LONG BEACH, CA—Stuart Firestein chairs the biological sciences department at Columbia University, and he came to the stage on the second day of the TED2013 conference in Southern California to address the scientific process. Specifically, Firestein wanted to share his thoughts on science's ability, or lack thereof, to capture the hearts and minds of the general public. Channeling a bit of Socrates, who once famously quipped “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing,” Firestein encouraged a change in the public perception of science—a change that begins with embracing what we don't know.

Firestein believes we have collectively put the scientific method on a pedestal, and we have imagined scientists as fact-producers. As a result, the public thinks scientists collect data and facts and publish them in books. But that's not an accurate perception. What’s really going on in science, Firestein said, is “farting around…in the dark.”

What scientists actually do is think about what they don’t know. “The ignorance is what’s missing” from public discussions of science, Firestein told the crowd. As a word, “ignorance” is potentially provocative, so he clarified. Firestein means "ignorance" in the sense that science focuses on recognizing and studying communal gaps in knowledge (rather than lauding the village idiot). This is the exciting part of science: “the boundary just outside the facts.”

Today, three new scientific papers are published every minute. What do scientists do with all of this? They strategically ignore it. The “point of science is not knowing a lot of stuff,” Firestein said. “Knowledge is a big subject, but ignorance is a bigger one.”

Scientists, Firestein continued, are not putting puzzles together. That implies there's actually going to be a final puzzle fitting together perfectly. They’re also not peeling an onion of knowledge, working toward some core truth hidden by layers of undiscovered reality. Scientists aren't even examining the tip of the iceberg, believing some massive truth lies below. All of those models are wrong, he said, because they assume scientists are primarily concerned with amassing a body of facts.

Firestein said George Bernard Shaw was delightfully right when he noted that “Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more.” And Firestein said this was a good thing: “We use knowledge to create high quality ignorance.” High quality ignorance is the goal, because what we don’t know makes a good question for a scientist.

So how do we get people excited about ignorance? Can it rejuvenate interest in science? Firestein told the crowd that in the second grade, both boys and girls are nearly universally excited by science. By the 11th grade, fewer than one in 10 have this curiosity for science. What happens in between? From the second grade on, science education often focuses on the accumulation of facts rather than the exploration of the boundaries of facts. It avoids the places where ignorance arises.

Science is a practice of revision, and Firestein asserted that it’s a victory to revise. He's suggesting a major revision in how we communicate science. He believes communicating our quest for ignorance to students and the public is the best way to spark scientific imagination. “Answers create questions... we may commonly think that we begin with ignorance and we gain knowledge,” he prefaced. “The more critical step in the process is the reverse of that.”