It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable, and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that that terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured. Anyhow, you can see that there will be problems of a fantastic magnitude coming from biology.
Now I will talk in a different direction.
Besides the applications there are ideas, and the ideas are of two kinds. One of them is the product of the science itself, that is, a worldview which the science produces. This is in some ways the most beautiful part of the whole thing. Some people think, no, the methods of science are the thing. Well, it depends on whether you like the ends or the means, but the means were to produce some wonderful ends and I will not bore you (well, I wouldn’t bore you if I could do it right) with the details. But you all know something about the wonders of science–it isn’t a popular audience I am talking to–so I won’t try to make you enthusiastic once again with the facts about the world: the fact that we are all made of atoms, the enormous ranges of time and space that there are, the position of ourselves historically as the result of a remarkable series of evolution. The position of ourselves in the evolutionary sequence; and further, the most remarkable aspect of our scientific worldview is its universality in this sense that although we talk about our being specialists, we are really not. One of the most promising hypotheses in all of biology is that everything the animals do or that living creatures do can be understood in terms of what atoms can do, that is, in terms of physical laws, ultimately, and the perpetual attention to this possibility–so far no exception has been demonstrated–has again and again made suggestions as to how the mechanisms actually occur. So that the fact that our knowledge is in fact universal is something that is not completely appreciated, that the position of the theories are so complete that we hunt for exceptions and we find them very hard to find–in the physics at least–and the great expense of all these machines and so on is to find some exception to what is already known. And, otherwise, that is another aspect of the fact that the world is so wonderful in the sense that stars are made of the same atoms as the cows and as ourselves, and as stones.
From time to time we all try to communicate to our unscientific friends this worldview–and we get into difficulty most often because we get confused in trying to explain to them the latest questions, such as the meaning of the conservation of CP,* whereas they don’t know anything about the most preliminary things. For four hundred years since Galileo we have been gathering information about the world which they don’t know. Now we are working on something way out, and at the limits of scientific knowledge. And the things that appear in the newspaper and that seem to excite the adult imagination are always those things which they cannot possibly understand, because they haven’t learned anything at all of the much more interesting well-known [to scientists] things that people have found out before. It’s not the case with children, thank goodness, for a while–at least until they become adults.
I say, and I think you must all know from experience, that people–I mean the average person, the great majority of people, the enormous majority of people–are woefully, pitifully, absolutely ignorant of the science of the world that they live in, and they can stay that way. I don’t mean to say the heck with them, what I mean is that they are able to stay that way without it worrying them at all–only mildly–so from time to time when they see CP mentioned in the newspaper they ask what it is. And an interesting question of the relation of science to modern society is just that–why is it possible for people to stay so woefully ignorant and yet reasonably happy in modern society when so much knowledge is unavailable to them?
Incidentally, about knowledge and wonder, Mr. Bernardini said we shouldn’t teach wonders but knowledge.
It may be a difference in the meaning of the words. I think we should teach them wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more. And that the knowledge is just to put into correct framework the wonder that nature is. However, he would probably agree that I just shifted some words around and that meaning trickled into the conversation. At any rate, I want to answer the question as to why people can remain so woefully ignorant and not get into difficulties in modern society. The answer is that science is irrelevant. And I will explain what I mean in just a minute. It isn’t that it has to be, but that we let it be irrelevant to society. I will come back to that point.
The other aspects of science that are important and that have some problem of a relation to society, beside the applications and the actual facts that are discovered, are the ideas and the techniques of scientific investigation: the means, if you will. Because I think that it is hard to understand why the discovery of these means, which seem so self-evident and obvious, weren’t discovered earlier; simple ideas which, if you just try them, you see what happens and so forth. It is probably that the human mind evolved from that of an animal; and it evolves in a certain way [such] that it is like any new tool, in that it has its diseases and difficulties. It has its troubles, and one of the troubles is that it gets polluted by its own superstitions, it confuses itself, and the discovery was finally made of a way to keep it sort of in line so that scientists can make a little progress in some direction rather than to go around in circles and force themselves into a hold. And I think that this is, of course, the appropriate time to discuss this matter because the beginnings of this new discovery were at the time of Galileo. These ideas and techniques, of course, you all know. I’ll just review them; it’s again one of those things that for a lay audience you go into great detail; I just mention them so you appreciate what I am talking about more specifically.
The first is the matter of judging evidence–well, the first thing really is, before you begin you must not know the answer. So you begin by being uncertain as to what the answer is. This is very, very important, so important that I would like to delay that aspect, and talk about that still further along in my speech. The question of doubt and uncertainty is what is necessary to begin; for if you already know the answer there is no need to gather any evidence about it. Well, being uncertain, the next thing is to look for evidence, and the scientific method is to begin with trials. But another way and a very important one that should not be neglected and that is very vital is to put together ideas to try to enforce a logical consistency among the various things that you know. It is a very valuable thing to try to connect this, what you know, with that, that you know, and try to find out if they are consistent. And the more activity in the direction of trying to put together the ideas of different directions, the better it is.
After we look for the evidence we have to judge the evidence. There are the usual rules about the judging the evidence; it’s not right to pick only what you like, but to take all of the evidence, to try to maintain some objectivity about the thing–enough to keep the thing going–not to ultimately depend upon authority. Authority may be a hint as to what the truth is, but is not the source of information. As long as it’s possible, we should disregard authority whenever the observations disagree with it. And finally, the recording of results should be done in a disinterested way. That’s a very funny phrase which always bothers me–because it means that after the guy’s all done with the thing, he doesn’t give a darn about the results, but that isn’t the point. Disinterest here means that they are not reported in such a way as to try to influence the reader into an idea that’s different than what the evidence indicates.
And you all appreciate these various aspects.
Now all this, all these ideas, and all the techniques are in the spirit of Galileo
. The man whose birthday we are celebrating had a great deal to do with the development and the spreading and, most importantly, the demonstration of the power of these ways of looking at things. In any centennial, or quattro-centennial likewise, one always gets the feeling sooner or later: I wonder if the man were here now and we showed him the world, what he would say. Of course, you say, that’s a corny thing to do and you can’t do that in a speech, but that’s what I am going to do. Suppose Galileo were here and we were to show him the world today and try to make him happy, or see what he finds out. And we would tell him about the questions of evidence, those methods of judging things which he developed. And we would point out that we are still in exactly the same tradition, we follow it exactly–even to the details of making numerical measurements and using those as one of the better tools, in the physics at least. And that the sciences have developed in a very good way directly and continuously from his original ideas, in the same spirit he developed. And as a result there are no more witches and ghosts.
Actually I say [that the quantitative method works very well] in science, but that is in fact almost a definition of science today; the sciences that Galileo was worried about, the physics, mechanics and such things, have of course developed, but the same techniques worked in biology, in history, geology, anthropology, and so on. We know a great deal about the past history of man, the past history of animals, and of the earth, through very similar techniques. With some- what similar success, but not quite as complete because of the difficulties, the same systems work in economics. But there are places where only lip service is paid to the forms–in which many people just go through the motions. I would be ashamed to tell Mr. Galileo, but it doesn’t really work very well, for example, in the social sciences. For example, my own personal experience–as you will realize, there is an awful lot of studying of the methods of education going on, particularly of the teaching of arithmetic–but if you try to find out what is really known about what is the better way to teach arithmetic than some other way, you will discover that there is an enormous number of studies and a great deal of statistics, but they are all disconnected from one another and they are mixtures of anecdotes, uncontrolled experiments, and very poorly controlled experiments, so that there is very little information as a result.
And now finally, as I’d like to show Galileo our world, I must show him something with a great deal of shame. If we look away from the science and look at the world around us, we find out something rather pitiful: that the environment that we live in is so actively, intensely unscientific. Galileo could say: “I noticed that Jupiter was a ball with moons and not a god in the sky. Tell me, what happened to the astrologers?” Well, they print their results in the newspapers, in the United States at least, in every daily paper every day. Why do we still have astrologers? Why can someone write a book like Worlds in Collision by somebody with a name beginning with a “V,” it’s a Russian name? Huh? Vininkowski?* And how did it become popular? What is all this nonsense about Mary Brody, or something? I don’t know, that was crazy stuff. There is always some crazy stuff. There is an infinite amount of crazy stuff, which, put another way, is that the environment is actively, intensely unscientific. There is talk about telepathy still, although it’s dying out. There is faith-healing galore, all over. There is a whole religion of faith-healing. There’s a miracle at Lourdes where healing goes on. Now, it might be true that astrology is right. It might be true that if you go to the dentist on the day that Mars is at right angles to Venus, that it is better than if you go on a different day. It might be true that you can be cured by the miracle of Lourdes. But if it is true it ought to be investigated. Why? To improve it. If it is true then maybe we can find out if the stars do influence life; that we could make the system more powerful by investigating statistically, scientifically judging the evidence objectively, more carefully. If the healing process works at Lourdes, the question is how far from the site of the miracle can the person, who is ill, stand? Have they in fact made a mistake and the back row is really not working? Or is it working so well that there is plenty of room for more people to be arranged near the place of the miracle? Or is it possible, as it is with the saints which have recently been created in the United States–there is a saint who cured leukemia apparently indirectly–that ribbons that are touched to the sheet of the sick person (the ribbon having previously touched some relic of the saint) increase the cure of leukemia–the question is, is it gradually being diluted? You may laugh, but if you believe in the truth of the healing, then you are responsible to investigate it, to improve its efficiency and to make it satisfactory instead of cheating. For example, it may turn out that after a hundred touches it doesn’t work anymore. Now it’s also possible that the results of this investigation have other consequences, namely, that nothing is there.
And another thing that bothers me, I might as well mention, are the things that the theologians in modern times can discuss, without feeling ashamed of themselves. There are many things that they can discuss that they need not feel ashamed of themselves, but some of the things that go on in the conferences on religion, and the decisions that have to be made, are ridiculous in modern times. I would like to explain that one of the difficulties, and one of the reasons why this can keep going, is that it is not realized what a profound modification of our worldview would result, if just one example of one of these things would really work. The whole idea, if you could establish the truth, not of the whole idea of astrology but just one little item, could have a fantastic influence on our understanding of the world. And so the reasons we laugh a little bit is that we are so confident of our view of the world that we are sure they aren’t going to contribute anything. On the other hand, why don’t we get rid of it? I will come to why we don’t get rid of it in a minute, because science is irrelevant [to astrology], as I said before.
Now I am going to mention still another thing which is a little more doubtful, but still I believe that in the judging of evidence, the reporting of evidence and so on, there is a kind of responsibility which the scientists feel toward each other which you can represent as a kind of morality. What’s the right way and the wrong way to report results? Disinterestedly, so that the other man is free to understand precisely what you are saying, and as nearly as possible not covering it with your desires. That this is a useful thing, that this is a thing which helps each of us to understand each other, in fact to develop in a way that isn’t personally in our own interest, but for the general development of ideas, is a very valuable thing. And so there is, if you will, a kind of scientific morality. I believe, hopelessly, that this morality should be extended much more widely; this idea, this kind of scientific morality, that such things as propaganda should be a dirty word. That a description of a country made by the people of another country should describe that country in a disinterested way. What a miracle–that’s worse than a miracle at Lourdes! Advertising, for example, is an example of a scientifically immoral description of the products. This immorality is so extensive that one gets so used to it in ordinary life, that you do not appreciate that it is a bad thing. And I think that one of the important reasons to increase the contact of scientists with the rest of society is to explain, and to kind of wake them up to this permanent attrition of cleverness of the mind that comes from not having information, or [not] having information always in a form which is interesting.
There are other things in which scientific methods would be of some value; they are perfectly obvious but they get more and more difficult to discuss–such things as making decisions. I do not mean that it should be done scientifically, such as [the way] in the United States that the Rand Company sits down and makes arithmetical calculations. That reminds me of my sophomore days at college in which, in discussing women, we discovered that by using electrical terminology–impedance, reluctance, resistance–that we had a deeper understanding of the situation. The other thing that gives a scientific man the creeps in the world today are the methods of choosin
g leaders–in every nation. Today, for example, in the United States, the two political parties have decided to employ public relations men, that is, advertising men, who are trained in the necessary methods of telling the truth and lying in order to develop a product. This wasn’t the original idea. They are supposed to discuss situations and not just make up slogans. It’s true, if you look in history, however, that choosing political leaders in the United States has been on many different occasions based on slogans. (I am sure that each party now has million-dollar bank accounts and there are going to be some very clever slogans.) But I can’t do a sum-up of all this stuff now.
I kept saying that the science was irrelevant. That sounds strange and I would like to come back to it. Of course it is relevant, because of the fact that it is relevant to astrology; because if we understand the world the way we do, we cannot understand how the astrological phenomena can take place. And so that is relevant. But for people who believe in astrology there is no relevance, because the scientist never bothers to argue with them. The people who believe in faith healing have not to worry about science at all, because nobody argues with them. You don’t have to learn science if you don’t feel like it. So you can forget the whole business if it is too much mental strain, which it usually is. Why can you forget the whole business? Because we don’t do anything about it. I believe that we must attack these things in which we do not believe. Not attack by the method of cutting off the heads of the people, but attack in the sense of discuss. I believe that we should demand that people try in their own minds to obtain for themselves a more consistent picture of their own world; that they not permit themselves the luxury of having their brain cut in four pieces or two pieces even, and on one side they believe this and on the other side they believe that, but never try to compare the two points of view. Because we have learned that, by trying to put the points of view that we have in our head together and comparing one to the other, we make some progress in understanding and in appreciating where we are and what we are. And I believe that science has remained irrelevant because we wait until somebody asks us questions or until we are invited to give a speech on Einstein’s theory to people who don’t understand Newtonian mechanics, but we never are invited to give an attack on faith healing, or on astrology–on what is the scientific view of astrology today.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out Page 11