1-7
8-14
15-21
22-28
29-35
36-42
43-49
50-56
57-63
64-70
71-77
78-84
85-91
92-98
99-105
106-112
113-119
120-122
1-7
8-14
15-21
22-28
29-35
36-42
43-49
50-56
57-63
64-70
71-77
78-84
85-91
92-98
99-105
106-112
113-119
120-122
that we cannot understand what it means not to be alive, and yet most of
the time the world had nothing alive on it. And in most places in the
universe today there probably is nothing alive.
something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all
other life. There is a part of chlorophyll, an important chemical in the
oxygen processes in plants, that has a kind of square pattern; it is a rather
pretty ring called a benzine ring. And far removed from the plants are
animals like ourselves, and in our oxygen containing systems, in the blood,
the hemoglobin, there are the same interesting and peculiar square rings.
There is iron in the center of them instead of magnesium, so they are not
green but red, but they are the same rings.
has recently been found that the protein-making machinery in the bacteria
can be given orders from material from the red cells to produce red cell
proteins. So close is life to life. The universality of the deep chemistry of
living things is indeed a fantastic and beautiful thing. And all the time we
human beings have been too proud even to recognize our kinship with the
animals.
ball in some repeating pattern in a crystal. Things that look quiet and still,
like a glass of water with a covered top that has been sitting for several
days, are active all the time; the atoms are leaving the surface, bouncing
around inside, and coming back. What looks still to our crude eyes is a wild
and dynamic dance.
atoms, that the stars are of the same stuff as ourselves. It then becomes a
question of where our stuff came from. Not just where did life come from, or
where did the earth come from, but where did the stuff of life and of the
earth come from? It looks as if it was belched from some exploding star,
much as some of the stars are exploding now. So this piece of dirt waits four
and a half billion years and evolves and changes, and now a strange
Introduction
TrustMark 2001 by Timothy Wilken
in the audience. What a wonderful world!
about. If you look closely enough at anything, you will see that there is
nothing more exciting than the truth, the pay dirt of the scientist,
discovered by his painstaking efforts.
girl jumping a jump rope. What goes on inside? The blood pumping, the
interconnecting nerves—how quickly the influences of the muscle nerves
feed right back to the brain to say, “Now we have touched the ground, now
increase the tension so I do not hurt the heels.” And as the girl dances up
and down, there is another set of muscles that is fed from another set of
nerves that says,
smiles at the professor of physiology who is watching her. That is involved,
too!
strong that in any normal substance all the plusses and minuses are
carefully balanced out, everything pulled together with everything else.
For a long time no one even noticed the phenomenon of electricity, except
once in a while when they rubbed a piece of amber and it attracted a piece
of paper. And yet today we find, by playing with these things, that we have
a tremendous amount of machinery inside. Yet science is still not
thoroughly appreciated.
six Christmas lectures for children. The point of Faraday's lectures was
that no matter what you look at, if you look at it closely enough, you are
involved in the entire universe. And so he got, by looking at every feature of
the candle, into combustion, chemistry, etc. But the introduction of the
book, in describing Faraday's life and some of his discoveries, explained
that he had discovered that the amount of electricity necessary to do
performic electrolysis of chemical substances is proportional to the number
of atoms which are separated divided by the valence. It further explained
Introduction
TrustMark 2001 by Timothy Wilken
anodic coloring of aluminum, as well as in dozens of other industrial
applications. I do not like that statement. Here is what Faraday said about
his own discovery: “The atoms of matter are in some ways endowed or
associated with electrical powers, to which they owe their most striking
qualities, amongst them their mutual chemical affinity.” He had discovered
that the thing that determined how the atoms went together, the thing
that determined the combinations of iron and oxygen which make iron
oxide is that some of them are electrically plus and some of them are
electrically minus, and they attract each other in definite proportions. He
also discovered that electricity comes in units, in atoms. Both were
important discoveries, but most exciting was that this was one of the most
dramatic moments in the history of science, one of those rare moments
when two great fields come together and are unified. He suddenly found
that two apparently different things were different aspects of the same
thing. Electricity was being studied, and chemistry was being studied.
Suddenly they were two aspects of the same thing—chemical changes with
the results of electrical forces. And they are still understood that way. So to
say merely that the principles are used in chrome plating is inexcusable.
made in physiology today: “The discoverer said that the discovery may have
uses in the cure of cancer.” But they cannot explain the value of the thing
itself.
human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of
logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting
what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are
examples of this.
things out. This method is based on the principle that observationis the
judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and
characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand
that observationis the ultimate and final judgeof the truthof an idea.
But “prove” used in this way really means “test,” in the same way that a
Introduction
TrustMark 2001 by Timothy Wilken
really should be translated as, “The exception teststhe rule.” Or, put
another way, “The exception provesthat the rule is wrong.” That is the
principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be
proved by observation, that rule is wrong.
show us that the old rule is wrong. And it is most exciting, then, to find out
what the right rule, if any, is. The exception is studied, along with other
conditions that produce similar effects. The scientist tries to find more
exceptions and to determine the characteristics of the exceptions, a process
that is continually exciting as it develops. He does not try to avoid showing
that the rules are wrong; there is progress and excitement in the exact
opposite. He tries to prove himself wrong as quickly as possible.
the kind of questions that can be answered. They are limited to questions
that you can put this way: “if I do this, what will happen? ” There are ways
to try it and see. Questions like, “should I do this?” and “what is the value of
this?” are not of the same kind.
observation, this does not mean that it is dead, or wrong, or stupid. We are
not trying to argue that science is somehow good and other things are
somehow not good. Scientists take all those things that canbe analyzed by
observation, and thus the things called science are found out. But there are
some things left out, for which the method does not work. This does not
mean that those things are unimportant. They are, in fact, in many ways
the most important. In any decision for action, when you have to make up
your mind what to do, there is always a “should” involved, and this cannot
be worked out from “if I do this, what will happen?” alone. You say, “Sure,
you see what will happen, and then you decide whether you want it to
happen or not.” But that is the step the scientist cannot take. You can
figure out what is going to happen, but then you have to decide whether
you like it that way or not.
Introduction
TrustMark 2001 by Timothy Wilken
be rough. You have to be very careful. There may have been a piece of dirt
in the apparatus that made the color change; it was not what you thought.
You have to check the observations very carefully, and then recheck them,
to be sure that you understand what all the conditions are and that you did
not misinterpret what you did.
misunderstood. When someone says a thing has been done scientifically,
often all he means is that it has been done thoroughly. I have heard people
talk of the “scientific” extermination of the Jews in Germany. There was
nothing scientific about it. It was only thorough. There was no question of
making observations and then checking them in order to determine
something. In that sense, there were “scientific” exterminations of people in
Roman times and in other periods when science was not so far developed as
it is today and not much attention was paid to observation. In such cases,
people should say “thorough” or “thoroughgoing,” instead of “scientific.”
making observations, and much of what is called the philosophy of science
is concerned with a discussion of these techniques. The interpretation of a
result is an example. To take a trivial instance, there is a famous joke about
a man who complains to a friend of a mysterious phenomenon. The white
horses on his farm eat more than the black horses. He worries about this
and cannot understand it, until his friend suggests that maybe he has
more white horses than black ones.
in judgments of various kinds. You say, “My sister had a cold, and in two
weeks … ” It is one of those cases, if you think about it, in which there were
more white horses. Scientific reasoning requires a certain discipline, and
we should try to teach this discipline, because even on the lowest level such
errors are unnecessary today.
necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the
experimenter, might like one result better than another. You perform the
Introduction
TrustMark 2001 by Timothy Wilken
falling in, the result varies from time to time. You do not have everything
under control. You like the result to be a certain way, so the times it comes
out that way, you say, “See, it comes out this particular way.” The next
time you do the experiment it comes out different. Maybe there was a piece
of dirt in it the first time, but you ignore it.
in deciding scientific questions or questions on the periphery of science.
There could be a certain amount of sense, for example, in the way you
analyze the question of whether stocks went up or down because of what
the President said or did not say.
the more interesting it is. The more definite the statement, the more
interesting it is to test. If someone were to propose that the planets go
around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for
movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an “oomph,” this theory could
explain a number of other phenomena as well. So this is a good theory, is it
not? No. It is nowhere near as good as a proposition that the planets move
around the sun under the influence of a central force which varies exactly
inversely as the square of the distance from the center. The second theory
is better because it is so specific; it is so obviously unlikely to be the result
of chance. It is so definite that the barest error in the movement can show
that it is wrong; but the planets could wobble all over the place, and,
according to the first theory, you could say, “Well, that is the funny
behavior of the “oomph.” ”
exceptions, and the more interesting and valuable it is to check.
conclusions can be drawn, as in my example of “oomph,” then the
proposition they state is almost meaningless, because you can explain
almost anything by the assertion that things have a tendency to motility. A
great deal has been made of this by philosophers, who say that words must
be defined extremely precisely. Actually, I disagree somewhat with this; I
think that extreme precision of definition is often not worthwhile, and
Introduction
TrustMark 2001 by Timothy Wilken
get into that argument here.
technical aspects involved in trying to make sure the method works pretty
well. Whether these technical points would be useful in a field in which
observation is not the judge I have no idea. I am not going to say that
everything has to be done the same way when a method of testing different
from observation is used. In a different field perhaps it is not so important
to be careful of the meaning of words or that the rules be specific, and so on.
I do not know.
observation is the judge of the truth of an idea. But where does the idea
come from? The rapid progress and development of science requires that
human beings invent something to test.
observations, and the observations themselves suggest the laws. But it
does not work that way. It takes much more imagination than that. So the
next thing we have to talk about is where the new ideas come from.
Actually, it does not make any difference, as long as they come. We have a
way of checking whether an idea is correct or not that has nothing to do
with where it came from. We simply test it against observation. So in
science we are not interested in where an idea comes from.
true or not. We can read an authority and let him suggest something; we
can try it out and find out if it is true or not. If it is not true, so much the
worse so the “authorities” lose some of their “authority.”
are among most people. This was true in the early days of physics, for
example. But in physics today the relations are extremely good. A scientific
argument is likely to involve a great deal of laughter and uncertainty on
both sides, with both sides thinking up experiments and offering to bet on
the outcome. In physics there are so many accumulated observations that
Introduction
TrustMark 2001 by Timothy Wilken