The actuality and irrelevance of scientific information and Sisyphus

I have a neighbour, in an office and lab near me, who is retiring. That's an interesting process to observe. One part of this process is clearing off with the past accretions that accumulated on the shelves and boxes. I have seen her having difficulties with that, and hesitating, and getting emotional with it. As a result, I thought that I might experiment with that process myself - and today I opened one box, from one corner of my office, a box full of articles. The intention was to clear that space - throw away what is not relevant, and keep the still relevant stuff. I recognised many of the papers, reflecting a particular period of work, reviews, primary data papers - most stretching along (almost) a decade, between '88 and '97.

All of it went to the bin, and the operation took less than 1 hour. I find this rather sobering. Quickly skimming through them you realise that the data was outdated - first, in terms of techniques, then in terms of the concepts put forward. And I remember how excited and interested I was with some of them; how extensively I used other reviews for writing this or that. In the end I kept about 6 or 7 reviews, mostly for historical reasons.

It might sound trite and banal to write about how time-sensitive scientific information is, but for a moment I was really struck by the absurdity of all this scientific process. It's very much like the Sisyphus myth - take the stone, carry it up with some effort and suffering, and then see it disappear. Or another image is that of a ghost town – sometime ago alive and populated, full of energy and laughter, shopping malls and bazaars, people shouting and fighting for attention, others moving stealthily in the shadows, wheeling and dealing. And then all this circus moved, bit by bit, leaving behind fewer and fewer people, until nobody was left, and all these buildings, papers, figures and reviews are hanging out there, lifeless, most of them in ruins, insignificant and only few of them as signs of previous glory.

And I think the issues here, and I am returning now to Sisyphus, at least in Camus’ interpretation, is one of meaning. Sisyphus work is absurd because is meaningless in the wider perspective, although it might carry a lot of meaning, as well as sweat, when it takes place. The absurd comes, for Camus, from the incongruence between the hope for meaning of Sisyphus and the existence of the universe that does not care. Is then, from this perspective, the whole of the science an absurd enterprise – the dedication and the hopes of the workers, attempting to give it meaning, when the reality, whatever that means, simply is beyond any kind of meaning-fullness. And from here, the next step is that science is just simply a social construct – the desperate attempts of the scientists to give meaning to their activities is simply directed to their peers, to their society. It is them they want to convince about the meaningfulness of their activities; while they are probably completely blind to the cool distance and indifference of reality, or nature.

Camus solution, the existentialist solution, is that Sisyphus could find meaning, and escape the absurdity of his existence, by simply accepting what he’s doing, at face value, and applying himself to the task in hand, without searching or hoping for a larger frame of reference.

What would that mean for science? Well, just do what needs to be done, immerse and stay with the topic, be yourself let be driven by it, and don’t search for big images and big impact. There is no real one, the impact is only in a big circus, that always moves. And it also means that it would be good not to write that much, as all these straw houses will remain behind, in a derelict and sorry state. Write if you need, but only big things, large constructions that have several pillars to keep them up for a longer period of time.