Back when I was in graduate school, my university ran a program in the summertime for people from industry to attend. It was aimed at people in the nontechnical departments—sales, HR, finance and so on—and it was designed to teach them some chemistry. Faculty members would give them some lectures during the day, and we grad students would come over in the evenings to try to clean up the damage by answering questions and doing one-on-one tutoring.

At the time, I was pretty grateful for the experience, but mostly because it paid, and there was also free food involved too!

If you got selected as a tutor, you picked up some extra money, and since I was living on about $650 a month at the time, anything from an extra ten bucks on up made a measureable impact. My checking account used to spend a lot of time down in the range where having to buy a new muffler for my Toyota would have bankrupted me, so once I got paid for my expert tutoring, I felt like going into the graduate student lounge and shouting, “Ramen noodles are on me, guys!” Life was good.

The other thing I got out of the program, though, was the chance to see what sorts of chemistry questions got asked by people who were competent, intelligent, but had no chemistry training whatsoever. I remember one person saying, “OK, we learned today that the innermost shell of electrons has two electrons in it. Why two? Why not just one? Or three?”

I’d never quite thought about that one. As I recall, I ended up taking the weasel’s way out and hid behind the age-old quantum mechanical reason that, “There just wasn’t enough time to explain.”

And while that was true, as far as it went, I realized from that and some of the other questions that one of the best ways to tell if you really understood a topic was if you could explain it to someone else. Being able to explain it to someone who didn’t already know all the lingo counted for even more.

What I wondered, even at the time, is what the customers were getting out of the whole process. I think that many of them were at least mildly interested to find out what it was that the chemists at their companies thought about all day. For all I know, it may have made some occasional social interactions easier for them. But I was never quite sure if anyone learned enough chemistry to be of any real use. There’s only so much you can teach in a week or two from a standing start, and I also thought that some topics—like s and p orbitals—could have been usefully glossed over in favor of things that might have been of more immediate use. The companies that paid to send their people to the program apparently thought that it was a worthwhile exercise, even if I couldn’t quite work out how that added up.

I think of those days every time the topic of science education comes up. I usually end up having quite an argument up in my head about this topic, because part of me thinks that everyone should know quite a bit about basic chemistry, physics, and biology—and that no one is truly educated until they do. Another part of my brain worries that it’s easy to take that principle too far, and that the other part of me would end up trying to tell everyone about s and p orbitals, and worse. Most people can get along fine without knowing about those, but I think that my entire brain can agree that there are still some principles that everyone really should have been exposed to.

But sometimes I think that it’s the whole idea behind science that would be important to get across, rather than almost any of the details. I really do think that we would be better off if more people greeted some startling new piece of information by thinking, “Hmm. I wonder if that’s true?”, rather than immediately running with it. Or if more people waited for an N of 2, on almost anything, before deciding that things are clearly working just fine. Or even if more people just understood that correlation really does not imply causation, even when it might appear ever so much so that it does. These, and plenty more besides, are, of course, the habits of scientific thinking. I find them pretty darn handy in my work, naturally, but I find them handy on the nights and weekends as well.

This sort of thing, I’ve long believed, is at the core of the cultural frictions between researchers and some of the other parts of the companies that they work for. The scientists and the HR people have perhaps the most notorious disconnect. There have been HR folks that I’ve gotten along with perfectly well over the years, but there have been others who ended up looking at me as if I’d just stepped out of a UFO. I was probably giving them a similar look at the time, and hiding my feelings about as well as they were hiding theirs. So what is it that makes these two tribes so different?

I’m convinced that it’s the day-to-day wrestling with the physical world that does it. By that I don’t mean searching for the car keys or deciding how long to microwave a burrito. I mean the interrogation of the physical world that we do in the lab. Every scientist knows, in the end, that the results are the results, and that Nature is going to do what Nature is going to do, regardless of how much we might want things to go otherwise. But the more unbearable end of the human-resources spectrum seems to buy into the motivational speaker view of the world, that if you just try hard enough and have enough positive attitude and energy, then you can do anything. Posters, slogans, and training courses are apparently very efficacious in getting this to work.

For my part, I think that hard work and a positive attitude are in the “necessary but not sufficient” category for success in science. Sheer brainpower goes in there, too. It is crucial, but there are plenty of very smart people who turn out to be mediocre scientists, or worse.