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...HUMAN UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURAL WORLD
...PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF THE SCIENTIFIC WAY
The veritable revolution in comprehension of our universe and of our own relations to it that we have recently experienced are not, of course, at all new in human history. They are as old as the world of Aristarchus of Samos or of Copernicus and Galileo; as recent as that of Darwin and of the revolution in physics during the early years of the twentieth century. Each revolution prefaced new vision, a widened intellectual scope, for the generations that followed.
But such major conceptual transformations never come easily. The greater the gap between old and new, the more difficult and traumatic they are and the more reluctantly they are accepted. One recalls the seventeen centuries that elapsed before the notion of Aristarchus that the earth, instead of being the center of the universe, was in fact a satellite of the sun gained any firm and general foothold in man’s intellectual tradition, spurred by the work of Copernicus and the publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. One recalls the elements of hostility in the initial reception of the Origin of Species, and that it was nearly a century before there was full and general acceptance of the new ideas it expounded. One is reminded of the forty-five years of virtual oblivion that greeted the critical paper of Mendel, even though it was published not nearly so obscurely as has often been supposed. One remembers the relatively long struggle that followed the development of the new physics before it, too, offered a fresh basis for human understanding.
Hostility, resistance, and with them, often enough, a poignant sense of diminution of man’s own place and significance in the universe of his imagining have been the common accompaniments of great conceptual change throughout the history of science. But it is notable too that those negations, so natural and so altogether human, have also, in the end, revealed a subtle and apparently paradoxical obverse, an obverse ultimately of profound significance for human growth.
Over and over again we have seen that the final acceptance of a new stage of human understanding about the natural world—an acceptance which at first appeared to sanction an intolerable demeaning of man’s stature and accordingly was resented and long resisted—has instead fostered a new order of human sensitivity and appreciative capacity; has signaled, indeed, a new and salutary humility before the wonder and the glory of the unfolding universe. And with that humility has characteristically come a renewed sense of the integrity of the partnership of man and his environment, a sense of a deep and fundamental unity with nature. That may well be one ultimate fruit of the dynamic advances of the last decades. We can properly anticipate its ripening over the years to come.
CARYL P. HASKINS: REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT 1969/70, CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON.
A complementary aspect of science, and one of major human significance has been conspicuous ever since the days of Francis Bacon. In our workaday world indeed, it sometimes preempts attention so effectively as to be regarded as the essential characteristic of the scientific way. It is “scientific-research-with-a-goal.” The goal is the important one of bettering man’s condition through the control of nature. That control and that betterment, as three centuries of experience have deeply impressed upon us, are best achieved, in the first instance, through a better understanding of nature. A predominant part of our material civilization, of our comfort and affluence, of our physical health, as we are acutely aware, is the cumulative consequence of investigative work directed to those ends of a span of at least two hundred years. In our day we should not need to be reminded although there is now real and growing evidence that we do need to be reminded that, materially as well as spiritually, scientific research is one of the most significant of all our activities.
At their proximate margins, there is little visible difference between scientific investigation undertaken with the primary object of understanding nature and that initiated with the primary object of controlling nature. Indeed, the two motivations may be inextricably entwined within a common program, as they so often are, for example, in medical research. Understanding and power can indeed proceed together.
But despite the fact that both motivations are extremely important to the progress of science; despite the fact that they are highly complementary and that often enough, the kinds of scientific investigation that they inspire may be quite indistinguishable, it is undeniable that the motivations themselves do differ in important ways, and in certain circumstances it is important to distinguish them.
Two reasons for this are worth emphasis. First, the second orientation is basically derivative, and in that sense is inherently dependent on the first. Typically, research with predominantly practical motivation extends frontiers of knowledge already touched by investigations of the first kind, often expanding and refining them with discrimination and power. But less frequently does it open wholly novel salients, and rather rarely is it prosecuted consistently in an area where tangible benefits do not appear within a reasonable length of time. This, of course, is as it should be. But it also means that if the second motive were ever to replace the first on a general scale we would be in great difficulty, for a good share of our initial impetus would necessarily be lost. There is an ever-present risk here, which, if remote, is also dangerously real. The nature of the practical world is clear such that, unless both the distinction between the two motivations, and their complementarity, are borne constantly in mind, the second view, instead of interweaving with the first, might indeed come to supplant it. That would be catastrophic indeed.
CARYL P. HASKINS: REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT 1968/69, CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON
Thoughtful students of scientific progress have commented again and again that the central step in the achievement of any new order of scientific understanding is basically nonlogical: truly a step of imagination. As T. S. Kuhn has cogently observed, in each age all the workers in the mainstream of any branch of science have typically accepted without serious questions a given frame of reference of work and thought inherited from the founders of the discipline. The very structure of science, the maintenance of its quantitative excellence, the assurance of its genuine progress within an arena determined to be sound, demand such a framework.
But the converse is that the adoption of a truly new viewpoint typically demands a radical fracturing of that structure. Such qualitative change is not to be achieved through work of every-greater intensity along the old lines, nor through the accumulation of more data or the improvement of old, nor by further refinement in the tools of analysis, nor, above all, by simplistic but grandiose speculation that merely extends old modes of thinking to more arresting planes.
The process by which major new scientific ideas are generated is, as Bronowski long ago emphasized, closely akin to the great insights of philosophy or literature or painting. The notions of Copernicus and of Darwin were clearly of this kind. Numbers of analogous modern examples come to mind: the theory of an expanding universe, for example, or of continental drift, or of the ultimate structure of DNA and the mode of its action. In this, its central process, science is clearly at one with the central processes of literature and art—belying the old assertions of their separateness.
In the genesis of their great ideas scientists, artists, and writers alike must deal essentially with resemblances, with analogies, and often enough with ambiguities unresolved. It is only in dealing with those ambiguities that the single significant distinction, that of the role of experiment, appears. For in literature and in art the ambiguity remains and must be resolved, if at all, by the receiver of the message. In science, neither the author of the ambiguity nor the audience can be allowed to act as the court of last resort. The court of nature, with experiment as its plea, alone can serve.
Once again, it is strikingly evident that the need for a general public understanding of the real nature of the scientific way has never been so great. How is it to be achieved? There is no one way, of course, no single campaign, no single plan that can suffice. It can only be attained, gradually and persistently, at many levels of concept and of execution. The channels are especially important, and must be especially subtle, at the deeper levels of feeling and philosophy which ultimately must be the most socially significant of all. For it is at precisely those levels where a truly widespread comprehension of the real nature of the scientific way could perhaps go farther than any other single factor in helping to span that disastrously serious gap left by the decline of formal religion in a society still fundamentally moved by its deep needs for reverence and an abiding sense of identification with the natural world.
CARYL P. HASKINS: REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT 1968/69, CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON
Joyce Carey has observed that freedom and independence of mind involve solitude in thought. In sympathy and in feeling we are communal, but in mind each of us is very much alone. In an increasingly crowded and an increasingly highly organized America, opportunities for the attainment of that quietness and episodic solitude combined with the assurance of intellectual communion and support when it is most needed become increasingly rare. Yet we know from long experience that just such environments vitally foster and nourish the greatness of the individual American, as of the society as a whole. For it is the gifted, unorthodox individual, in the laboratory or the study or the walk by the river at twilight, who has brought to us, and must continue to bring to us, many of the basic resources by which we live. Six hundred years ago Chaucer observed: “Out of the old fields cometh the new corn.” In tilling the fields and steadfastly maintaining them, in cultivating them anew and in fostering their productivity, the Carnegie Institution continues today one of the greatest and most permanent aspects of its leadership.
At the close of this term of duty, I can find no other words than those of my predecessor, Dr. Vannevar Bush, on the same occasion: words as true today as when they were written in 1955: “It is faith that makes us look beyond tomorrow and ever seek to know, because in some mysterious way we realize that only a small portion of the road to knowledge has yet been trod, that matters beyond our present comprehension lie just around the bend, and that it would be folly at any point to abandon the journey in skepticism without striving to surmount the next obstacle and perhaps attain a better view. You are members of a distinguished and worthy company. Treasure the privilege of your association in your hearts.”
Caryl P. Haskins
And the pleasure of discovery differs from all other pleasures in this, that it is shadowed by no fear of satiety on the one hand or of frustration on the other. Other desires perish in their gratification, but the desire of knowledge never: the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing.... the sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read we shall never come to the end of our story book.
A.E. Housman, Lecture at University College, London, 1892
CARYL P. HASKINS, REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT 1969/70, CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON
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