary technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR. The goal was to make millions of copies of a tiny piece of DNA. But the process required heating the mixture to separate the DNA strands, and the high heat destroyed the enzymes needed for copying. They had to stop and add new enzymes after every single cycle. It was slow and tedious. Kevin: Let me guess. He needed an enzyme that loved the heat. Michael: He needed a heat-resistant enzyme. And where did he find it? In the research on those "useless" thermophiles from Yellowstone. The enzyme from Brock's hot-spring microbes became the key ingredient that made PCR possible. It automated the whole process. Kevin: And PCR is the foundation of everything now. DNA testing, forensic science, medical diagnostics, the COVID tests... Michael: All of it. A multi-billion dollar industry and a revolution in biology, all because one guy in the 60s was curious about weird microbes in a hot spring. It’s the ultimate example of how you can't predict where knowledge will come from. Sometimes the most powerful strategy for navigating ignorance is just to follow your curiosity, no matter how pointless it seems.

Michael: So what this all points to is a fundamental shift in how we should engage with science. The news reports the 'breakthrough,' the single fact, the lit room. But the real story, the more exciting story, is the decades of fumbling in the dark that came before, and the new, bigger darkness the breakthrough reveals. Kevin: It really is about changing our relationship with uncertainty. We're taught from a young age to fear saying "I don't know." In school, it means you failed the test. At work, it can feel like an admission of incompetence. Michael: But Firestein is arguing that "I don't know" is the most powerful and exciting phrase in the human language. It's the beginning of every adventure, every discovery, every work of art. Kevin: That's the core of it, isn't it? It’s not an admission of failure; it's the starting pistol for discovery. It's what separates dogma from science. Dogma is the conviction that you have all the answers. Science is the conviction that you don't, and the courage to go looking for them anyway. Michael: And that's a perspective that makes science accessible to everyone. You don't have to be an expert with all the facts. You just have to be curious. So the next time you meet a scientist, or a doctor, or an engineer, don't ask them to explain what they know. Kevin: Ask them what they're trying to figure out. Michael: Ask them what they're ignorant about. Ask them what keeps them up at night. You'll get a much, much better story. Kevin: I love that. It’s such a simple, powerful shift in perspective. It makes me wonder, what's the biggest thing you, our listeners, realized you were 'productively ignorant' about? What's the dark room you're currently exploring? Let us know your thoughts. We'd love to hear them. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.