Travel Behaviour as Scientific Art
When I was a child, my parents would read poetry to me. Statistically speaking, I don’t know the percent of engineering professors with this particular life experience, but I would hazard to guess it is small. One of my favourite poems was Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. The message I got from it was to pursue the path not taken, which I’d like to think I have taken forward in my life. I recently read Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, one of those books that people like to say they read to sound intellectual but only skim a few pages then read the Wikipedia page - I read about 80% before skimming.
One of the key insights by Kuhn is that science differs from other fields in its linear treatment of innovation. That is, a scientific field reaches a divergence in the yellow wood and takes a single path. Kuhn characterizes the evolution of science in terms of general science and paradigm shifts. General science is the drudgery of research to make incremental advancements. Paradigm shifts are rare but move a field in a new direction. The key difference from other fields, at least according to Kuhn, is that the shift means a releasing of past ideas. After Einstein developed general relativity, Newtonian gravitation was deemed incomplete and a previous paradigm. While there may be a certain amount of competition among theories at a given time, there will ultimately be a winner.
I think Kuhn is making an interesting insight, but I would also argue it’s largely a feature of fundamental physical sciences. To clarify his point, we can consider visual art. Cubism and Art Deco developed during the same period, but one did not subsume the other after vigorous discussion among artists. In art, multiple schools of thought can exist without raising questions of consistency. There are certainly debates about the merits of style and individuals are free to express their opinion about a particular piece of art, but revolution does not invalidate the continued pursuit of extent styles.
In my own field of travel behaviour, we often talk about modeling human behaviour as a mix of science and art. I think this rings true in the Kuhnian sense that parallel theories or approaches can coexist without being incongruent. When two roads diverge in the woods of behaviour, there is merit to pursuing both paths in order to get a fuller picture of behaviour. To come full circle, I recently read “Cosmic Wonder” by the young Canadian astronomer (from Victoria, BC - yes, my parents got me a signed copy) Nathan Hellner-Mestelman. It brought me back to my high school days reading pop science cosmology by Brian Greene and others. While I think Kuhn made some deep insights, I think physical sciences can also overstate its knowledge of the universe. They should also feel the freedom to pursue diverse paths, even if it diverges from the conventional wisdom and never leads to a paradigm shift. Of course, questions of consistency and equilibrium of thought (i.e., you cannot build on a scattered foundation) are important. We just need to not take ourselves too seriously as scientists and recognize we are all really artists - even if our fourth grade teacher told us we were no good at art.