Former Boston Globe science columnist and college prof. Chet Raymo has written a stirring ode to the value of ignorance in his latest Science Musings. Pascal, Priestly and Popper -- he covers them all. What he's done is put his finger on a counter-intuitive definition of science, and what a definition it is:
The purpose of science -- and indeed all education -- is to arrive at a state of ignorance, but an ignorance that is aware of itself.
One more excerpt should be enough to convince you to read the whole thing.
As long as our answers to these questions invoked the gods -- as they did for thousands of years -- no reliable public knowledge was possible. Only when a few curious people said "I don't know" did science begin. Admission of ignorance is a prerequisite of scientific discovery, and by the same token, the more we learn, the more we are aware of what we do not know.
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I'm glad you've picked up on Raymo's piece. To extend or build on his clear headed view of science, I'd add that ignorance manifests itself in the form of questions. The point of the knowledge enterprise is to equip us to ask ever more pointed questions. What's special about modern science is that it cultivates the art of framing questions in a way that permits experience and experiment to contribute to the answers.
"The purpose of science -- and indeed all education -- is to arrive at a state of ignorance, but an ignorance that is aware of itself."
That statement just makes me feel stupid not ignorant: I wish I would have said it. Now I have to go read the whole thing. Thanks.
Just got back: good read, sounds more philosophical than scientific, but nothing wrong with that.