Composition and Context

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In a conversation with my parents a week or so ago, I reminded myself of one of my more brilliant points in my teaching and one of my pet peeves with researchers. Wednesday night when I go to lecture for the first time this term, I will point that out in my discussion of the Scientific Method, that in our experimental design and description it is important to discuss the setting. You see, the rules are the rules under a certain set of conditions. Chemistry is the science of changing the conditions in order to force matter and energy to change from the state in which we find it to the state in which we prefer it be.

Even students of the fine arts know about setting. It plays a huge part in plays, in books, and in the cinema. I mean, it wouldn't make much sense for the Rebel Alliance to fight the Death Star using slingshots or for people to be fighter pilots in a story set in 1650 AD. The setting helps us "set the stage" and defines under what conditions a thing might happen, and in our particular case the conditions under which it does. Scientists do the same. They are supposed to report their experimental and control settings so that we know in what context the results they observe occurred so that we can reproduce it or draw relevant conclusions based on changing conditions.

Much of science, I teach my students, tells us that it depends. Normally, according to scientists, heat and light are not considered to be useful work. Work to us means the conversion of matter. However, light and heat can be useful if we set the stage correctly. When you get up in the middle of the night and flip on the lamp, light is absolutely critical. When the sun explodes, it casts just the right amount of heat and light 93 million miles to keep the earth sufficiently warm and lit for life to persist. It depends, on what, where, with what, how much, at what time, and with what other props or conditions a thing occurs. Under different conditions, other outcomes are likely.

Many people do not think the Nevada desert is beautiful. In and of itself, perhaps they are right. The rocks are bleak and unimpressive. The plants are scrawny. The game is colored blandly. However, it means fewer people want to come here, so I can see the stars more clearly here than I could at 10,000 feet in the middle of Colorado, and I can hike without having to suffer the incessant chatter and electronic intrusions that seem to always disrupt the peace in Utah's "wilderness". Even my own father who once worked as a professional photographer complimented me on many of my photographs of this state. He taught me, on a late summer day during high school with an old Canon A1 camera, about composition and context.