Conclusion
A playful spirit is essential to scientific research. The atmosphere in a laboratory ought to be “enthusiastic and joyful, with moments of tension followed by relaxation and gaiety” (I’m paraphrasing a sentence from Huizinga’s Homo ludens ) . The sphere of play is that of fictions one believes in, of an imaginary world ruled by convention and by perceived invariants, such as natural laws.
I vouch for the games chemists are wont to play. A chemist in the laboratory, sets up encounters between various chemicals in glassware to witness their interaction. The chemist is intent upon watching what they lead to. His or her expectations only extend those of the child who has been given a paintbox and tries out mixing the colors with one another, just to find what comes out. In the same ludic mood, the chemist asks himself “what would happen, were I to change … the proportions?/ were I to modify the sequence of the operations? / were I to invert the argument? / were I to add, just for fun, another ingredient?” Let me assure you, such an attitude can be extremely fruitful.
In this lecture, I started with the question “how does a scientist confront complexity, how does he or she go about unravelling a problem of awesome complication?” The answers were: by making it an enjoyable, a playful activity; by guessing at the solution; by training one’s mind to the nonobvious, to the paradoxical, to the uncanny.
I considered science, whether theoretical or experimental, as a form of tinkering, which I define as grasping an object and investing it with a novel, innovative use.
I have looked at pretend games in relation to challenges, in particular.
And my final stand is that science needs play because it is rooted in language, and language needs and enjoys built-in play.
Thank you for your kind and patient attention.