I often feel self-conscious when people ask how I became interested in science because my story differs from what you hear from most scientists. Often you get stories about inspiring scientists or teachers, a wish to discover a drug to save the world or just “having been born a scientist”: doing experiments in the kitchen or back garden from a ridiculously young age. That was not the case for me – I came to science because I wanted certainty.

Growing up, I thought I would go on to have a career in the humanities, perhaps as a teacher. I was fascinated by history, society and languages and spent most of my childhood in one or another fictional world. But as I got older, I grew uncomfortable with the subjectivity and nuance that was inherent in these subjects. Everything could be interpreted from one perspective or another and nothing was absolute, whereas I just wanted “the truth”. In high school, I started looking for other options and decided to give science a chance. I had placed it on my blacklist in primary school after too much tramping in dense Finnish forests looking for obscure plants and too many silly classroom experiments with sugar cubes and magnets – I thought this “science” was neither fun nor informative. But giving science another shot a few years later, I found it to be a very different experience. There was an exactness and logic to it that I had not encountered before. I simply loved memorising the Krebs cycle, calculating enthalpy changes and drawing out mechanisms of chemical reactions. All I wanted was to understand how the world worked and science provided the straight answers I was looking for. I saw none of the uncertainty I had been so bothered by in the humanities and I felt that I had found ‘my thing’.

The problem, of course, is that science is not about certainty. If anything, it is all about uncertainty – in the “facts” we obtain, in the theories and models we generate, in the measurement error of technology… uncertainty is ingrained in science. Somehow I was well into my time at university before I realised this but when I did, it hit me hard. I had anchored all my faith in science to the absolute answers and certainty it generated, so when this perfectly crafted image vanished, I felt disillusioned with science and came very close to quitting my degree. I dragged myself back for my final year and when I did, I felt that I had joined an entirely different course. Whereas previous years had been focused on learning about science, we now got to learn how to do science. Instead of sitting in lectures and memorising for exams, we got to engage with actual scientists and participate in research. It was this experience that made me realise that I had fundamentally misunderstood what science is: it is a process, not a collection of facts. And that process is the best tool we have to understand the world, little by little. I had been so focused on the facts and whether or not they were accurate statements about the world that I had lost sight of the ultimate purpose in science: exploring the unknown, which, by definition, is full of uncertainty.

When I shifted my focus from wanting certain knowledge to wanting to understand the unknown, I was able to see uncertainty in a new light. It is not a weakness tainting the body of scientific knowledge, but a necessity for acquiring new knowledge about the world. If scientific facts were set in stone and could not be updated with new evidence, scientific progress would have died out with the first scientists and we would still be believing in a flat Earth. Uncertainty is the driving force behind never-ending inquiry, it is what indicates where there are many questions left to answer. Incidentally, it is also what makes science so fun: without it, there would be no debates among scientists about whose theories are correct, no reason to do yet another experiment to test whether something actually holds true. In the end, I am happy that I no longer see science as being about proving existing theories and defending established facts. Today, what science is to me is fearlessly diving into the unknowns, questioning the assumptions we have about the world. And isn’t that much more exciting?

More broadly, though, I don’t think I am the only one wishing for certain knowledge about the world. The current pandemic, if nothing else, is making that blatantly obvious. No one knows when/if it will end and what the future will look like at that point. In the meantime, we just trudge on in our daily lives, weighed down by constant uncertainty about tomorrow. And many times, dealing with that is the most difficult thing. When everything feels uncertain, we tend to cling to something that makes us feel that we are in charge. I suspect that this feeling of control is why I was so drawn to science in the first place: the certain answers I felt it gave me made me feel safer in a world that is so complicated and unpredictable. By stocking my brain full of what I thought were absolute facts and explanations for how at least part of reality works, I felt more capable of dealing with the other irrational and uncertain aspects of life. To me, science was – and still is – a coping mechanism for living with uncertainty. Then as a source of certain facts, now as something fun to balance out the often depressing world we live in.

Here’s another question: do we enjoy learning because it satisfies our intrinsic human curiosity or because learning gives us knowledge which reduces the amount of uncertainty we perceive around us and that makes us feel more secure and therefore more content? Many of us, especially scientists, pride ourselves on being naturally curious, but how much of that is actually just a stronger-than-usual desire to understand the world so that we can feel more in control? Perhaps the answer matters, perhaps it doesn’t. I guess the important thing is that there is something that keeps us wanting to discover what there is to know about the world.