18 The Natural Scientist’s Perspective

As a child, my parents would scold me for messing with fire around the house and for making noises with wine glasses in restaurants. The truth is, I have always been curious about my surroundings and fascinated by the way objects change with manipulation. I liked uncovering nature’s secrets and learning to control them.

I was lucky to have great science teachers in high school who encouraged my explorations. They were the ones who pointed me towards pursuing a career in the natural sciences when I was unsure about what to do next in life. My chemistry teachers were particularly persistent and I decided to follow in their footsteps. I applied to university as a chemistry major but experienced a rocky start.

During my first two semesters in college, I found myself hating my chemistry classes. They were boring, with too many ideas that didn’t make sense to me and too many facts I had to memorize. I was so discouraged by science classes in which teachers bombarded me with information, that I considered changing my major to education. Fortunately, at that time, a chemistry professor invited me to join her lab to begin a research project on innovative materials. The opportunity to explore relevant, real-life systems in a hands-on and interactive environment stimulated my passions and renewed my interest in science as my career choice.

Many people believe that science is about memorizing facts, mixing colorful liquids in labs, or plugging numbers in complex formulas. Who would blame them for having those ideas given that some teachers teach science that way? But good science teachers represent their discipline in more authentic ways. They help students understand — as I learned during my undergraduate research experience — that science is a very powerful way of knowing the world, understanding it, and transforming it. The natural sciences allow us to answer what, how, and why questions about the world not only to make sense of it but also to learn to predict its behavior and control it. Scientific reasoning and practices have been key to social and economic progress in human history by providing intellectual and practical tools that have helped improve the lives of millions of people on our planet.

Science is done in many different ways by all types of people. It is common to talk about “the scientific method,” but the fact is that the way biologists, chemists, and physicists conduct investigations can be quite different from how it is done in other scientific fields, like astronomy and geology. There are, of course, common science practices, such as conducting observations, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data, building models, generating explanations, and constructing arguments. But these activities are performed in a variety of manners and in diverse contexts. During my undergraduate research experience, for example, I got to build computational models that helped us understand and develop materials that were impermeable to water. I never set foot in a wet lab full of chemicals and glassware, while some of my classmates loved spending their time in laboratories testing different methods of synthesizing chemical substances with antibacterial properties. Nowadays, science is conducted in closed and open spaces, natural, artificial, and virtual settings, underwater or in multiple flying objects inside and outside our planet’s atmosphere.

Natural scientists look at the world with wide-open eyes and critical minds. We seek to build models, make predictions, and construct explanations based on reliable data, recognizing the limits of our knowledge and the influence of our personal beliefs. Natural scientists have learned that our daily interactions and experiences with surrounding objects and processes may mislead us and bias our reasoning. Just think of the various unproven ways in which people think that viruses like COVID-19 are transmitted or can be eliminated from our bodies. Thinking like a scientist often requires escaping common-sense reasoning and learning to see the world in different ways. I remember my own surprise when I learned that what I thought to be willing behaviors of plants or animals were instead basic physiological responses. Reshaping how we think may be challenging, but it is fascinating and highly rewarding.

For some reason, people associate the natural sciences with rational thinking and the arts with creative thought. In my experience, these artificial divisions fail to properly represent what it takes to be a scientist or an artist. The creation and development of a work of art typically demand high levels of creativity but also deeply rational thought while deciding what is to be conveyed, why, and through which media. Conversely, the design of a scientific investigation, the development of new models, and the construction of meaningful explanations are creative efforts guided by rational thought, but many times are influenced by unconscious insights about the systems of interest. In fact, some of the most groundbreaking ideas in science have come to scientists indirectly, like Niels Bohr, whose atomic model came to him while dreaming of electrons circling around the atomic nucleus like planets revolving around our sun, or Albert Einstein’s dream of riding a sled downhill in snow that provided inspiration for his Theory of Relativity.

It is also common to think of natural scientists as white-coated men working in sterile laboratories, oblivious to the social, environmental, economic, political, moral, and ethical problems and dilemmas that plague our world. I know that a few scientists may fit that profile. But the majority of the scientists I know and interact with daily  — women and men, Asian, Black, White, or Hispanic like me — are highly informed about the complex planetary challenges we face. These scientists dedicate their lives to addressing these challenges through research, education, and advocacy in their areas of expertise. Scientists are, for example, developing strategies to capture CO₂ from the atmosphere to reduce its impact on our planet’s climate, or designing new drugs to fight different types of diseases. There are also scientists like me who conduct investigations to better understand how to help students like you grasp and be marveled by natural science.

About the author

name: Vicente Talanquer

Vicente Talanquer is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the UA. His research focuses on undergraduate chemistry education. He has published close to 150 peer-reviewed and invited papers where he has explored the conceptual difficulties that students face when learning chemistry and the effect of different teaching strategies on student understanding. He has also investigated prospective science teachers’ reasoning and practices. Vicente has applied the results of his educational research to the development of innovative curricula for undergraduate chemistry education. He has received various awards during his academic career, including the James Flack Norris Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Teaching of Chemistry by the American Chemical Society, and the Educational Research Award by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. In 2015, he was named “Arizona Professor of the Year” by the Carnegie Foundation. In 2019, he received the Education Research Award from the Council of Scientific Society Presidents and he has recently been awarded the 2021 ACS Award for Achievement in Research for the Teaching & Learning of Chemistry.