When I try to imagine an ideal version of scientific exploration, it looks something like this: people from different places, different disciplines, different ways of moving through the world, gather around a shared curiosity. The opportunity to question things, make theories, speculate, and critique exists for every person. Everyone in the room is genuinely trying to figure something out together, and simultaneous conversations happen in different rooms. There's no urgency to produce a result. Things unfold slowly, because that's what it actually takes to understand something, to sit with it, turn it over, let it get complicated. The driver of science in this utopia is curiosity rather than productivity metrics. It values the contribution of varied minds, experiences, approaches, and interpretations. It honors the fact that different people see different things, and that this is not a weakness to correct for. It's the whole point. It doesn't demand that everyone fit the same shape to be considered excellent.

There's a particular pride that exists in some corners of academia around difficulty for its own sake: the professor who boasts that most students fail their class, as though the failure rate is evidence of rigor. I'd argue it's evidence of the opposite. If you design a course where most people can't get through, you've built a sieve with holes cut to one specific shape, and then declared that only the people who fit through that shape meet your definition of "excellence." That's a confident kind of exclusion, especially when you consider that the design of the shape is fundamentally limited to your experience alone.

I tend to slip into "what we should not do" language when I think about academia. It's easier to name what's broken than to describe what we're building instead. But I think the positive version is worth trying to articulate, because if we can't describe what we actually want, we'll keep defaulting to what already exists, just with slightly softer edges.

Scientific questions themselves are only part of what science actually is. Yes, we have detected literal ripples in spacetime and confirmed that black holes exist. That is extraordinary. But alongside that discovery, we also built the structures that made it possible. We established a common language for sharing knowledge across networks, constructed formal collaborative structures, tested the efficacy of new research tools, expanded our field to new members, evaluated which groups receive financial support, decided which individuals receive awards and recognition over others. As we question how our theories should be refined, we should also consider if we have approached this work in the best way. What could we try differently?

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a system of interpreting the world we live in, which means it's a system built *by* and *for* people. It carries our assumptions, our blind spots, our biases, and also our capacity for curiosity, generosity, and self-correction. It is not above the social structures it exists inside of. How we structure our collaborations, how we train the next generation of scientists, how we decide who gets to participate, how we evaluate rigor, how we distribute recognition - these questions shape the field as much as any discovery does.

Of course, I'm writing these thoughts from inside the system. I work within institutions that have their own pressures, their own hierarchies, their own incentive structures that determine our career stability. I'm aware that living these values perfectly isn't really an option, but there is some room to be intentional in our daily choices.

For me, intentionality mostly looks like paying attention to the how in my own work. How is this project structured, and does that structure actually serve the people doing the work, or just the timeline? How am I approaching collaboration — as a transaction or as something more generative? Who's in the room, who isn't, and why? Am I open to new ideas, or am I defaulting to familiar names, familiar formats, familiar shapes?

When we talk about making science more inclusive, more accessible, more equitable, we are still largely talking about bringing more people into an existing framework. That matters, but it doesn't go far enough if we never stop to ask whether the framework itself is the only valid one. Human beings have been interpreting the natural world for as long as we have existed. Indigenous communities developed sophisticated understandings of ecology, medicine, astronomy, and land systems over thousands of years. This knowledge was accumulated carefully, tested against experience, revised across generations, and encoded in language, practice, and story. People consider this primitive thinking waiting to be validated by a peer-reviewed journal, but it could instead be valued as a different way of asking what counts as knowledge, who gets to produce it, and how it should be held and shared. Western science has not only failed to incorporate these knowledge systems. In many cases it has actively suppressed, dismissed, or extracted from them while refusing to credit them as legitimate. That history should make us a little more humble about the confidence with which we treat our current methods as the definitive way of knowing.

We do not evolve as a species in a straight line. Knowledge accumulates, but it also gets lost. Paradigms shift. Things we were certain about get overturned. And there are ways of understanding the world that have survived and served human communities across centuries that we have barely begun to take seriously. Mostly because they don't look like what we've decided rigor looks like, or they don't fit the same shapes of our personally-constructed sieves.

When I talk about expanding our field to include more perspectives, I mean something deeper than access to papers or seats in lecture halls. I mean: who decides what counts as understanding in the first place? Whose questions get treated as the serious ones? Whose ways of knowing get incorporated into the project at all? If the knowledge we generate about the physical world is, at its core, knowledge about the world everyone inhabits, then the question of who gets to participate in generating it (and who gets to benefit from it) seems like it should be higher on the list. What is the point of exploring the fundamental nature of the Universe if only a select few people get to understand it?

I don't have or expect any clean answer for this, but I think that those of us who work inside the system, who benefit from its structures, who speak its current language, who have been granted legitimacy by its institutions, have a particular responsibility to keep asking this question. Simply as a practice to maintain humility and a reminder that our way is not the only way. Admittedly, these thoughts are pretty theoretical and not quite figured out. If any of this resonates, or you want to talk about what it actually looks like in practice, let's talk!