THE SCIENCE OF BISCUITS

“And God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it;’” (Genesis 1:28a, NAS). 

Science has proven to be a very useful tool, enabling mankind to fulfill God’s commands to fill and subdue the earth.  Simply put, science uses a systematic method of gathering information to help us understand how God has made everything from atoms to galaxies.  Industry then capitalizes on the information that science provides to make new and better medicines, to genetically engineer seeds that produce more abundant crops, and to build faster computers.  But practically speaking, how does science work? What do scientists do?

Instead of describing what I do in the lab as a polymer chemist, it might be easier if I describe how the tool of science could be used in the kitchen.  Last week I made a batch of biscuits (yes, I enjoy cooking almost as much as chemistry).  Making good biscuits is easy.  Just use a pastry cutter to blend flour, baking powder, and a dash of salt with butter.  The blend should be light and crumbly, not heavy and pasty, or dry and dusty.  Then add milk all at once and quickly stir just enough to get a uniform mixture.  Spoon out dabs about the size of a walnut on a cookie sheet, and bake for 10 minutes in a pre-heated 425 F degree oven.  Mmm!  I like them best hot out of the oven with honey, and I don’t mind the sticky fingers. J

Now for the science.  Why does the recipe call for three teaspoons of baking powder, and what will happen if I use two or four teaspoons?  Easy enough, I just whip up a few batches with different amounts of baking powder and see what happens.  You guessed it, with less baking powder the biscuits do not rise as much, and with more they rise more.  But how much more?  I measure the exact size of my biscuits and make a mathematical correlation between the size (volume) of my biscuits and the amount of baking powder used.  I might end up with an equation like this: 

Volume of biscuits in cubic centimeters = (rise factor) x (teaspoons of baking powder)

Once I run several more experiments to make sure that I have correctly determined the value of the rise factor, I’ll begin to feel like I’m gaining an understanding of the science of biscuit making.  However, being the inquisitive scientist that I am, I will then go on to study how biscuit quality changes with the amount of butter, flour, milk, and salt used, as well as with baking time and temperature.  It is simply a matter of systematically changing each of my variables (cups of flour, oven temperature, baking time), and then observing/ measuring results (biscuit size, color, taste).

There is so much that we can learn when science done well, like how to make the perfect biscuit, but I have found that science can be un-safe for us scientists.  The practice of science tends to produce in us a peculiar arrogance.  If I study biscuit making in great detail, I will want to publish my results in a prestigious scientific culinary journal (please bear with just a bit of tongue-in-cheek here).  I will likely then be invited to speak about my work in symposiums on food chemistry.  Within a few years I will aspire becoming known as the world’s leading expert in the field of biscuit science.  Over time I may come to identify myself so strongly with the fine science of making biscuits that I will conveniently forget that good biscuits have been made by little known cooks for hundreds of years.  It is so easy as a scientist to lose sight of the fact that I did not create the biscuit, I merely study it.

Science also has limitations.  Though it can be used to systematically study and gain knowledge about everything from atoms to biscuits to galaxies, it has marginal value as a tool to help us gain knowledge about anything that cannot be directly observed, measured, and studied in a systematic way.   How can I use the tool of science to unfold the mystery of love, beauty, joy, or truth*?  Science is powerless to probe the spiritual realm, to prove or disprove the existence of spirits, gods, or God.  Science has made great strides understanding the workings of God’s creation, even how He might have gone about making it, but science cannot tell us why He created the universe.  More importantly science cannot tell us why we were created.

*Neuroscience is capable of monitoring the chemical and electrical changes in our brains that occur as we observe a beautiful sunset, read a love poem, or grapple with moral issues, but I would contend that beauty, love, and truth are more than the measured responses of our brains to these intangibles.