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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Botany is a branch of Natural History that possesses many advantages; it contributes to health of body and cheerfulness of disposition, by presenting an inducement to take air and exercise; it is adapted to the simplest capacity, and the objects of its investigation offer themselves without expense or difficulty…
Taxonomy was the biology of the scientific revolution. The opening up of the New World and the Far East provided European scientists with thousands of new species to examine and classify. Establishing botanical gardens, menageries and 'cabinets' of minerals, preserved animal specimens and dried plants were favourite…
rhe systematic development of knowledge and technology that we all 'science' originated in the millennia of prehistory, and early vomen were among these first 'scientists'. They invented tools, accumulated knowledge about edible and medicinal plants, and 3robably discovered 'the chemistry of pot-making, the physics of…
We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have…
What is remarkable about man is not the size of his brain, no greater than that of a dolphin, nor his loose incomplete development as a social animal, nor even the faculty of speech or his ability to use tools. Man is remarkable because by the combination of all these things he has created an entirely new entity. When…
When Rachel Carson made us aware of the dangers arising from the mass application of toxic chemicals, she presented her arguments in the manner of an advocate, not a scientist. In other words, she selected the evidence to prove her case. The chemical industry, seeing its livelihood threatened by her action, responded…
The inseparability of junk science from junk thought is evinced by the telltale marks of endemic illogic coupled, in many instances, with deliberate manipulativeness. The first and most fundamental warning sign is an inability to distinguish between coincidence and causation—a basic requirement for scientific…
Intellectual quackery extends throughout the landscape of academia; tenured professors in the humanities and social sciences, on the right and left, are constantly purveying theories that are the philosophical, literary, and artistic equivalents of junk science. That many of the researchers consider themselves…
This is, in fact the critical discovery of science. That we often perceive what we expect or want to perceive, often at variance with what is objectively true. The Cro Magnon genius of trumping objective evidence with subjective belief. The original and only true form of magic. How has science dealt with this…
In the Dark Ages, the religious orders of monasteries were the bearers of our culture. Much of this knowledge was contained in books, and the monks took care of them and read them as part of their discipline. Sadly, science is no longer a calling where scientists are the guardians of knowledge, but rather has become a…