The Scientist as Rebel (New York Review Books (Paperback))
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Last annotated on May 25, 2017
THERE IS NO such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions.Read more at location 170
But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture,Read more at location 171
One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white.Read more at location 175
For the great Arab mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam, science was a rebellion against the intellectual constraints of Islam,Read more at location 179
For the first generations of Japanese scientists in the nineteenth century, science was a rebellion against their traditional culture of feudalism.Read more at location 183
For the great Indian physicists of this century, Raman, Bose, and Saha, science was a double rebellion, first against English domination and second against the fatalistic ethic of Hinduism.Read more at location 184
scientists from Galileo to Einstein have been rebels. Here is how Einstein himself described the situation: When I was in the seventh grade at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, I was summoned by my home-room teacher who expressed the wish that I leave the school. To my remark that I had done nothing amiss, he replied only, “Your mere presence spoils the respect of the class for me.”Read more at location 186
Science is an alliance of free spirits in all cultures rebelling against the local tyranny that each culture imposes on its children.Read more at location 192
Over a time span of 100,000 years we are all Africans. And over a time span of 300 million years we are all amphibians, waddling uncertainly out of dried-up ponds onto the alien and hostile land.Read more at location 204
Ironic, detached, contemptuous like Einstein of national pride and cultural taboos, he stood in awe of nature alone.Read more at location 220
In our century we have seen the physicist Lev Landau sitting in jail in the Soviet Union and Pyotr Kapitsa risking his own life by appealing to Stalin to let Landau out. We have seen the mathematician André Weil sitting in jail in Finland during the Winter War of 1939–1940 and Lars Ahlfors saving his life.Read more at location 225
Another example of science as subversion is Andrei Sakharov. Davis and Sakharov belong to an old tradition in science that goes all the way back to the rebels Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth century, to Galileo and Giordano Bruno in the seventeenth and sixteenth.Read more at location 234
The vision of science as rebellion was articulated in Cambridge with great clarity on February 4, 1923, in a lecture by the biologist J.B. S. Haldane to the Society of Heretics. The lecture was published as a little book with the title Daedalus.Read more at location 239
I have already made it clear that I have a low opinion of reductionism, which seems to me to be at best irrelevant and at worst misleading as a description of what science is about. Let me begin with pure mathematics. Here the failure of reductionism has been demonstrated by rigorous proof. This will be a familiar story to many of you.Read more at location 253
Gödel proved that in any formulation of mathematics, including the rules of ordinary arithmetic, a formal process for separating statements into true and false cannot exist.Read more at location 270
To decide whether a mathematical statement is true, it is not sufficient to reduce the statement to marks on paper and to study the behavior of the marks.Read more at location 274
It is a curious paradox that several of the greatest and most creative spirits in science, after achieving important discoveries by following their unfettered imaginations, were in their later years obsessed with reductionist philosophy and as a result became sterile.Read more at location 276
Like Hilbert, Einstein did his great work up to the age of forty without any reductionist bias.Read more at location 279
But like Hilbert, as he grew older he concentrated his attention more and more on the formal properties of his equations, and he lost interest in the wider universe of ideas out of which the equations arose. His last twenty years were spent in a fruitless search for a set of equations that would unify the whole of physics, without paying attention to the rapidly proliferating experimental discoveries that any unified theory would finally have to explain. I do not need to say more about this tragic and well-known story of Einstein’s lonely attempt to reduce physics to a finite set of marks on paper.Read more at location 281
I shall instead discuss another aspect of Einstein’s later life, an aspect that has received less attention than his quest for the unified field equations: his extraordinary hostility to the idea of black holes.Read more at location 286
Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions of Einstein’s equations that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence.Read more at location 289
We now know that black holes ranging in mass from a few suns to a few billion suns actually existRead more at location 293
Einstein was not merely skeptical, he was actively hostile to the idea of black holes. He thought that the black hole solution was a blemish to be removed from his theory by a better mathematical formulation, not a consequence to be tested by observation.Read more at location 296
Like Hilbert, they were not content to solve particular problems one at a time.Read more at location 308
In the history of science it happens not infrequently that a reductionist approach leads to a spectacular success.Read more at location 310
sometimes the understanding of a whole field of science is suddenly advanced by the discovery of a single basic equation. Thus it happened that the Schrödinger equation in 1926 and the Dirac equation in 1927 brought a miraculous order into the previously mysterious processes of atomic physics.Read more at location 312
Bewildering complexities of chemistry and physics were reduced to two lines of algebraic symbols.Read more at location 314
But it happens at least equally often in the history of science that the understanding of the component parts of a composite system is impossible without an understanding of the behavior of the system as a whole. And it often happens that the understanding of the mathematical nature of an equation is impossible without a detailed understanding of its solutions. The black hole is a case in point.Read more at location 317
When I look at Gödel’s proof of his undecidability theorem, I do not see a philosophical argument. The proof is a soaring piece of architecture, as unique and as lovely as Chartres Cathedral.Read more at location 326
Gödel proved that in mathematics the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.Read more at location 330
The black hole solution of Einstein’s equations is also a work of art. The black hole is not as majestic as Gödel’s proof, but it has the essential features of a work of art: uniqueness, beauty, and unexpectedness.Read more at location 332
When I am working, I feel myself to be practicing a craft rather than following a method.Read more at location 336
In recent years there has been great dispute among historians of science, some believing that science is driven by social forces, others believing that science transcends social forces and is driven by its own internal logic and by the objective facts of nature. Historians of the first group write social history, those of the second group write intellectual history. Since I believe that scientists should be artists and rebels, obeying their own instincts rather than social demands or philosophical principles, I do not fully agree with either view of history.Read more at location 343
The image of noble and virtuous dedication to truth, the image that scientists have traditionally presented to the public, is no longer credible.Read more at location 355
Historians who believe in the transcendence of science have portrayed scientists as living in a transcendent world of the intellect, superior to the transient, corruptible, mundane realities of the social world.Read more at location 359
Both in science and in history there is room for a variety of styles and purposes. There is no necessary contradiction between the transcendence of science and the realities of social history.Read more at location 367
To my mind, the history of science is most illuminating when the frailties of human actors are put into juxtaposition with the transcendence of nature’s laws.Read more at location 371
two discoveries in which he was involved. One was the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, the other was the discovery of the triple-helix structure of the collagen molecule.Read more at location 374
Crick says that the two discoveries caused him equal excitement and equal pleasure at the time he was working on them. From the point of view of a historian who believes that science is a purely social construction, the two discoveries should have been equally significant. But in history as Crick experienced it, the two helixes were not equal. The double helix became the driving force of a new science, while the triple helix remained a footnote of interest only to specialists. Crick asks the question, how the different fates of the two helixes are to be explained.Read more at location 378
Nature herself, and not the scientist, decided what was important. In the history of the double helix, transcendence was real.Read more at location 384
Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.Read more at location 387
If we try to squeeze science into a single philosophical viewpoint such as reductionism, we are like Procrustes chopping off the feet of his guests when they do not fit onto his bed.Read more at location 388
