May 20, 2013

• What was The Scientist Series About?

  So I've finished my wildly popular Scientist series, which averaged a scintillating 1.25 comments per entry, and thus, it's time to sum it all up. Why did I write it?

  I was at a research conference the day the series came to me, and I couldn't help but think that scientists are poorly understood by the general public. It's easy to see scientist as objective calculators. But there are other emotions that lurk beneath the surface. There's obsession, envy, the desperate struggle to stay objective when there are huge rewards for selling out, the desire for power and to control one's universe, to subjugate nature underneath your feet.

  Scientist exist to test the world, but also to see if a structure of logic can cover chaos. There's this compulsive desire to keep testing things until they break, to push things to the limits, all while trying to remain self-controlled and follow standard procedure. I feel the emotional lives of scientists are horribly understudied, the way they put so much of themselves into tasks, the odd contrasts and paradoxes that go into the creation of new human knowledge. And while they try to deny it, there's always whispers of the artist around their work, whispers that the scientist denies but cannot refute, just as artists resist comparisons to scientists.

  In the end, I find that science fiction itself does little justice to scientists, let alone news reports and biographies. And thus I wrote my little trilogy, and I found it hugely rewarding. What have your experiences been with scientists?

  • 2:58 pm
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