Throughout National Science and Technology Week (October 17–26), we're celebrating new Canadian books on science and technology. Today, we bring you a chapter from Bold Scientists: Dispatches From the Battle for Honest Science, by Michael Riordon. In his book, Riordon asks deep questions of bold scientists who defy the status quo including:

• An Indigenous biologist who integrates traditional knowledge and a trickster’s wit;
• An engineering professor who exposes the myths and dangers of fracking;
• A forensic geneticist who traces children stolen by the military in El Salvador;
• A sociologist who investigates the lure and threat of mass surveillance;
• A radical psychologist who confronts psychiatry’s dangerous power;
• A young marine biologist who risks her career to defend science and democracy.

In this short chapter, Riordon poses the paradox of science: "Nature enslaved no longer elicits wonder. Yet Bacon calls wonder 'the seed of knowledge.' Without seed, what can we expect to grow?" 

*****

Human responses to a spider’s web: 

1. Awe.
2. Eeew, call the exterminator!
3. Make metaphors: “O, what a tangled web we weave, / When  first we practice to deceive!” (Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, 1808)
4. Make sense: “Given the presumed metabolic effort required by the spider for rebuilding an entire web, localized failure is preferential as it does not compromise the structural integrity of the web and hence allows it to continue to function for prey capture in spite of the damage.” (S.W. Cranford et al, Nature, February 2012)
5. Make products. In the works: sutures for eye or nerve surgery, artificial ligaments and tendons, textiles for parachutes...
6. Make a superhero. To date: seven hundred comic issues, two live-action TV series, seven animated series, four movies, various video games, backpacks, blankets, water bottles, ball caps, action figures, costumes, weapons, the most expensive Broadway musical in history...
7. Make military/police gear. In the works: comfy body armour for the imperial guard...
8. Awe: “All knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.” (Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605)

I would add: Wonder and awe are on the same spectrum. Wonder is indispensable to the quest for knowledge. But it goes far too easily missing along the way.

Awe revels in the grandeur, elegance, and mystery of the universe. It is rooted in healthy humility. In awe, we know our place.  Falling out of awe, we lose our place.

Wonder is spontaneous and ecstatic. Children feel it, without restraint. But then we learn how to think, and then we learn what to think. Wonder is at risk. If it withers enough, eventually we have to pretend it. Or buy it.

Awe embraces  vast questions, most of which need no answers, though religion and science keep trying to answer them.

On a midwinter walk, my breath clouds under clear sky, transparent to infinity. I watch rising sun brush treetops with a buttery glow. I feel its warmth, and the pleasure draws a smile. But then pleasure surrenders to memory—a hymn from my Presbyterian childhood in another century:

When morning gilds the skies

My heart awakening cries...

 A rapturous image of awe. Then the unknown author delivers a message from the sponsor:

... may Jesus Christ be praised.

Religion can’t resist steering awe into worship, a more governable activity. Science does something different, but remarkably similar. It tends to treat awe as superstition, a vestige, like the tailbone, of our primitive past. In doing so, it lures wonder away from its natural object, the universe, to be dazzled instead by the brilliance of human science as it deconstructs the universe.

The lure is beguiling. When we reduce the universe to data, it appears more manageable, less capriciously horrific. Not an unreasonable goal in a universe that delivers catastrophe as indiscriminately as pleasure. But data is cold. It can easily shrink, cramp, and eventually kill wonder.

In 1605, in The Masculine Birth of Time, Francis Bacon also wrote: “I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.”

Here is a paradox: Nature enslaved no longer elicits wonder. Yet Bacon calls wonder “the seed of knowledge.” Without seed, what can we expect to grow?

Awe induces respect. What we don’t respect we tend to neglect or destroy: people we dislike, countless fellow species, forests, oceans, air, the breath of life.

A cruel paradox. What are we to do?

Excerpted with permission from Bold Scientists: Dispatches from the Battle for Honest Science, by Michael Riordon, Between the Lines books, 2014.