The Scientist in You

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A lot of my thoughts about what it means to learn and be good at something were shaped in school. It is interesting to look back on how differently ability and improvement were seen inside and outside the classroom. For example, I was neither athletic nor especially interested in basketball, but I remember becoming a decent player through sheer practice and repetition. It was reassuring to intuitively see myself improve week on week; the sensory evidence of practice leading to progress kept encouraging me to play more.

Academic subjects came more easily to me; however, I’m unsure whether my classroom experience did much to deepen and solidify my understanding of them, as playing and talking about basketball did. I found science subjects fascinating, so I would go through all the textbooks before the school year started. Once classes started, however, I would just nod along with everyone else at what was being said. Even during lab sessions, we were not always trusted with delicate equipment or methodology, and were usually asked to observe as an aide demonstrated the experiment for us rather than perform it ourselves.

After many years out of school, I question whether it was even correct to say I was “good” at science in the first place. The label itself feels arbitrary, leaving out many everyday practices of science. Who was even eligible to be considered as doing science, let alone being good at it?

Since I read ahead, I consistently scored higher than my classmates, leading me to conclude I was “good” at science. If there were no exams at all, I don’t even know if I would have been able to assess that I was “better” at science than my classmates, or “better” at physics than biology. All this felt very different from basketball, where my own senses would tell me whether I’m doing well or poorly. I remember spending many hours in a small garden outside our house helping my grandfather tend to plants. We had small pomegranate and guava trees, along with ridge gourd vines that would bloom with yellow flowers. He would instruct me on all parts of the process, such as why we chose some plants over others, when to dig out weeds, and when the gourds were ready to be picked. Most of what he passed on had either been shared by his parents and friends or simply learned through trial and error over many years of tending the garden. This process of looking at what worked for others, followed by working closely with your hands, resembles the classroom/lab experience that science education seems to strive for, yet nobody ever said that my grandfather was good at science. He himself would have laughed at the notion that his gardening could be called scientific performance. 

It is as if our institutional definition of science often excludes most of the everyday practice of its principles, reinforcing the belief that science is only for “smart” students who will be taught about it in classrooms that few get to access. As a result of this segregation, even students who gain access to elite scientific education often focus on their exclusive status and how it can help them stand out in a competitive workforce, rather than engaging critically with the ideas they’re being taught.

When we lock science away in elite institutions and treat it merely as a vehicle for a career or for clearing an exam, we create a group of learners who are either kept away from scientific learning or learn to wield it only in highly specialized environments for career gain. For both groups, this pedagogy leaves a vacuum in everyday reasoning.  On the flip side, we are constantly performing science when forced to solve practical problems, yet we simply don't label it as such. We often celebrate this as jugaad. But it is rarely just a hack; it is frequently a brilliant, intuitive application of physical and chemical principles. When a street vendor wraps a block of ice in thick jute sacks to slow its melting in the sweltering Delhi heat, they are intuitively applying the principle of thermal insulation. Every time we use a clay pot to store water or curd, the porous surface allows water to seep outside and evaporate. This draws the latent heat of vaporization directly from the insides and keeps them cool.

This void is too easily filled by superstition, dietary fads, and unquestioned traditions. Consider how we approach our own physical fitness. It is incredibly tempting to fall for pseudoscientific supplements, crash diets, or fitness myths marketed with flashy buzzwords. Scientific temper urges us to treat our bodies as biological systems rather than rely on hearsay. Adjusting protein intake, monitoring recovery times, and observing how our joints respond to stress are deeply empirical processes. It is the practice of biology and physics, applied directly to ourselves.

Scientific principles are constantly at play in our everyday practice; we often just don’t acknowledge them. Recognizing these practices as scientific would encourage people to also involve scientific inquiry and reasoning in other parts of their lives. To nurture a scientific temper is not to uncritically borrow authority from experts, but to ceaselessly hone our own skills in observation and recognition. What we lose when science becomes merely academic is the sense of participation in a shared curiosity about the world. If nurtured correctly, everyday scientific practice would naturally lead to academic practice, just as playing basketball every day led me to watching professional games and reading about its theory.

When we cook, plant, repair, or even argue thoughtfully, we participate in the process of discovery. Small changes are all that are needed to imbibe the spirit of discovery in every part of our lives: reading food labels instead of advertisements, and asking how something works instead of only whether it does. When we employ rules of thumb, such as avoiding storing salt in steel containers, it’s good to look up the underlying principle to build the habit of questioning our existing beliefs.

Another important practice is to document observations, making notes about one’s health and the result of trying something new while cooking/ gardening/cleaning. Over time, one might start to find patterns in one's notes, which can then be looked up against scientific textbooks/research. As one develops this practice, the relationship between the self and the world is deepened. Slowly, scientific knowledge is experienced not as achievement or status, but as accumulated memories of all the times we paid attention, asked questions, kept records, looked up information, and overall engaged with our surroundings.

{Harshit is an Artificial Intelligence PhD researcher at IIT Delhi. He has five years of experience as a quantitative researcher and data scientist. His current work focuses on structurally aligning foundational models with the natural sciences.}