Scientists say what they do is work, but we know better

Originally published 12 November 1990

“Ants do not play.”

That’s what Har­vard ento­mol­o­gists Bert Höll­dobler and E. O. Wil­son say in their mon­u­men­tal new work The Ants.

The two sci­en­tists define play as an activ­i­ty that makes no imme­di­ate con­tri­bu­tion to sur­vival or repro­duc­tion. Appar­ent­ly, a few ear­li­er observers of ant behav­ior thought they had seen ants engag­ing in some good-natured wrestling — horse­play, we’d call it. Not so, say Höll­dobler and Wil­son; what looked like play was real­ly dead­ly combat.

Ants don’t play, but Höll­dobler and Wil­son do.

Sci­ence is humankind’s most sub­lime form of play. A life­time spent observ­ing ants cer­tain­ly makes no imme­di­ate con­tri­bu­tion to the sur­vival or repro­duc­tion of ento­mol­o­gists. Ento­mol­o­gists observe ants because observ­ing ants is fun — at least for them.

Oh yes, sci­en­tists will protest that what they do is seri­ous and prac­ti­cal: Know­ing about ants will help us pro­tect our crops from insect pests, that sort of thing. Sci­en­tists who build super­con­duct­ing super­col­lid­ers and Voy­ager space­ships are for­ev­er talk­ing about tech­nol­o­gy spin-offs and eco­nom­ic bonan­zas, but that’s just a smoke­screen to jus­ti­fy the mon­ey soci­ety spends to sup­port their fun. The high-ener­gy par­ti­cle physi­cists and plan­e­tary astronomers are real­ly just play­ing, and don’t let any­one tell you dif­fer­ent­ly. There is noth­ing more use­less to the sur­vival or repro­duc­tion of the human species than sub-atom­ic quarks or the rings of Uranus.

There’s no ques­tion that sci­ence’s off­spring, tech­nol­o­gy, has enhanced our capac­i­ty to sur­vive, and even our abil­i­ty to repro­duce. But pure sci­ence, as prac­ticed at the high­est lev­el of the art, has no imme­di­ate inter­est in the mere­ly useful.

Worlds of imagination

“Sci­ence is a won­der­ful thing if one does not have to earn one’s liv­ing at it,” said Albert Ein­stein. He knew that sci­en­tists play; he played with his equa­tions the way a kid plays with a new toy. “Only when we do not have to be account­able to any­body can we find joy in sci­en­tif­ic endeav­or,” said Ein­stein. In oth­er words: Keep the grown ups out of the room; us kids are hav­ing fun.

The play of chil­dren offers a world apart. Sci­ence, too, cre­ates an imag­i­nary world that goes beyond the imme­di­ate world of our sens­es, a world of make-believe that we can enter if we choose to play. Quarks, quasars, black holes, spin­ning strands of DNA, the rings of Uranus; these things are fairy tales. Yes, fairy tales of a par­tic­u­lar­ly unar­bi­trary kind, but fairy tales nevertheless.

Ah, you protest: Sure­ly what sci­ence seeks is real­i­ty, not fan­ta­sy? Yes, but so does all play. All play has rules. All play builds mod­els of real­i­ty — dolls, Monop­oly mon­ey, Lionel trains, the pieces on a chess board. Play is an escape from the worka­day real­i­ty of sur­viv­ing and repro­duc­ing into a high­er real­i­ty, where a dif­fer­ent kind of order reigns.

Sci­ence, like the games of chil­dren, is make-believe. Physics stu­dents who spend hours work­ing prob­lems with fric­tion­less pul­leys, weight­less strings, and point mass­es are well aware that physics is a game of “let’s pre­tend.” Sure, sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries reflect real­i­ty (what­ev­er that is), but only in an imper­fect and some­times arbi­trary way. The fun of the game is try­ing to make the match between the­o­ry and real­i­ty more and more convincing.

Bringing order to an imperfect world

Johan Huizin­ga, the Dutch cul­tur­al philoso­pher who wrote Homo Ludens (Man the Play­er), said this of play: “Inside the play­ground an absolute and pecu­liar order reigns… [Play] cre­ates order, is order. Into an imper­fect world and into the con­fu­sion of life it brings a tem­po­rary, a lim­it­ed per­fec­tion. Play demands order absolute and supreme. The least devi­a­tion from it “spoils the game,” robs it of its char­ac­ter and makes it worth­less… [Play] is invest­ed with the noblest qual­i­ty we are capa­ble of per­ceiv­ing in things: rhythm and harmony.”

Huizin­ga’s descrip­tion of play will sound famil­iar to any sci­en­tist. Change the word “play” to “sci­ence” and the pas­sage still makes per­fect sense.

All high­er forms of play are based on rep­e­ti­tion and alter­na­tion, says Huizin­ga; in oth­er words, on rules and vari­a­tion with­in the rules. The human mind rebels from too much con­stan­cy or too much chaos, pre­fer­ring instead a bal­ance of same­ness and nov­el­ty. End­less vari­a­tion with­in sim­ple rules is the pre­scrip­tion for a per­fect game. Pat­ty­cake. Ring-around-the-rosy. Black­jack. Chess. Base­ball. Science.

Ants do not play. Cats and dol­phins do play. Humans play most of all. The biggest, most elab­o­rate human game pits play­ful minds against the uni­verse itself. The game has noth­ing to do with mak­ing a buck or find­ing a mate. It’s called sci­ence. And it’s fun.