Never heard of it? More accurately, it should be “the science of droppin'”, but you are probably none the wiser. Neither were we until we wandered into an out-of-the-way bookshop in London and stumbled upon a little book called Droppin’ Science from Three Rivers Press. Admittedly, it wasn’t in the science section, but then the bookshop didn’t seem to have one. (We can’t be sure as the owner told us, “If you can’t see the book you want, it’s probably been stolen.”)
Droppin’ turns out to be hip-hop parlance for dropping a clever bit of true street wisdom into your songs or conversation. Usually it is one of those bits of wisdom that is so profound it can seem truly mundane – or vice versa. If you perfect the science of droppin’, your listeners will never be able to figure out which.
So what’s in it for scientists? Our view is that with droppin’ becoming a science, scientists should be aware of this new chance to increase their street credibility and party cool.
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Let’s get started. First get into the swing with some quotes from the legendary giants of hip hop. “Strength has to come from the inside” – Eve. “Everything changes and nothing changes” – Macy Gray. “Life’s struggles make you realise the importance of having a mother” – Black Rob.
Next, learn from great scientists who were inadvertently droppin’ long before hip hop was invented. Listen to these gems from science’s greatest voices. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future,” said Niels Bohr, a beautiful combination of the shallow and the deep that would win a place in any anthology of droppin’.
“You cannot think about thinking, without thinking about thinking about something,” said Seymour Papert. Exactly. “What’s a sundial in the shade?” asked Benjamin Franklin. (We are still thinking about the answer, a sign of excellent droppin’). Then there’s Erwin Schrödinger’s injunction to “think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees”.
Time to try it for yourself. What will you learn? Maybe that all wisdom looks the same, whether picked up in the street or the lab. As Albert Einstein said: “Wisdom is not the product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
Now see if you can tell who is responsible for these two quotes: “Knowing and understanding are the same” and “The understanding that the truth gives you, and the freedom that the truth gives your heart, is something every man is capable of having and entitled to have”. Einstein or RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan?
