Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Bronowski , Jacob (1965), Science and Human Values, Faber and Faber, Retrieved on 2011-04-19
Folksonomies: science philosophy two cultures Memes
19 APR 2011
Using Nagasaki as a Place for Diplomacy
The gravest indictment that can be made of our generalized culture is, in fact, that it erodes our sense of the context in which judgments must be made. Let me end with a practical example. When I returned from the physical shock of Nagasaki, which I have described in the first page of this book, I tried to persuade my colleagues in governments and in the United Nations that Nagasaki should be preserved ext actly as it was then. I wanted all future conferences on disarmament, and on other iss... 1 
notes
notesJ. Bronowski suggests the idea, but it is shot down because it would leave the delegates uncomfortable.
19 APR 2011
Two Visions of Science
g. When Shelley pictured science as a modern Prometheus who would wake the world to a wonderful dream of Godwin, he was alas too simple. But it is as pointless to read what has happened since as a nightmare. Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science, and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simply by taking sides.
And this make-believe game might cost... 1 notes
notesShelly's view of science as a liberator versus HG Wells vision of science as an elitist endeavor, leaving the populace slaves to its whims.
19 APR 2011
Science is About Finding Likeness
All science, is the searchjnr njQJty in hidden likenesses. The search may be on a grand scale, as in the modern theories which try to link the fields of gravitation and electromagnetism. But we do not need to be browbeaten by the scale of science. There are discoveries to be made by snatching a small likeness from the air too, if it is bold enough. In ^935 the Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa wrote a paper which can still give heart to a young scientist. He took as his starting point the know...Folksonomies: science scientific practice
Folksonomies: science scientific practice
1 notes
notesThe art of science is finding the common bond between phenomena.
19 APR 2011
It Wasn't the Apple that Newton Used to Discover Gravity
Science finds order and meaning in our experience, and sets about this in quite a different way. It sets about it as New¬ ton did in the story which he himself told in his old age, and of which the schoolbooks give only a caricature. In the year 1665, when Newton was twenty-two, the plague broke out in southern England, and the University of Camb] idge was closed. Newton therefore spent the next eighteen months at home, removed from traditional learning, at a time when he was impatient for k...
1 Gravity was already known, Newton's vision was extending the force of gravity up to the Moon.
19 APR 2011
Science is the Knot Tying it all together
The creation was a concept—a connected set of concepts. There was the concept of a universal gravitation-reaching beyond the tree tops and the air to the ends of space. There was the concept of other universal forces in space, which ti to pull the moon away as a whirling stone pulls away fro: its string. And there was the concept which put an end to the four elements of Aristotle: the concept of mass, alike in t apple and the earth and the moon, in all earthly and heavenly bodies.**
All t...Folksonomies: science scientific process
Folksonomies: science scientific process
1 notes
notesThroughout the centuries, scientists postulate hypotheses, and later scientists connect them to others to form stronger, more universal theories.
19 APR 2011
The Train of Thought to Equality
Since then society has evolved a sequence of ci central con¬ cepts each of which was at one time thought to make it work of itself, and each of which has had to be corrected to the next. There was the early eighteenth-century concept of selfinterest, in Mandeville and others; then came enlightened self-interest; then the greatest happiness of the greatest num¬ bet; utility; the labor theory of valueie; and thence its expression either in the welfare state or in the clasassless society. Men ... 1 notes
notes...ending in the Declaration of Independence.
19 APR 2011
Evolution from Inner-Philsophy to Natural Philosophy
There have always been two ways of looking for truth. One is to find concepts which are beyond challenge, because they are held by faith or by authority or the conviction that they are self-evident. This is the mystic submission to truth which the East has chosen, and which dominated the axiomatic thought of the scholars of the Middle Ages. So St. Thomas Aquinas holds that faith is a higher guide to truth than knowledge is: the master of medieval science puts science firmly into second place.... 1 notes
notesSummary of human culture moving from introspectively-revealed knowledge of the Dark Ages to the outward-viewing philosophy of naturalism.
19 APR 2011
The Mesh of Science
I do not think that truth becomes more primitive if we pursue it to simpler facts. For no fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field—a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it.
Truth in science is like Everest, an ordering of the facts. We organize our experience in patterns which, formalized. make the network of scientific laws. But scie... 1 notes
notesScience "articulates the movements of the world."
19 APR 2011
Scientists Create and Thrive in a Stable Civilization
I take a different view of science as a method; to me, it enters the human spirit more directly. Therefore I have studied quite another achievement: that of making a human society work. As a set of discoveries and devices, science has mastered nature; but it has been able to do so only because its values, which derive from its method, have formed those who practice it into a living, stable and incorruptible society. Here is a community where everyone has been free to enter, to speak his mind,...Folksonomies: science culture science virtue
Folksonomies: science culture science virtue
1 There's a question of cause and effect in considering Bronowski's observation.
19 APR 2011
Respect is a Scientific Virtue
The society of scientists must be a democracy.® It can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect; between independence from the views of Others, and tolerance for them. The crux of the ethical problem is to fuse these, the private and the public needs. Tolerance alone is not enough; this is why the bland, kindly civilizations of the East, where to contradict is a personal affront, developed no strong science. And independence is not enough either: the sad his...Mutual respect, building ideas on other ideas, is crucial to how science works.
19 APR 2011
Dissent as a Scientific Virtue
First, of course, comes independence, in observation and thence in thought. I once told an audience of school-children that the world would never change if they did not contradict their elders. J was chagrined to find next morning that this axiom outraged their parents. Yet it is the basis of the scientific method. A man must see, do and think things for himself, in the face of those who are sure that they have already been over all that ground. In science, there is no substitute for independ...Without dissent, there is no progress.
19 APR 2011
The Culture of Scientists
This is the light by which the working of society is to be examined. And in order to keep the study in a manageable field I will continue to choose a society in which the principle of truth rules. Therefore the society which I will examine is that formed by scientists themselves: it is the body of scientists.
It may seem strange to call this a society, and yet it is an obvious choice; for having said so much about the workings of science, I should be shirking all our unspoken questions if I...Scientists form a culture, a virtuous culture, as Bronowki describes it.
19 APR 2011
Science Virtue and its Impact on History
So proud men have thought, in all walks of life, since Giordano Bruno was burned alive for his cosmology on the Campo de' Fiori in 1600. They have gone about their work simply enough. The scientists among them did not set out to be moralists or revolutionaries. William Harvey and Huygens, Euler and Avogadro, Darwin and Willard Gibbs and Marie Curie, Planck and Pavlov, practised their crafts modestly and steadfastly. Yet the values they seldom spoke of shone out of their work and entered their...Folksonomies: history science virtue
Folksonomies: history science virtue
Scientists prove their virtue in their actions.
28 JAN 2012
The Conflict of Free Versus Social
The problem of values arises only when men try to fit together their need to be social animals with their need to be free men. There is no problem, and there are no values, until men want to do both. If an anarchist wants only freedom, whatever the cost, he will prefer the jungle of man at war with man. And if a tyrant wants only social order, he will create the totalitarian state. 1 notes
notesAnarchy or Totalitarianism, man can go to either extreme.
19 APR 2011
Mathematicians Do Math for Its Own Sake
4- As an example, consider the practice of mathematics. Mathematics is in the first place a language in which we discuss those parts of the real world which can be described by numbers or by similar relations of order. But with the workaday business of translating the facts into this language there naturally goes, in those who are good at it, a pleasure in the activity itself. They find the language richer than its bare content; what is translated comes to mean less to them than the logic and...They work the art as if it were poetry, much of it without practical application, but for the beauty of mathematics.
19 APR 2011
Art and Science Both Recreate Reality
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art. But it is not therefore the monopoly of the man who wrote the poem or who made the discovery. On the contrary, I believe this view of the creative act to be tion. The......and both make the heart skip a beat with the effort.
19 APR 2011
Science Tames Nature by Understanding
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. rhis is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature. The alchemist and the magician in the Middle Ages thought, and the addict of comic strips is still encouraged to think, that nature must be mastered by a device which outrages her laws. But in four hundred years since the Scientific Revolu tion we have learned that we gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only ...Contrasted with comics, fiction, and religion, where nature is subdued by force and magic.
