the nature of scientific reasoning

1、The Nature of Scientific Reasoning by Jacob Bronowski What is the insight in which the scientist tries to see into nature? Can it indeed be called either imaginative or creative? To the literary man the question may se

2、em merely silly. He has been taught that science is a large collection of facts; and if this is true, then the only seeing which scientists need to do is, he supposes, seeing the facts. He pictures them, the colorless

3、 professionals of science, going off to work in the morning into the universe in a neutral, unexposed state. They then expose themselves like a photographic plate. And then in the darkroom or laboratory they develop t

4、he image, so that suddenly and startlingly it appears, printed in capital letters, as a new formula for atomic energy. Men who have read Balzac and Zola are not deceived by the claims of these writers that they do no m

5、ore than record the facts. The readers of Christopher Isherwood do not take him literally when he writes “I am a camera.” Yet the same readers solemnly carry with them from their schooldays this foolish picture of the

6、 scientist fixing by some mechanical process the facts of nature. I have had of all people a historian tell me that science is a collection of facts, and his voice had not even the ironic rasp of one filing cabinet rep

7、roving another. It seems impossible that this historian had ever studied the beginnings of a scientific discovery. The Scientific Revolution can be held to begin in the year 1543 when there was brought to Copernicus, p

8、erhaps on his deathbed, the first printed copy of the book he had finished about a dozen years earlier. The thesis of this book is that the earth moves around the sun. When did Copernicus go out and record this fact w

9、ith his camera? What appearance in nature prompted his outrageous guess? And in what odd sense is this guess to be called a neutral record of fact? Less than a hundred years after Copernicus, Kepler published (between

10、 1609 and 1619) the three laws which describe the paths of the planets. The work of Newton and with it most of our mechanics spring from these laws. They have a solid, matter-of-fact sound. For example, Kepler says tha

11、t if one squares the year of a planet, one gets a number which is proportional to the cube of its average distance from the sun. Does anyone think that such a law is found by taking enough readings and then squaring a

12、nd cubing everything in sight? If he does, then, as a scientist, he is doomed to a wasted life; he has as little prospect of making a scientific discovery as an electronic brain has. It was not this way that Copernicu

13、s and Kepler thought, or that scientists think today. Copernicus found that the orbits of the planets would look simpler if they were looked at from the sun and not from the earth. But he did not in the first place fin

14、d this by routine calculation. His first step was a leap of imagination-to lift himself from the earth, and put himself wildly, speculatively would be severe with it. Yet Yukawa without a blush calculated the mass of th

15、e pellet he expected to see, and waited. He was right; his meson was found, and a range of other mesons, neither the existence nor the nature of which had been suspected before. The likeness had borne fruit. The scie

16、ntist looks for order in the appearances of nature by exploring such likenesses. For order does not display itself of itself, if it can be said to be there at all, it is not there for the mere looking. There is no way o

17、f pointing a finger or camera at it; order must be discovered and, in a deep sense, it must be created. What we see, as we see it, is mere disorder. This point has been put trenchantly in a fable by Karl Popper. Suppo

18、se that someone wishes to give his whole life to science. Suppose that he therefore sat down, pencil in hand, and for the next twenty, thirty, forty years recorded in notebook after notebook everything that he could ob

19、serve. He may be supposed to leave out nothing: today’s humidity, the racing results, the level of cosmic radiation and the stock- market prices and the look of Mars, all would be there. He would have compiled the mos

20、t careful record of nature that has ever been made; and, dying in the calm certainty of a life well spent, he would of course leave his notebooks to the Royal Society. Would the Royal Society thank him for the treasur

21、e of a lifetime of observation? It would not. The Royal Society would treat his notebooks exactly as the English bishops have treated Joanna Southcott’s box. It would refuse to open them at all, because it would know

22、without looking that the notebooks contain only a jumble of disorderly and meaningless items. Science finds order and meaning in our experience, and sets about this in quite a different way. It sets about

23、 it as Newton 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 22, the plague broke out in southern England, and the Univers

24、ity of Cambridge was closed. Newton therefore spent the next 18 months at home, removed from traditional learning, at a time when he was impatient for knowledge and, in his own phrase, “I was in the prime of my age for

25、 invention.” In this eager, boyish mood, sitting one day in the garden of his widowed mother, he saw an apple fall. So far the books have the story right; we think we even know the kind of apple; tradition has it that

26、 it was a Flower of Kent. But now they miss the crux of the story. For what struck the young Newton at the sight was not the thought that the apple must be drawn to the earth by gravity; that conception was older than

27、 Newton. What struck him was the conjecture that the same force of gravity, which reaches to the top of the tree, might go on reaching out beyond the earth and its air, endlessly into space. Gravity might reach the mo

28、on: this was Newton’s new thought; and it might be gravity which holds the moon in her orbit. There and then he calculated what force from the earth (falling off as the square of the distance) would hold the moon, and