Waiting to be known

The hardest thing to teach as a science teacher was hypothesizing. Often what we came up with were 'if we do this, that will occur' testable sentences, predicting the behavior of things under certain conditions. But what is harder, much harder, is to explain why things behave as they do, that is, to understand how something works well enough to be able to construct a explanatory model that can be tested.

Over in Scotland, I tried to make popovers for the gang. Eggs, check; milk, check; flour, okay. Muffin tin, specially purchased for the occasion, greased and ready to go. Oven?  Ah, now we're in new territory. First, it's temps were in celsius degrees. So 450 degrees converts to what? Then there were the controls. Was this a convection oven? I seemed to hear a fan more or less loudly roaring at each setting. How then were the four options different?

What I saw through the oven window after a few minutes was the batter in some cups billowing up. When I looked later, everything was flat. When I pulled them out of the oven, the popovers were like pancakes in cupcake form, edible, even tasty, but not popovers. I tried twice with the same result. Very disappointing. What could I say to those who had been waiting for the treat that I'd made successfully many times before stateside? Sorry, unfamiliar oven. A standard excuse.

I have a theory about popovers, a hypothesis if you will. The initial 'inflation' is due to air mixed up in the batter expanding but getting trapped by the crust being formed and hardened by the heat. Temperature is key. Too hot and, while a crust forms, the air pressure is too high for the crust to hold; too cold and the air leaks away before the crust forms. After about twenty minutes at 450, the oven must be put down to 350 for another 20 minutes so that the batter cooks.

When I looked through the newspaper today and saw a recipe for Foolproof (love it) Tart Tatin, an apple dessert (just the thing I keep my eye out for), I quickly perused it and read: 'When ready to cook, heat oven to 375 degrees (or 350 if using convection)...' What? Perhaps I really had overheated the oven. Maybe my popovers had indeed popped. Should I try the experiment of overheating my oven, and maybe spoiling a batch? Maybe it'd be worth it.

Kitchen science is a wonderful subject. The person to read on this head is Harold McGee. I used cooking experiments in a number of my classes. The lessons have double, triple benefit: we learned to cook; we made good things to eat (usually); we found out something about chemistry and physics and hypothesis-making. As I looked through the glass into the oven, those little dabs of batter swelling and bulging were like living things. I watched them with the same interest I give to soil where I've planted seeds. 'What's going on in you?' I wonder. 'How are you developing?' There's a process going on and I try to imagine myself inside it.

When we explore, we're strangers but curious. Hypothesizing invents stories about how things work, stories we can test. It's looking under the hood; it's getting up close and personal. The whole world and everything and everyone in it is waiting to be known this way.

This year's Nobel prize winner in economics, Jean Tirole, earned the award from hypothesizing about the relationships of regulators and businesses in the context of the marketplace, and concluding that the story is about something as full of complex interactions and feedback loops as a living being. A valid story may suggest a multiplicity of good ways for things to work.

Isaac Asimov, the science and science fiction writer, wrote an essay about creativity 50 years ago but only just published in MIT Technology Review and in it he said:

"Making the cross-connection (between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordinarily seem connected) requires a certain daring. It must, for any cross-connection that does not require daring is performed at once by many and develops not as a 'new idea,' but as a 'mere corollary of an old idea.' It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable."

New ideas, yes, but even corollaries to old ideas: what matters is engaging with things by looking and thinking and linking, again and again.