Exploring the Universe; 1; What is the Nature of Science

I am a man and I am in the middle. If you're a human being, you too are in the middle. In the middle is many ways today, in the middle of, for example, the largest and smallest parts of our universe. With these tools, the telescope on one hand and a microscope on another hand, if you're a scientist, you can look in both directions and see that you are in size in the middle. Through the telescope, you can look out into the infinity of space, beyond our local stars and planets and galaxies, and actually look at a thing called the Ring Nebula, a giant ball of gas, trillions of miles away, billions of miles across. And through the microscope here, you can look at a similar site in a way and see a human egg being fertilized to hundreds of an inch across. And we're in the middle in size, you and me. This is what science tells us and much else. Science concerns our life so closely these days that we thought this might be a good time

to find out something about the nature of science. And that's what this series is about. What is science? How do you and I define it? Well, how do you define it? We're going to take ten seconds out right now and I ask you in this ten seconds to think of your answer, what is the nature of science? All right, fair enough. That's your definition. We're going to further explore this definition and this question with Dr. Margaret Mead when I ask her, too, what is the nature of science? We asked what your definition of science was, we're looking to see what the dictionary says

about it. There, I think, eleven definitions here, so try the first one which says science comes from the Latin word scantia and means knowledge, that is the Latin word means knowledge. There's a danger there, though, in thinking that science is knowledge because you can't always tell what a word means from its roots where it comes from. I remember, well, there's always a blackboard, you can be sure of that, they're pretty handy things. I remember the Roman road system used to come in patterns like that where three roads joined together and the Roman word for three is TRI or three and the Roman word for road is VIA and trivia, TRI, BIA is not just the junction of the road but the small talk that went out of the roads. After a while, it became not the junction but the thing that happened there and so trivia's route is not three roads but small talk.

This perhaps has happened to the word science. In the 20th century, does that word still mean knowledge? Well, I was pretty surprised. We went to what you might call a modern crossroads to find out what people at large think about the meaning of the word science. Here's some genuinely random responses to that question. What is the nature of science? Things that we don't know anything about that are explored and done by men of great thinking. I just don't know what science is but I think it's a study of ways, means, different things, different types of science. Science is on a study of many animals and nature inside and here. My definition of science is dealing exclusively with men, M-A-N and until science is going to contribute to the services of men's welfare, men's happiness, I consider science still in war rather than serving peace.

Outer space, what to eat, what not to eat, vitamin, medicine, and that's it. Science is an organized investigation using logical means to discover what these are phenomena in the universe are and make them comprehensible to men. My definition of science is men's uniform study of all matters and all things in this environment. I wouldn't know what it means, I couldn't define it, too great for me. This is a little confusing isn't it? Those were people at large we talked to in a railroad terminal. So then we went and selected some people opinion makers and leaders mostly by occupation. I am the president of a corporation. To me science is that never-ending effort that explores what makes the universe tick and that provides us with means to a better future.

I've been asked to come here as an artist. To me science is an exploration of the mysterious working of the universe. It's also an attempt to understand these workings and to control them and I feel that it can be just as creative as the transformations of nature that the artist carries out. I teach and I'm studying history at New York University. Basically it is trying to understand. It is a method of trying to understand just as philosophy is another method of trying to understand the universe. I'm a pharmacist and been practicing for the last 40 years at my profession. Science to me means a world of wonders. Wonders like penicillin that has saved so many thousands of lives, wonders like the

Dr. Salt vaccine, products that will alleviate the yields of the world. I am a newspaper editor. I don't think there is any end to the search of science. It's a broad horizon with no ending. We shall continue to find answers to questions we don't know. Sounds fair, but what about that question and what is the nature of science? Do you find out? I kind of wonder if it's possible to really find out the nature of something which has so many different meanings to so many different people. Is it worth a try? Well, it's so important to our lives today. I think it's worth a very serious try. For many programs here, we're going to try. Perhaps the way to find out something about the nature of science is to do what I used to do. I'm sure you did when you were kids. When you find out something in journal parts or how it was made up, you took it apart, geared by a gear and a piece by piece and you saw how they fit together like this clock.

After a while, if you had them all apart and put them back together, you knew the nature of it and what made it tick. I don't dare say we're going to find out what makes science tick, but let's see what we can find out about the nature of the scientist. How does he do what he does? Does he discover and create like a poet, painters and poets tell us they choose their specifics out of thousands of feelings and intuitions and forms and color and words. I'm not sure a scientist does that, but let's find out if we can. Let's ask some of the great scientists of our time. What special sense and intuitive or otherwise moves him forward in his search for knowledge? Usually we find as the first element in the nature of science that there is a body of knowledge, a book of facts or a great collection of facts, historical, traditional, accumulated by people before that individual scientist and on which he generally relies to some extent before he goes forward with his own work. For example, well, there's so many of these Galileo back in, I think, 1609.

New about elementary lenses, there were magnifying lenses and diminishing lenses, reducing lenses. There's one of each right here. This one is one and I'll turn it a little sideways right here. There's the other here. Now if I put a white strip of paper and back of these two, you see one lens makes it larger. This one magnifies, this one diminishes and the white strip is its normal size over here and over here. Same size strip, one bigger, one smaller. But if you do as Galileo did, no one had done this until then, put them together through the two, you have a telescope into infinity and through that telescope and through that association of two known facts, not previously associated, Galileo had the first close look of moon and of Jupiter and its satellites of the university. It was a great step forward in the advance of astronomy and of human knowledge by one scientist working with the body of knowledge but putting new things together.

In a similar way, it's still going on today, modern science builds on the accumulation of past knowledge very much throughout Alexander Fleming, he wasn't certain, I think, in 1928 he was investigating the life cycle of the Statholic Caucus, a certain germ that causes very serious infections. This is a culture, they grow like that, normally. But one day on this culture, one just like this, you notice that a green mold had appeared at certain little spots like that and around the green mold there were dark areas where no germs grew. The mold he knew well had occurred in bread and certain places, penicillin. He said, maybe there's something in them, penicillin that kills the germs around there, keeps them from growing. He had the traditional knowledge, you see, which told him that the Statholic Caucus ordinarily did grow and in this case didn't. So he associated those facts, the green mold might have a killer of the deadly bacteria and prevent its normal spread, so it wouldn't grow like this, but like this.

So since this process still goes on, I think we're fairly safe in saying the first element in the nature of science is the accumulation of traditional knowledge, the historical background which we all have in order to go forward. But having that in back of us, the scientist still has them to be his own self and next to discover and demonstrate. Usually, you think of a scientific discovery as being it, but if a man discovers something all by himself and doesn't say anything to anybody about it, it isn't much of a discovery because you never heard of it. Suppose you're fooling around with a rubber band, for example, as I'm sure you have, but have you ever done this? Stretch the rubber band like this, you might try this any time, put it against your upper lip, which is the most sensitive part of your body as far as temperature goes, and then let the rubber band contract touching your lip like this. What would happen do you think?

No bells, no, a different effect. Try that sometime. Stretch it out. Hold it a second, then let it in like this, fast. You'll be amazed to find out, perhaps, this is the word that the rubber band becomes quite cold, usually when something contracts, it gets hot, expands, it gets cold, just the opposite with rubber. This was a discovery. Then, of course, you had to do the second part of the two-headed thing, discovery demonstration. You had to demonstrate it. That should do by experimenting, observing. You check on other rubber bands, you buy a whole lot, and you try those against your lip. Yes, this one gets cold too. You repeat it many times. Maybe it's a trick of the senses. Your senses fool you, as you know. You get a jar of hot water and a cold water, and then go outside. And on a very cold day, when you put your finger in, it's hard to tell which is which, if your finger is hot or cold. So what we did is to get a very sensitive thermometer kind of thing called a thermistor,

in this case, and we'll check it with an instrument, and sometimes science gets down to the measurement of things with the instruments or pointers, as they're called. This little delicate dot here in the middle is the thermistor element, and I'll put the rubber band on a nail there and pull it out, and you see that the instrument scale is way up at the end, and I'll put it in and compress it like that, and it goes down. See that? And when I take it away, it goes up again. Now it's going to go colder, hotter. We'll go into this, actually, on another program, quite a bit more, because it's a fascinating thing that isn't fully understood yet about the nature of the molecules of the rubber, but you can probably surprise your friend or two by just pulling it out and letting it cool your lip. OK, now the experiment's been made, and if enough are made, observations are made, but collected, put together, other people make experiments, it's published, other scientists discuss this effect, perhaps they have a theory as to why it happens, but if it's consistent

and happens all the time under any conditions that can be demonstrated, then it's accepted by the community of science as a fact, into the body of knowledge. And from there, its uses may become, well, maybe you could make a refrigerator out of enough rubber bands or something else. Maybe 500 years from now, that effect may be of vital use, we don't know. That's where basic research comes in, of course, there are many people letting things like this happen, finding out facts, noting them down, checking them out, and putting them in books where they may be needed some time in the future. I was out at a low observatory in Flagstaff a few months ago, talked to an English astronomer who was sitting at the eyepiece of the 24-inch low refractor at a cool, calm, lovely night, looking at double stars and making little notes about their position. And I said, what's this really for? And he said, well, probably for a generation, or ten generations, two to 500 years from now, who will want to know where those stars were in this year and where they are in

their day, so they can know their masses and advances trying to be a bit this way. It isn't very often you find as selfless a person as that. These are not very easy and simple either to find like this rubber band. But with the explosion of facts that are happening, the explosion of knowledge about us, the amazing increase in the number of things that we're finding out about nature, actually is greater and degree than the so-called population explosion, life is getting awfully complicated, and the techniques of specialized things are so voluminous that no man can hope to have more than a small grasp of the total number of them. The number of these specialties is growing by a leaps and bounds that extends literally from A to Z of astronomy to zoology, and there's a B for biologists and C for chemists and D for DNA molecule study here. In fact, they break down into such special classifications that sometimes within one discipline, one group, people hardly speak to another.

Whereas the atomic physicists, the nuclear physicists, the neutron physicists, the subatomic physicists, well, they go on until one is hardly sure that he knows yet, and yet they're very close. They do communicate personally. But the number, especially as you as a person, must know something about. There must know something about the man who studies nuclear physics, physics, and who studies mold growth, the surgeon who studies the human body, and the astronaut who studies outer space as he goes up, and the man who studies the nose cone reentry problem of that rocket. The sociologist who studies human interrelations, the biologist who studies the flight of geese, the astronomer who finds out about Andromeda, two million night years away, or the thousands of other galaxies, billions of light years away, which you see here. The man who studies the architecture of the past, of the architecture of the salt crystal, the man who studies the poetry of relations of mathematics, and of the human body, who

studies the flower, and the genetics, the love of the flower, who studies miscellary, and who measures a single microbe. And in these many specialties, many branches of science, their lives perhaps a potential danger to us, the citizens, and to the scientists themselves, and to our world. For they must communicate with us, and we must be able to understand the nature of their talk, and what it's about, so that we as citizens can influence public opinion, since we are public opinion, and let out leaders know how we feel, so they can move in the directions that we want them to move it. But how do you understand that language sometimes, it gets pretty complicated, there's the danger. For example, take the ge space worker, that's not a man, it's a machine, you see it over here, with Gene Day, the engineer in it. It's a machine designed to capture Gene here, train astronauts to work against spacecraft in outer space.

He is essentially weightless in five directions, but if you knew what the facts are, you'd have to understand what I meant when I said that the ability of the astronaut to perform useful work is restricted to his ability to apply body mass through a limited dynamic envelope. Since the basic equation of motion relates force, mass, and acceleration in the form of force equals mass times acceleration, slow application of body mass results in the correspondingly low force, if the mass is applied rapidly though, to high acceleration, the resultant force is correspondingly high. Therefore, if the displacement is limited, or translation is limited to any given area, theoretically apply the equal force to the product of the astronaut's mass twice the given distance, and the reciprocal of the square of the time of the force is applied, which is equal, as f equals m over 2d over c squared, spelled out, that's very simple. But do you understand all that? This is the danger, and I better rescue Gene here. See, as he tries to turn his wrench, well, he's learned how now, but ordinarily, he would just tip over if I push him like that, whoops, pardon me Gene, over.

Thank you very much. He can't hear me, so it's all right. I better leave him spinning merely. He's on the air, by the way, that whole machine is on an air pressure device, which raises at 3,000 of an inch off the ground, so it floats literally in the air. That's one of the dangers of science. Let's talk about one of the third characteristic of science. So far, we've had discovery and demonstration, the body of knowledge behind it, and the fact that thirdly, science is concerned in the middle of the man, prep science is man. I know of no better person to whom to talk about mankind, and Dr. Margaret Mead. Dr. Mead is by Esther, by Esther D., how I should describe her. She said, call me an anthropologist, and she surely is that. She is famous, of course, as anthropologist and human being, a member of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Endless Other Titles.

Primarily, she's a great human being, I think. And I'm going to ask her right now, where, Dr. Mead, does man, that was man over there, letting you to see him off? Where does man fit into the nature of science, which is what we're talking about here today? I think it's rather where science fits into the activities of man, because after all science is only one of man's activities, one of his newest, one of his proudest, but it's only part of life, part of the way in which man approaches the universe. I kind of have the car before the horse, then, really. We come first, don't we? And what we think about and do and act comes second, so. Well, science is just one of the things that we do in the world, one of the ways we try to understand it. Are we in danger of letting science, which is our creation, then, kind of over-realmas and think that science comes before us? Well, right now we are, I think, you know. This has grown so very rapidly recently, we've started to spell over the capital as talk about scientists as if they were very different kind of people, and worry about a rift between

scientists and the rest of humanity. I think this is a result of what's happened since World War II, which is a result of the nuclear threats that we've come to associate with the advancement of science, but isn't necessary? Well, isn't there a real rift between the individual scientist singular with a small ass and the community who must understand his work or something about it in order to react to it and to be directed by it? I don't think there's any more rift between the individual scientist. And, you know, it isn't, but with the community, it's with men, women, and children, and butchers, and bakers, and doctors, and tinsmiths, and all sorts of people. And we've just focused on the scientist at present that he has a special skill, and it sounds very esoteric, and we've made him into a kind of a mystery man. We don't particularly care about what the tinsmith does, there's no worry about the rift in communication with the tinsmith these days.

No, and yet we be very badly often in many mechanical ways also, you see, but we're overimpressed with the power of the scientist at present, I think. Well, do people understand the ways that knowledge gets to them, the important knowledge in any area in which they must have it, to television, or radio, or newspapers, or magazines, or books? In fact, what are the ways in which knowledge is distributed these days? We see it used to be only distributed through books, and people used to be sat down and rose and learned to read the squiggles on the page. And this was called education, and everybody who was educated learned some physics and some mathematics. Now, today it's distributed in a thousand ways. The smallest child, the six-year-old, knows more about many scientific things than most people knew 15 years ago about the science of their day. In fact, the textbooks themselves are almost magazines out there, the paperback textbooks have changed every semester.

They change very rapidly, and they're cheap. Well, to the people who, the children who learn from these textbooks, are they better adapted to understanding the world in which we live than we older folks who have a basic background of rigid misinformation? You know, I think you're a little hard on us to call it rigid misinformation, but we learned early our scientific statements, you know, because science keeps changing all the time. So that the children, the six and seven-year-olds, are like, well, they're like the natives of a country. They live here, and we're like the immigrants that have come back from another period and tried to understand things, and we'll never understand them quite as well as the children do. Is a scientist who talks to us to be regarded as a special kind of man, as far as battery judgment going, other fields and science? We've had a touch of this since the war, of course, because the physicists felt so responsible over the whole nuclear energy problem that he began to worry for the first time in his

life about fixing up the world, and he worked rather hard at it, and he disregarded the sciences that know something about human behavior. And so we did get a notion of the rather omniscient scientist. There isn't any reason why a scientist outside his own area should be any more proficient than anyone else, or a sure pronouncer on value, unless he uses scientific method. Now, if he will bring his scientific method into another field and be just as careful there, then he can add something that other citizens probably can't add. I mean, we can add an intuitive sense of what's right and wrong. We can add a great deal of loyalty to a value system, but maybe we can't act with the same kind of detachment that the scientists can. But this doesn't mean that the scientist is not free to act as a citizen, in any way, using what knowledge he has. No, but it's very important for him to know when he's acting as a scientist and when

he's acting as a citizen, and not mix them up. Or should he wear a hat that says scientist as a citizen, how can you tell them? Well, I think, in for instance, if a scientist is talking to an audience, he should be able to say, now these are the scientific facts, as we understand them now. This is what we can test. This is as far as we can go. He has to say, for instance, we can't tell what will happen if you go any further than this. We haven't information. Then, if the audience, the PTA or who's that, ask him, now what do you think? Then he can say, as a citizen, as myself, as a member of this community, as a father, as a member of the school board, or whatever, besides, this is my judgment. And I'm not now speaking as a scientist, but as a citizen, and this is different. Well, kind of man actually separate himself into compartments like that and be a citizen at one moment and then flip-flop and emotionally and intellectually be another man as scientist.

I think probably that's one of the things that worry people, but you know that's what scientists are trained to do. When they go into the laboratory, they must leave outside their hopes and fears, and they must be able to observe detachment. And this seems a little like compartmentalization to other people. But it isn't to a scientist. When I go to a savage tribe, I have to behave differently than the way I behave here, but I still feel like a whole human being. I imagine they do. Thank you, Dr. very much indeed. Good to have you. Dr. Margaret Mead, who isn't as worried about the nature of science or scientists, is perhaps some of us are, and I think she knows more than most of us feel about this. There is, of course, a good reason why those of us who are non-scientists should be to some degree concerned about the nature of science because it's so very much with us these days.

Richard Russell once pointed out that the dinosaurs were in their day of what we are more or less, the lords and creation, perhaps the fate of the dinosaurs might well serve as a warning to a human being, perhaps I say. They failed to adapt to their changing world, and it's a very question that we must ask ourselves. Are we non-scientists in danger of failing to understand and adapt to our very swiftly changing world, which the scientists are in large measure creating for us? Because we live in that world, you know, today and hopefully tomorrow. And in this series, we invite you to address yourself to that question with courage. This is NET, National Educational Television.