Science in the New Humanism

Science in the New Humanism I The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. That is, scientists owe their growing success during the last 300 years to the way in which they have been able to turn science into a method. And the strength of the method is that it can be taught and learned; more people have learned to be scientists in our lifetime than in all human history before us. We cannot teach people how to make great discoveries, of course, but we can certainly teach them how discoveries are made. And the evolution in the last 300 years of this method has been the essential discovery of science. In this sense, science is a method of discovery. There are evidently two things to be asked about such a method: how it works, and whyit works. Neither of these questions is simply technical; on the contrary, their answers imply a special relation and attitude of man to his environment, and that is why they are important to every thinking person. So I shall divide the treatment of my subject into three parts. In the first part I shall ask, How doesscience work? This is therefore an inquiry in logic. In the second part I shall ask, Why does science work? This is an inquiry in philosophy. And in the third part I shall examine the human and social requisites which are necessary to make science work-which make it possible for men to work at science so that science works. This third part is therefore an inquiry in ethics. The three parts make a rather formal progress, yet they seem 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. I1 How does the scientific method of discovery work? To answer, we must be clear in our minds that science is not a mere register of facts-and indeed, that our minds are not made (like a cash register) to tabulate a series of facts in a Originally published in TheSciencc Teacher35.No. 5, May 1968. Copyright @ Estate of Jacob Bronowski. Reprinted by permission. PergamonPress Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X185 S3.00+0.00 Jacob Bronowski neutral sequence one after another. Our minds connect onefact with another,they seek for order and relationship, and in this way they arrange the facts so that they are seen to be linked by inner laws in a coherent network. Science is an organization of knowledge. The facts are there for us to observe, but their organization is not; it has to be discovered stepby step, and each step has to be probed and tested. The nub of the scientific method is the procedure of testing whether the model of the inner organization of nature that we have formed remains consistent with the facts when we add a new fact to those from which we began. From the known facts we form a model of how we think nature is organized-that is, of her laws; and now we ask whether the model really works as nature does, not only in those places where we already know the facts, but in a place where we do not. This is the crucial test, and to make it we must constantly think of places that have not yet been explored. Therefore we seek the implications of our present model, and ask it to predict how nature will behave in a new and wholly different situation. The prediction is made by reasoning logically from the model, but it can only be tested by confronting nature with the new situation. Sometimes such a situation occurs of itself, and we have only to wait for the opportunity; so astronomers had only to wait for the eclipse of 1919 (and good weather) in order to test Albert Einstein’s prediction that light is bent towards massive bodies. More often we have to create such a situation artificially, as Gregor Mendel did in his monastery garden to test his theory of inheritance, or as modern geneticists have done to test Watson and Crick’s model of...