Science Is Entertainment, Part 1: The Mozart Effect? Nope

In the 90's, an odd bit of scientific research suggested some temporary improvement in spatial reasoning due to listening to classical music, particularly Mozart, and particularly in infants. I have a funny picture in my mind, a pregnant woman with headphones over her abdomen, gestating the next Karl Gauss or Thomas Edison. I don't know if anyone ever actually did that (we'll see if we have more Gausses in a decade or so), but you have to admit it's funny, not least because the research never showed that listening to Mozart makes you smarter. Nor did the researchers make such a claim.

However, this so-called "Mozart effect" did lead some classical music lovers to declare haughtily this final evidence of the superiority of their beloved genre. What's more, it became a justification for listening to classical music.

The problem is: a person doesn't need an excuse to listen to Mozart or Beethoven or anyone else. The reason for listening to classical music? Because it's entertaining. Whether it has some mysterious other benefits, I don't know, but to use "increased intelligence" as an excuse--especially when there are so many other factors that are definitely known to increase intelligence, like breakfast--is at the top of the silly list.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of classical music, but I've always liked Chopin (I remember my mom playing it on the piano from time to time after we were in bed), Bach if the right player is playing, and I can definitely dig Wolfgang. I find Vivaldi boring, Bach wrong with the wrong player playing, and, sorry Claude, La Mer has been much too inspirational to Danny Elfman and John Williams to be taken seriously. (I mean, I'd rather watch Big Fish, Star Wars, oh yes!) Fantasia sucks, yes, I said it, except that creepy one, Night on Bald Mountain, is awesome, and Ave Maria is very pretty (if a bit overdone).

Notice how in the above stompy rant about classical music I didn't mention how much smarter or dumber the music makes me. Those kinds of considerations just don't matter.

The reason for listening to classical music, or any other kind: enjoyment. There does not need to be any other reason, although there may be (cultural identity, relaxation, whatever). The enjoyment pays for the cost of listening.

To right-angle the discussion, and to apocryphy, consider the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC). I don't know if this is a true story, and I would appreciate someone pointing out clarification on this matter, but it serves quite well allegorically. A prominent physicist is testifying before a congressional panel about the SSC. A congresscritter asks, "Does it have any consequences for Defense?" meaning, if we're spending all this money, we ought to be able to shoot it at the Soviets or something. The physicist replies, "No, but it gives us something worth defending."

I require a couple of comments (as if this weren't a blog). First, America is worth defending anyway, because, um, people live here, and in any case we had all kinds of nifty stuff to shoot at Soviets already. Second, I'm skeptical that Congress should have a role in funding projects like this one anyway. For one thing, arguably the SSC didn't have a commercial function, either, or else private industry would have funded one. Leaving that for another time, and just accepting that Congress funds science, we get to the point of the SSC story.

The reason for having a Superconducting Supercollider is because it's cool. If the US is going to spend that kind of money on basic physics, the reply should have been not that it gives us something worth defending (what the heck, I mean, it's like if we didn't have the world's coolest basic physics, should we just throw in the towel? I am in mighty need of a break, if anyone has one) but that, and here's my thesis, finally, we should do it because it's fun.

One can and should question whether the government spending money to keep physicists and their hangers-on (me, for one) entertained. But that's not the point here. Science is extremely fun, which is why scientists do it. Okay, fine, scientists crave recognition as well, and they want to be well-thought-of by their peers (which is another reason not to spend government money on it ...) but if research and science weren't fun nobody would spend years studying to get to the point required to make new contributions.

When I tell non-scientists that I'm a scientist, people perhaps pity me that I had to go through all that suffering just to, uh, suffer more. But that's not the way it was. I enjoyed every single science course I took, and I enjoy new, clever research now. The reason is that it's fun to figure things out. I think the same probably happens to mathematicians--what you like doing math?--but it's really just a manifestation of what leads people to do Sudoku, crosswords, and the like. It's fun to figure stuff out.

This is the primary reason for starting Free Range Science at all. Once I realized that science is fun, there is every reason to tell non-scientists about cool science. Even if a non-scientist couldn't solve the puzzles, it's intellectually satisfying to understand a problem, and I believe that the non-scientist can get a great sense of enjoyment from hearing about the solutions.

Here is an example that the reader is sure to enjoy. The relevant experiments were performed by Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty in 1944, based upon work of Griffiths, who in 1928 did work with two kinds of bacteria that cause pneumonia, one of which kills laboratory mice, and one of which doesn't. I describe, fairly carelessly, the results of their experiments.

When just the DNA (not the whole, live, bacterium) from the virulent kind of baterium is injected into mice, nothing happens; live bacteria are need to produce the lethal infection. When the DNA from the virulent strain is injected along with the non-virulent bacteria, the mice die; the virulent DNA changes the non-virulent bacteria to virulent. However, when just protein from the virulent bacteria is injected with the non-virulent bacteria, the mice don't die.

So we have these observations:

1. virulent bacteria + mice = dead
2. non-virulent bacteria + mice = live
3. virulent DNA + mice = live (DNA by itself is not enough; live bacteria are needed, observation 1)
4. virulent DNA + non-virulent bacteria = dead (different result as just non-virulent bacteria, observation 2)
5. virulent protein + non-virulent bacteria = live (same result as just non-virulent bacteria, observation 2)

Figure this out, and reap the rewards of biological logic: what molecule (DNA or protein) carries the information required to have a virulent strain?

This actually isn't the lynchpin for why DNA is the genetic material, because nothing in science is ever that conclusive, but it's still pretty convincing. An experiment like this generates more questions, which generates more experiments; the more such experiments are performed, the more certain we get that DNA is, in fact, the genetic material. It holds the information required to for virulence.

Actually that brings up yet another fun thing about science: arguing what results mean. Done well, this leads to more experiments, which are the only things that can be used to resolve scientific disputes. For instance, at that point in time (remember, nobody knew what DNA did) one might argue that the DNA of the virulent strain provides some kind of food for the non-virulent strain, which super powers it and makes it virulent. This can be tested by looking at how much food energy the non-virulent DNA has compared to the virulent DNA. An experiment would show that the amount of energy in each type of DNA is more or less the same, discrediting the DNA-as-Popeye-spinach hypothesis.

The joy of figuring out problems translates just as well to math as to science. A recurring complaint in algebra classes is, "When are we ever going to use this?" The proper answer is not, all the time, lots of jobs require a knowledge of algebra. This answer is misleading; while some jobs (like mine) require the ability to "solve for x," but almost everyone gets by, after high school, without ever solving an equation. Not that the things people suffer through, like algebra and geometry, cannot be used by everyone every day--my wife reports using geometry when sewing and algebra when running a register. But that doesn't answer the question: useful as it may be, sewing does not require geometry.

No, the real answer to why people should learn algebra is the satisfaction of figuring things out. Because it's fun to figure out puzzles. The best high school math teachers, I'm sure, already know this.

Why science? Because of its entertainment value. It's the same answer to the questions, Why Mozart? Why Superconducting Supercollider? Why learn algebra? The advantage of human animals lies not only in the ability to reason and figure things out, but in its enjoyment. Not too different from sex, in fact. Mainly, we do it for fun. Just as we have fun having sex, we have fun while solving scientific problems, and something amazing and wonderful happens. That we get Mozart, an understanding of DNA, and babies is a bonus, but the benefits are not enough. The fun is enough.