Special of the week; Issue 2-1969

NDE are the national educational radio network presents special of the week. Dr. Jacob Bronowski a senior fellow at the Salt Institute for Biological Studies at San Diego spoke earlier this year before the annual convention of the National Science Teachers Association in Washington. Dr. Bernard McKey is a mathematician by training well known in intellectual history and literature. He is recognized as an authority on William Blake in poetry and in the philosophy of science. Jacob Bronowski subject here science and the new humanism. The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is of course science itself. I mean that scientists Oh they're growing success during the last 300 years to the way in which they've been able to turn science into a myth. And the strength of the method. What brings you here. Is that it can be

taught and learned more people have learned to be scientists in our lifetime. Than in or human history therefore. We can teach people how to make great discoveries of course. But we can certainly teach them how discovery was made. And evolution in the last few hundred years of this method has been the essential discovery of science. In this sense science is a method of discovery. And they evidently two things to be asked about such a method. How it works. And why it works. Neither of these questions is simply technical. On the contrary there are answers imply a special relation an active shooter of man to his environment. And that's why they point to every thought or person. So I shall divide the

treatment of my subject into three parts. In the first part I shall ask. How does science work. This is therefore an inquiry in logic. In the second part I should ask. Why does science work. That's an inquiry in philosophy. But in the third part I should examine the human and social way quizzes. Which are necessary to make science way. That is to say. What makes it possible for human beings to work. ACT science so that science works. This third part is that when inquiry and ethics. I'm afraid that makes a rather formal progress but it seems to me the most cogent way to construct the common conceptions of Man and Nature which have given science its power and humanism its force in the modern age. How does the

scientific method of discovery work. We must be clear in our minds that science is not a mirror just a fact and across our minds are not made like a cash register to tabulate a series of facts in a neutral sequence one after another. Our minds connect one fact with another. They look for order and relationship. And in this way they arrange the facts so they're seen to be linked by in the laws in a coherent network. That is to say science is an organized ation of knowledge. Now the facts are there for us to observe. But the organization is not. It has to be discovered step by step. And each step has to be probed and tested. The number of the scientific method is the procedure of testing. Whether the model of the in organized ation of nature that we have formed remains consistent with the

facts. When we add a new fact from those from which we start. From the known facts we form a model of how we think nature is organized. That is 100 laws. And now we are asked whether the model really works as nature does not only in those places where we already know the facts but in places where we do not. That's the crucial test. And to make it we must constantly think of places that have not yet been explored. So we seek the implications of the model and ask it to predict how nature would behave in a new and wholly different situation. The prediction is made by weaseling logically from the model but it can only be tested by confronting nature with the consequences. Sometimes such a situation occurs of itself.

It was a consequence of the general theory of relativity that light ought to be seen to be bending towards the sun in the eclipse of 1919 and all that astronomers had to do was to wait for the eclipse and to hope for good weather in order to test Einstein's prediction. More often we have to create such a situation artificially as grégoire Mendel did in his monastery garden to test his theory of inheritance. Or as modern geneticists have done to test Watson in quicks model of the DNA helix. In essence every good experiment is a challenge to nature of this kind which requires her to declare herself for all against a model. So we can summarize the hower scientific method in a single definition which I quote In fact from the commonsense of science. Science is the

organization of our knowledge in such a way that it commands more of the Hidden Potential in nature. Say that again. Science is the organization of our knowledge in such a way that it commands more of the Hidden Potential in nature. The first part of the definition summarizes in the word organization. The three legged conjunction of Booysen experiment and imagination. The second part of the definition states our modern belief that we progress by constantly uncovering more in nature than we knew to be there. I come to the second part of my jaw. Which is implied by this definition. Why does science work as a method. Why has it been so successful for 300 years. Why have we achieved a commom of natural forces which is so much more effective and persuasive than our command say of social forces.

Now the answers to these questions I'd place it in our definition namely that it's knowledge of nature that gives us command of her potential. This is the insipid essential conception on which science rests and did so elative the modern conception. Quite unknown in the Middle Ages. You see in the Middle Ages people thought that the forces of nature could only be dominated by magic. The mystics and alchemy is one not looking for laws of nature. On the contrary they were looking for spells which would turn the laws aside. Their underlying belief was that man could only turn nature to use by witching her so that she was compelled to run counter to her normal laws. The cry was sun stand still. Now the essential discovery of science is the outright rejection of

this view. We do not believe that the potential of nature can be commanded by magic or exaltation or persuasion. It can only be commanded by knowledge. We can't over though the laws of nature and that's not the way to bend nature to the human will. Instead we have to discover the laws the organization of nature and then we have to think of ways in which we can use them to do for us what we want done. That's how the dynamo is invented a new age waves and X-rays and antibiotics. The jet engine and the laser beam. I put that very bluntly science works in practice exactly because it works in theory. And that's why you're here and that's why science teaching is done after all. No truculence spell could have produced a nuclear chain reaction.

It was produced from the mood to kill a sleek modest finding. That natural doing and contains several isotopes and then patiently sorting one set of isotopes into one box and one into the other. And lo and behold it blew up of itself just as we said it will. There can be no more vivid demonstration at least not since past did the same thing with. Unsymmetrical crystals nearly a hundred fifty years ago that we command the hidden potential in nature by the organization of our knowledge. So the success of science has its roots in a basic change of outlook about 400 years ago. When many science thinkers came to take a different view of nature and to see how not as an antagonist but as an animal. And in this sense even such hallowed phrases the conquest of nature. Power over nature the musky of nature. I will be out of date and out

of tune with our mind. No scientist thinks that the point of his discoveries is to get power. For him. Fame is the spanner. No. And though he seems fain brushed the powerful for a moment he is convinced that in the long run it settles on the Pioneers and on the disk of us every scientist every teacher every one of your students knows that Galileo was less powerful than the Pope in human affairs. He proved it today brutally. And that the Venetian engineers where more powerful than Galileo in their control of natural forces. But you see Galileo's name is remembered when not one in ten members of this audience can remember the name of the pope who sent Galileo to the Inquisition. And you never knew the names of the Venetian Internet and do a viewing thing is that the public has now accepted

the estimate of history. The Nobel Prizes are news and I suspect that more people in the United States recognize the name of Francis Crick and James Watson than the name of their own senator. At any rate I can tell you what true story and that is that my two younger children asked me at different times who would German called our daughters Hitler was but each of them at that time could tell me who were German called out of what I was in fact the scientific temper has spread. Through the whole community and created a universal climate in which knowledge is indeed seen as the key to a full life. Of course we say knowledge is power and choose but simple as those three words are. Knowledge is power. The hidden key to them is the definition of knowledge

as we see it. Knowledge is the unraveling of nature's law so that it displays that you know we moved the way the strands go over and under one another. We understand the harmony between the laws and we learn to we arrange it for our aims. Knowledge is power because knowledge is seeing the harmony. And power is learning how to use it. I've now spoken about how science works and why science works. Now the question is how is it that human beings can work at science so as to make it work. Now no doubt there are immemorial laws of nature. But we have to accept the fact that they are many times and more subtle and more complex than any that we discover.

We make good to rational approximations. We link them together quite ingenious live in systems of laws or axioms and it's wonderful that our simple model works so well as imitation of nature works at all. We are sometimes as clever as Isaac Newton when he devised the law of gravitation. And then our discoveries look marvelously natural. After all what could be more natural in a space of three dimensions than a force that falls off as the square of the distance and we are sometimes as lucky as Newton whose law worked so infallibly for two hundred years that it really seemed to be the law of nature. But after that soon or late our luck runs out even new slack. We have to go to work again and make another model. Another imagined discovery. We learn that it's not in our power to be right for ever not even for three hundred years.

Therefore the practice of science requires that we take a very practical view of human fallibility. We can't aspire to supernatural knowledge any more than to supernatural power. We must learn to work within our imperfections because we are neither perfect gods nor even thank goodness perfect machines. No intellectual for such Africans were preserve us from the errors of the human condition and hundred down the truth for us as an omniscient and final revelation. We may be deeply convinced that we know in advance how nature must work. For example an atom can't conceivably tell left from right. But we always turn out to be wrong or are wrong headed. And Nature always turns out to be much less naive than we thought. When

Isaac Newton was a boy Oliver Cromwell put this warning into a passionate and famous sentence. He said. I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken. The church assembly whom he addressed of course paid no heed because they knew that they had direct access to a superhuman truth. Now it would be nice to feel that scientists from Earth have a better characters than the men whom Cromwell scolded more temperate in thought and more tolerant in Outlook. It would be delightful to suppose that eight thousand teachers of science at this meeting and tens of thousands more all over the world are Parikh and's of all the virtues. However I must admit that the numbers are rather discouraging. Even if I admit my own failings it seems unlikely that everyone

else in science is perfect. It's too much to ask. And that's exactly why science does not ask the community of scientists has flourished successfully optimistic because it does not ask its members to be perfect but to be human it owes its strength to the realism which it uses to direct ordinary human motives common and by transforming the sense of communal responsibility into a personal ethic. At one time people thought when I saw us that this thrust everybody into the position of being a lowly science but it turned out to be different. It turned out that people were thrust in science to depend on one another and that's in fact how the first scientific clubs were formed. I say clubs rather than societies because it's important to understand

that an interest in the new knowledge was a bond of friendship. For example what we now call a scientific paper. The cat began as a letter to a friend in the club. The letters about his experiments in electricity that Benjamin Franklin invoked his friend Peter Collinson in London have this easy and formality of spirit which was still normal in 1750 Collinson who had come to the Royal Society which said that they were deservedly admired not only for the clear intelligent style but also for the novelty of the subject and I commend the order of importance of those that sentenced to. Science has continued to be a communal process in which even the most individual genius has to build on the work that other people have already done. And in order to build on it he must be able to align it. The prerequisite for personal achievement in science is communal

trust. The march of discovery depends on our absolute assurance that we need not look suspiciously over our shoulder but that we can believe what we read in the paper. I mean of course the scientific paper. We know that the other man is sincerely trying to tell the truth. He may not get it right. He will not get it right. But so far as is possible. So fries as humanly possible. He is going to try. Now of course there is more in the scientific ethic than a bad dependence on just George. True but the fact is that science owes its success for 300 years by making that fundamental. There we do it in a quid. Believe spot the nuclear physicist wrote in Moscow. And the writer in Peking who says without hesitation to a paper about the biology of the plane that was published in Heidelberg under the auspices

of the Vatican Academy I'm quoting a literate example. This won't by itself fill the empty place in the humanities curriculum that was once filled by Socrates and Pascal but it's remarkable in two ways because it shows. That so simple an agent as objective truth has produced the unbroken progress of knowledge in science in 300 years. And it brings home to us that the concept of objective truth itself is a specifically human and humanistic creation. It may seem that a modest and humdrum to seek a foundation for science and humanism in simple truth to fact surely even science aspire to higher forms. Yes it does. Yes but the facts are the empirical stuff. And bottom of our knowledge from which our work begins and to which it constantly returns. It's useless

to talk about the high and science of humanism and then to behave as if the means were too commonplace to talk about the basic means which a scientist uses are statements of fact and try as he may he must be truthful in those in the most humble puritanical and Mesler sense of the word. It's fatal to say to yourself privately that your ends are so good that you can commit yourself the expedient of bending the means just ever so little to say you are faithful to your status of as a man as well as a scientist and equally faithful I believe to the human community here the ethic of science is simple and universal. There is no distinction between means and ends because there is no way to serve a great end other than by honest means.

There was a man in public office in Pennsylvania this year who was troubled to hear that college students are taking drugs and saw it for the dangers which they were carelessly inviting. So he put out a story that six students of taken LSD and having formed into a trance had unknowingly stared at the sun until they were blinded. The story has a special sadness because the man himself is blind and he was perhaps expressing a poignant sense of his own loss. But of course the story is a total invention. And so it happens is the danger that it implies. Why did the blind man whom I will leave nameless even finish the story. Because he felt sure and passionately that he was serving and noble end and that the end justified the lie. Like so many men with a sense of mission particularly in public life he believed that his convictions about good and evil had a higher status

than the distinction between true and false. And we see the fatal results of that believe on every campus. Not only do students distrust but that elders say about practical subjects like drugs and war but they suspect our whole ethic to be a fraud. They think that our generation is constantly engaged in pretense and what we call the generation gap seems to them. Literally a hypocrisy gap. Let me end with the last example which is well-known but which is never I think been well understood. You know that there are men with the training in science and medicine who carried out experiments on prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps. Why is it that that work of which we have a live account turns out to have been so shameful so trivial so and actually

senseless. Many people think that it's because they really were no censor experiments that could be done on human beings. But that's not so. That our fundamental question is in biology particularly in the biology of the play which experiments on human beings might give unknowns for example we could learn a great deal about how the two halves of the brain work together and separately if we felt we need to separate them in normal subjects. We might make important advances in understanding what goes on in the frontal lobes in the speech centers and in other specific areas of the human brain. If we felt free to experiment there because you see all our knowledge of the human brain has a great defect it's derived from subjects whose brain is already damaged by injury before they come to the operating table. Most such subjects come to us because they've been in a car accident. So we're getting admirable knowledge of the brains of bad drivers.

And let me add that there are experiments in many branches of biology. In which human subjects would be splendid for instance. We know that many animal cancers are caused by viruses we do not know whether any human cancer was caused by VI was the fundamental question which we're going to solve in the next five yes. But anybody at Auschwitz could have solved it. Why then did no one get Auschwitz. Ever do a single worthwhile experiment given the million and more men and women who went uselessly to the cast of. Weather no biologist in Germany who would have learned something from them on the way to death. A cost aware of cost of a good scientist in Germany who would have liked to learn more about the brain all about chemistry. But no good scientist no good biologist no good doctor would stoop to learn by such means. You couldn't get scientific work done

in the camp because you couldn't get a good man to go in there. What scientists call a good man and what the world calls a good man a good man doesn't have to be extraordinary either in science or interaction. I said before the community of scientists does not require its members to be saved but it has evolved a set of dentures without which science could not exist as a communal activities. A certain modesty and respect and tolerance for human fallibility a commitment to the best in short and ordinary decency and dignity. Nobody can grow up in the day to day society of science without learning these unconsciously without ever talking about them simply as the conditions for good work. A man of this stamp is a good man in science by which we understand that he's committed to decent and honest means. And that's just what the world means by a good man. And that's not the kind of man who went to work in Auschwitz.

The only people who would do the work in Auschwitz in the house would be ignoramuses of the profession. Professor cloud back Doctor interest and the dreadful doctor meant they had never done a decent job in their lives a decent action or decent piece of scientific way. No summary can show so clearly as this macabre example the human content of science as a method a method which teaches its own ethic because it conflicts without that the how of science can work without imagination why it can't work without a philosophy which seeks in knowledge a harmony with nature and we can't make science work except by a philosophy of humanism. The philosophy of science is the same as that of humanism. That is it identifies a sympathy with nature with an emotion in

the human experience and a coherent philosophy if science can give to those who cross it. A sense of man's unique place in nature. That can overcome. The last seven of which so many non-scientists now feel. The central problem in teaching today is just stagnation. This sense of place in the Vedas switch sides to rise from its active and communal search for truth. You have been listening to Dr Jacob Bronowski senior fellow at the Salt Institute for Biological Studies San Diego speaking in Washington earlier this year before the annual convention of the National Science Teachers Association and he ours a special of the week. Thanks WRVA our Riverside Radio New York with a recording of this address. This has been special of the week from and we are the national educational radio network.