The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

Joe loved science. He also thought that science was in some ways misunderstood, at least as it was often taught to children. After the fact, scientific progress was often described as a cool, antiseptic affair. A lone scientist or team of scientists had formed some hypothesis, created a way to test it, and discovered some new truth, or not. Joe thought that scientists should be encouraged to look at stuff without having any idea of what they were looking for. “There’s a time and a place for a hypothesis,” said Joe, “and there’s a time and a place to let it go.” He also thought that people who looked at stuff without any preconception of what they might find were the ones who saw the things that no one had seen before. “It’s science’s dark secret,” he said. “If you actually look at the great discoveries—okay, maybe not in astrophysics, but in medicine and biology—you don’t have to go back more than a couple of steps to find a chance observation.” Science was just curiosity’s tool. Progress often began when someone saw something they hadn’t expected to see and said, “Huh, that’s weird.”

Curiosity’s Tool: The Power of Seeing Without Expectation