Science: Determinism and Uncertainty

1
Science Determinism and Uncertainty
2
Science entering the 19th Century

• Scientific Awakening laid the theoretical and
  operational bases science
• Popular opinions about science at the beginning
  of the 19th Century
• Authority for truth
• Triumphant in describing nature
• Prestige in method of science versus other
  methods (religion redefined)
• Technologists looking at science to improve
  technology

3
The Bases of Science

• 1. Cause and Effect
• 2. Determinism
• Reductionism
• Objectivity

4
Physical Sciences are Quantitative

• "I often say...that when you can measure what you
  are speaking about, and express it in numbers,
  you know something about it but when you cannot
  measure it, when you cannot express it in
  numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and
  unsatisfactory kind it may be the beginning of
  knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your
  thoughts, advanced to the stage of science,
  whatever the matter may be."
• Lord Kelvin

5
Social Sciences Confident but methods not fully
defined

• Belief that all puzzles can be solved through
  science
• Rosetta stone solved mystery of Hieroglyphics
• Medical advances
• Technology
• Electricity and magnetism
• Analysis of behavior

6
Louis Pasteur

• Use of science to improve life
• Degree in crystal chemistry
• Switched to Bacteriology/microbiology
• Chicken cholera

7

• Fortune favors the prepared mind.
• Louis Pasteur

8
Contributions of Louis Pasteur

• Developed the concept of vaccinations and showed
  how it worked to prevent chicken cholera
• Living things only from living things (study in
  bacteria)
• Demonstrated that disease is caused by
  microorganisms (foundation of modern
  microbiology)
• Pasteurization (saved the milk, beer, and wine
  industries of France)
• Saved the silk industry through heat treatment of
  silk worm nurseries
• Vaccination against anthrax (saved the sheep/wool
  industry of France)
• Rabies vaccination

9

• I have been looking for spontaneous generation
  for twenty years without discovering it. No, I
  do not judge it impossible. But what allows you
  to make it the origin of life? You place matter
  before life and you decide that matter has
  existed for all eternity. How do you know that
  the incessant progress of science will not compel
  scientists to consider that life has existed
  during eternity, and not matter? You pass from
  matter to life because your intelligence of today
  cannot conceive things otherwise. How do you
  know that in ten thousand years one will not
  consider it more likely that matter has emerged
  from life?
• Louis Pasteur

10

• "Science advances through tentative answers to a
  series of more and more subtle questions which
  reach deeper and deeper into the essence of
  natural phenomena."
• Louis Pasteur

11
Pasteurs environment and motivation

• Duty to country
• Personal value system
• Scientific impetus
• Earn a living

12
Charles Darwin

• Influenced by previous scientists
• Theory begun in Galápagos Islands
• Origins of Species
• Descent of Man
• Controversy and support
• Persisting problems today

13

• Organic evolution, as Darwin conceived it,
  involved at least three distinct propositions
  first, that more complex forms of life appeared
  on the earth later than simpler ones (the
  doctrine of progression) secondly, that these
  later forms of life were descended from the
  earlier ones (the doctrine of transformation)
  and thirdlyDarwins essential contributionthat
  the descent of these later species from the
  earlier was a consequence of variation and
  natural selection.
• - Toulmin, Stephen and June Goodfield, The
  discovery of Time, The University of Chicago
  Press, 1965, pg 138.

14

• Because Darwins view of the origins of life is
  totally mechanistic, it fails to explain all of
  the elements of mans progress. Hegel says that
  somewhere or somehow the natural juices from
  which organisms were created must have inclined
  towards the Greek. (Meaning that there was some
  tendency that led mankind to seek perfection in
  spirit, beauty, and behavior.)
• Another way of thinking about this is to consider
  the limits of reductionism. One could ask, What
  is a radio? A scientist would seek to answer by
  taking the radio apart. (You could, in fact,
  just throw it down and break the case so that all
  the elements and parts are scattered about.)
  However, isnt there something about the radio
  that can only be discerned by turning the radio
  on and listening to a beautiful symphony (or
  other great aesthetic work). This goes beyond
  the mechanistic approach and asks the question
  Why does something exist?

15
Changes in science in mid 1800's

• Status
• Determinism, reductionism, cause and effect not
  disputed
• Newton's description of universe was fully
  accepted
• Newton's basic assumptions not disputed
• Time is continuous and constant
• Space is continuous and constant
• Mass is continuous and constant
• The world can be described by Euclidean
  principles

16

• Euclidean geometry a priori assumptions
• 1. The shortest distance between two points is a
  straight line.
• 2. Two parallel lines never cross.
• 3. Two non-parallel lines cross at one and only
  one point.
• Newton then derived that mass is a constant that
  relates time, length, and speed or acceleration.
• Riemann geometry a priori assumptions
• 1. The shortest distance between two points is a
  curve.
• 2. Two parallel lines cross at infinity.
• Einstein then derived that mass is a variable
  that depends upon time, length, and speed or
  acceleration.
• From H. Clay Gorton, The Transitory Nature of
  Telestial Knowledge

17
Conflict Newton versus Einstein

• Newton Mass is constant. Time and length are
  uniform.
• F ma
• Einstein Mass is variable. Time and length are
  relative.
• E mc2

18
Relativity

• "A clock attached to a system that is in relative
  motion will be observed to run more slowly than
  one that is stationary with respect to us. Rods
  appear to contract in the direction of their
  motion when they are observed to move from rest
  into uniform motion... The mass of a moving body
  increases with the body's velocity relative to
  its observer."
• Gardner, Howard, Creating Minds, Basic Books,
  1993, p.111.

19
Einstein Creativity

• "Einstein had the peculiar habit of attacking a
  problem by going back to the basics. He
  dispensed with most of the known facts, deriving
  the key concepts himself from scratch. By doing
  so, he avoided many of the bad assumptions that
  confused his colleagues."
• Thorpe, Scott, How to Think Like Einstein,
  Barnes Noble Books, Inc., 2000, p. 30.

20
Einstein Creativity

• "The only reason for time is so that everything
  doesn't happen at once.
• Einstein, Albert, quoted in Thorpe, Scott, How
  to Think Like Einstein, Barnes Noble Books,
  Inc., 2000, p.136.

21
Einstein Creativity

• The distinction between past, present and
  future is only an illusion, however persistent.
• Einstein, 1955

22
Einstein Creativity

• Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very
  persistent one.
• - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

23
Creativity

• The difference between fiction and reality?
  Fiction has to make sense.
• - Tom Clancy

24
Uncertainty Principle and Quantum Principles

• You cannot simultaneously determine the position
  and momentum (mass) of a particle
• Electrons and light are both particles and waves
• Positions, masses and other characteristics of
  particles are expressed by probability

25
Uncertainty Principle and Quantum Principles

• "The quantum effect is a feature of the subatomic
  world which has no analogy in macroscopic
  physics the more a particle is confined, the
  faster it moves...Modern physics thus pictures
  matter not at all as passive and inert but as
  being in a continuous dancing and vibrating
  motion whose rhythmic patters are determined by
  the molecular, atomic, and nuclear
  configurations. We have come to realize that
  there are not static structures in nature. There
  is stability, but this stability is one of
  dynamic balance, and the further we penetrate
  into matter the more we need to understand its
  dynamic nature to understand its patterns."
• The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra

26
Uncertainty Principle and Quantum Principles

• "While it an electron acts like a particle, it
  is capable of developing its wave nature at the
  expense of its particle nature, and vice versa,
  thus undergoing continual transformations from
  particle to wave and from wave to particle. This
  means that neither the electron nor any other
  atomic 'object' has any intrinsic properties
  independent of its environment. The properties
  it shows particle-like or wave-like will
  depend on the experimental situation, that is, on
  the apparatus it is forced to interact with."
• The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra

27
Uncertainty Principle and Quantum Principles

• "God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on
  Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The Devil runs
  them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and
  Saturday."
• William Bragg, Nobel prize-winning physicist

28
Chaos and Synchronicity

• Butterfly effect
• Principles of chaos
• Synchronicity

29
Chaos Theory

• Weather prediction story
• Observation Small changes can make large
  differences
• Conclusion We may not really know the cause and
  effect relationship

30
Chaos and Synchronicity

• "When a butterfly flutters its wings in one part
  of the world, it can eventually cause a hurricane
  in another..."
• Edward Lorenz and Chaos Theory

31
Chaos and Synchronicity

• Poincaré 1854-1912 also points out that some
  events that appear to be fortuitous are not
  instead, their causes stem from minute
  disturbances. A cone perfectly balanced on its
  apex will topple over if there is the least
  defect in symmetry and even if there is no
  defect, the cone will topple in response to a
  very slight tremor, a breath of air. That is
  why, Poincaré explained, meteorologists have such
  limited success in predicting the
  weather....Chaos theory, a more recent
  development, is based on a similar premise.
  According to this theory, much of what looks like
  chaos is in truth the product of an underlying
  order, in which insignificant perturbations are
  often the cause of events.
• Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods, 1996, 201

32
Chaos and Synchronicity

• This, finally, is the essence of synchronicity
  the world we live in is filled with harmonies
  and coincidences that have no explanation in
  terms of cause and effect. It is fruitless to
  seek after hidden forces and occult powers. The
  world is a given it is just as it is, full of
  cause and effect, full of synchronicity.
• R. Rucker, The Fourth Dimension, p. 188

33
Changes in the Bases of Science (1850 - present)
X

• Probability
• Uncertainty
• Chaos theory

• Reductionism
• Determinism
• 3. Proximate Cause and Effect

X
X
34
Science Today

• "In science, ?fact' can only mean ?confirmed to
  such a degree that it would be perverse to
  withhold provisional assent'."
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.88.

35
Science Today

• "Scientific theories can never provide a
  complete and definitive description of reality.
  They will always be approximations to the true
  nature of things. To put it bluntly, scientists
  do not deal with truth they deal with limited
  and approximate descriptions of reality."
• The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra

36
Science Today

• "The purpose of science was not the 'accumulation
  of knowledge' (since, after all, all scientific
  theories are eventually proved false) but rather
  the creation of 'mental maps' that guide and
  shape our perception and action, bringing about a
  constant 'mutual participation between nature and
  consciousness.'
• David Bohm, The Special Theory of Relativity

37
Science Today

• "So far as the laws of mathematics refer to
  reality, they are not certain. And so far as
  they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
• Einstein, Albert, quoted in Thorpe, Scott, How
  to Think Like Einstein, Barnes Noble Books,
  Inc., 2000, p. 111.

38
Faith Scientific and Religious

• Faith is trusting that you understand the cause
  of some effect. In science, you trust that the
  cause is proximate, that is, nearby in time and
  space. In religion, you trust that the cause is
  known to God. Both methods require faith.
• Brent Strong

39
The New World

• "The modern era has been dominated by the
  culminating belief expressed in different forms,
  that the worldand Being as suchis a wholly
  knowable system governed by a finite number of
  universal laws that man can grasp and rationally
  direct for his own benefit. This era, beginning
  in the Renaissance and developing from the
  Enlightenment to socialism, from positivism to
  scientism, from the Industrial Revolution to the
  information revolution, was characterized by
  rapid advances in rational, cognitive thinking.
  This, in turn, gave rise to the proud belief that
  man, as the pinnacle of everything that exists,
  was capable of objectively describing, explaining
  and controlling everything that exists, and
  possessing the one and only truth about the
  world. (continued)

40
The New World

• "It was an era in which there was a cult of
  depersonalized objectivity, an era in which
  objective knowledge was amassed and
  technologically exploited, an era of systems,
  institutions, mechanisms, and statistical
  averages. It was an era of freely transferable,
  existentially ungrounded information. It was an
  era of ideologies, doctrines, interpretations or
  reality, an era in which the goal was to find a
  universal theory of the world, and thus a
  universal key to unlock it prosperity
  (continued)

41
The New World

• "Communism was the perverse extreme of this
  trendThe fall of Communism can be regarded as a
  sign that modern thoughtbased upon the premise
  that the world is objectively knowable, and that
  knowledge so obtained can be absolutely
  generalizedhas come to a final crisis. This era
  has created the first global, or planetary,
  technical civilization, but it has reached the
  limit of its potential, the point beyond which
  the abyss begins.
• "Traditional science, with its usual coolness,
  can describe the different ways we might destroy
  ourselves, but it cannot offer truly effective
  and practical instructions on how to avert them."
• Vaclav Havel (first leader of the Czech Republic)

42
Thank You
43

• "It certainly is curious to start one's
  autobiography, not with where and when one was
  born, the names of one's parents, and similar
  personal details, but to focus instead on a
  question which Einstein phrases simply 'What,
  precisely, is thinking?' Einstein explains why
  he has to start his 'obituary' in this way 'For
  the essential in the being of a man of my type
  lies precisely in what he thinks and how he
  thinks, not in what he does or suffers.'"
• Gerald Holton, Einstein, History, and Other
  Passions

44

• "Few modern researchers are likely to admit, as
  Oersted gladly did, that he had been completely
  convinced many years earlier of the existence of
  the effect he eventually discovered. Oersted had
  been persuaded of a connection existing between
  electricity and magnetism by reading Immanuel
  Kant, who on metaphysical grounds proposed that
  all the different forces of nature are only
  different exemplifications of one fundamental
  force, a Grundkraft."
• Gerald Holton, Einstein, History, and Other
  Passions

45

• "In the twentieth century physics has gone
  through several conceptual revolutions that
  clearly reveal the limitations of the mechanistic
  world view...The universe is no longer seen as a
  machine, made up of a multitude of separate
  objects, but appears as a harmonious indivisible
  whole a network of dynamic relationships that
  include the human observer and his or her
  consciousness in an essential way.
• The Turning Point , Fritjof Capra

46

• "Many great discoveries in physics ultimately
  boil down to equalities of two ratios. When
  Archimedes discovered the law of the lever, for
  example, he found that a balance beam is in
  equilibrium when the ratio of the weights is
  equal to the inverse ratio of the lengths of the
  lever arms...Two thousand years later Galileo
  showed that the ratio of the acceleration of a
  ball rolling down an incline to the acceleration
  of ball in a free fall is equal to the ratio of
  the height of the incline to its length. This
  likeness is subtler and more deeply hidden than
  the law discovered by Archimedes and, for that
  reason, it is in some sense superior. In a
  similar way, works of art gain in stature and are
  considered to be more beautiful, as the
  appearances they unify are more widely varied.
  Thus there is greater merit in comparing death to
  a bee than to, say, sleep, and more poetry in the
  metaphor of honey for Juliets breath than, say,
  wind. A scientific theory is beautiful to the
  extent that the phenomena it explains are
  unrelated - or at least seem so."
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.66.

47

• "Einstein...notes first of all to pay 'special
  attention to the relation between the content of
  a theory,' on the one hand, and 'the totality of
  empirical facts,' on the other. These two
  constitute the two 'components of our knowledge,'
  the 'rational' and the 'empirical' these two
  components are 'inseparable' but they stand
  also, Einstein warns, in 'eternal antithesis....'
  Up to this point, therefore, we are left with a
  thoroughly dualistic method for doing science.
  On the one hand, Einstein says, 'the structure of
  the system is the work of reason' on the other
  hand, 'the empirical contents and their mutual
  relations must find their representation in the
  conclusions of the theory.'
• Gerald Holton, Einstein, History, and Other
  Passions

48

• "It used to be considered obvious that time
  flowed on forever, regardless of what was
  happening but the theory of relativity combined
  time with space and said that both could be
  warped, or distorted, by the matter and energy in
  the universe. So our perception of the nature of
  time changed from being independent of the
  universe to being shaped by it. It then became
  conceivable that time might simply not be defined
  before a certain point as one goes back in time,
  one might come to an insurmountable barrier, a
  singularity, beyond which one could not go. If
  that were the case, it wouldn't make sense to ask
  who, or what, caused or created the big bang. To
  talk about causation or creation implicitly
  assumes there was a time before the big bang
  singularity.
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.66.

49

• "One can assemble a list of about ten chief
  presuppositions underlying his Einstein's
  theory of construction throughout his long
  scientific career primacy of formal (rather
  than materialistic or mechanistic) explanation
  unity or unification cosmological scale in the
  applicability of laws logical parsimony and
  necessity symmetry (for as long as possible)
  simplicity causality (in essentially the
  Newtonian sense) completeness and
  exhaustiveness continuum and, of course,
  constancy and invariance."
• Gerald Holton, Einstein, History, and Other
  Passions

50

• "He Einstein felt a gap somewhere without
  being able to clarify it, or even to formulate
  it. He felt that the trouble went deeper than
  the contradiction between Michelson's actual and
  the expected result. He felt that a certain
  region in the structure of the whole situation
  was in reality not as clear to him as it should
  be, although it had hitherto been accepted
  without question by everyone, including himself."
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.97.

51

• "The reward for such internalization of subject
  matter is intuition. The scientist learns to
  sense what is expected, to feel how the world
  ought to work... In essence, intuition is the
  ability to sense an underlying order in things,
  and thus is related to still another mental tool
  that is indispensable to the working scientist
  the perception of patterns, both visual and
  verbal...All good theories contain, at heart, an
  ordering process that reveals hidden patterns."
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.116.

52

• "Another troubling trend of the new physics
  Standard Model of particle physics, big bang
  cosmological model and Grand Unified Theories is
  that the theories have many arbitrarily
  adjustable parameters (one model fits all data),
  or they come in many slightly different versions,
  so as to hedge one's bets... An irreverent name
  for this strategy might be the Ptolemaic
  method...who...developed a theory of planetary
  motion that involved adding increasingly
  complicated ?epicycles' until his predictions
  fitted the facts."
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.77-78.

53

• "One can sum up all this the viability of a
  scientific theory by saying that the criterion
  of the scientific status of a theory is its
  falsifiability, or refutability, or testability."
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.85.

54

• Scientists are aware....that it is possible
  to live and not to know. But I dont know
  whether everyone believes this is true. Our
  freedom to doubt was born out of struggle against
  authority in the early days of science.... It is
  our responsibility as scientists to teach how
  doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and
  discussed.
• Richard Feynman (quoted in Nye, Mary Jo, before
  Big Science, p. 228)

55

• In my entire scientific life, extending over
  forty-five years, the most shattering experience
  has been the realization that an exact solution
  of Einsteins equations of general relativity,
  discovered by the New Zealand mathematician Roy
  Kerr, provides the absolutely exact
  representation of untold numbers of massive black
  holes that populate the universe. This
  shuddering before the beautiful, this
  incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a
  search after the beautiful in mathematics should
  find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to
  say that beauty is that to which the human mind
  responds at its deepest and most profound level.
• Astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

56

• In 1937, in response to criticisms of The
  General Theory, Maynard Keynes summed up his
  views By uncertain knowledge...I do not mean
  merely to distinguish what is known for certain
  from what is only probable. The game of roulette
  is not subject, in this sense, to
  uncertainty....The sense in which I am using the
  term is that in which the prospect of a European
  war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the
  rate of interest twenty years hence, or the
  obsolescence of a new invention....About these
  matters, there is no scientific basis on which to
  form any calculable probability whatever. We
  simply do not know!
• Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods, 1996, 229

57

• What I am suggesting is that if we take
  sensations and thoughts as primary, then there is
  no reason to limit the dimensions of the world
  to the space and time dimensions involved in the
  motions of inanimate objects. Part and parcel of
  every object you see is what the object reminds
  you of, how you feel about it, what you know
  about its past, and so on. If we make an honest
  effort to describe the world as we actually live
  it, then the world grows endlessly more
  complicated than any simple 3-D picture. There
  is a feeling that the more we delve into the
  nature of reality, the more we will find. Far
  from being limited, the world is inexhaustibly
  rich.
• Rucker, The Fourth Dimension, p.194

58

• "Many students in the sciences (to say nothing
  of those in other fields) believe that the
  business of science is truth and that, in
  science, truth is based on fact. But science has
  to do with understanding nature, not with
  establishing fixed truths."
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.x.

59
Ockham's Razor

• "What can be done with fewer terms is done in
  vain with more."
• Ockham, William, as quoted in Palmer, Donald,
  Does the Center Hold?, Mountain View, CA
  Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 91.

60

• The Order of Nature
• Newton believed that there were 5 fixed and
  permanent concepts or features of nature
• Ultimate inorganic particles which were solid,
  massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable.
• Problems Radioactivity, Uncertainty Principle
• Organic structures that are adaptive and willful.
• Problems Evolution by natural selection, no
  difference between organic and inorganic matter.
• Stability of the planetary orbits and fixed
  nature of the stars
• Problems New planets, Red shift
• Laws of motion (passive) arising from inertia and
  mass such as F ma and Newton's basic laws of
  motion.
• Problems Relativity, e mc2
• Laws of attraction and repulsion (active) such as
  gravity, magnetism, electrical attraction,
  chemical reactions
• Problems None so far. Do we know that basic
  constants (Planck's constant, gravitational
  constant, pi, natural logarithm, etc.) have been
  and will remain constant for all time?
• From Toulmin, Stephen and June Goodfield, The
  Discovery of Time, The University of Chicago
  Press, 1965, p.247 and following.

61

• When Romeo finds Juliet in the tomb, and thinks
  her dead, he laments, "Death that hath suckt the
  honey of thy breath." The rhyme of death with
  breath, and the sixfold repetition of the th
  sound, sometimes silent, sometimes buzzing, are
  the tools of the poet's craft. But the power of
  the line derives from its message, the
  comparisons of death to a bee, of Juliet to a
  flower hidden likenesses between vastly
  disparate things."
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.71.

62
Determinism by Laplace

• "If I knew all the laws of nature and had one
  complete description of the universe at any given
  moment, then I could predict all future events
  and retrodict all past events."
• Laplace as quoted in Palmer, Donald, Does the
  Center Hold?, Mountain View, CA Mayfield
  Publishing Company, 1991, p. 241.

63

• "For two and a half centuries physicists have
  used a mechanistic view of the world to develop
  and refine the conceptual framework known as
  classical physics. They have based their ideas
  on the mathematical theory of Isaac Newton, the
  philosophy of René Descartes, and the scientific
  methodology advocated by Francis Bacon...Like
  human-made machines, the cosmic machine was
  thought to consist of elementary parts.
  Consequently it was believed that complex
  phenomena could always be understood by reducing
  them to their basic building blocks and by
  looking for the mechanisms through which these
  interacted. This attitude, known as
  reductionism, has become so deeply ingrained in
  our culture that it has often been identified
  with the scientific method."
• Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point

64
Chemistry/Physics

• Thomas Young
• light waves
• John Dalton
• atomic theory
• Kekule
• organic molecular structure
• Dmitri Mendeleev
• periodic table
• Alfred Nobel
• dynamite

65
Uncertainty and the Quantam Theory

• Wilhelm RoentgenX-rays
• Pierre and Marie Curieisolated radium
• fission
• Max Planckquantum theory
• Albert Einsteinphotoelectric effect
• relativity
• Ernest Rutherfordatomic structure

66
Electricity

• 1800selectricity identified
• Alessandro Voltafirst battery
• Hans Christian Oerstedelectromagnetism
• Andre Ampereelectromagnetic theory
• Georg Ohmcircuit analysis
• Michael Faradayrelation between valance electron
  and electricity
• James Clerk Maxwellelectromagnetic theory

67
Biology

• Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann
• All living things have cells
• Gregor Mendel
• Rule for genetics

68
Medicine

• Edward Jennersmall pox vaccination (1796)
• Robert Kochgerms caused disease (1882)
• Tuberculosis caused by bacteria
• Paul Ehrlichchemotherapy
• Sigmund Freudpsychoanalysis
• Alexander Flemingpenicillin (1928)

69

• "In 1898 an English admiral, Percy Scott, watched
  his men at target practice. All but one was
  doing miserably. That one gunner had evolved his
  own aiming tactic. He kept his eye on the sight
  and he moved the gun continuously until he could
  feel the synchronization between his aim and the
  motion of the ship. What he was doing was
  subtle...It coupled the man and the machine...
  That unknown English sailor thought not about
  mastering standard technique but about how to do
  the job."
• John Lienhard, The Engines of Our Ingenuity,
  p.54.

70

• "The twentieth-century quantum physicist Richard
  Feynman asserted that if the human race was wiped
  out and could pass on just one sentence of
  scientific knowledge, this sentence should begin
  'All things are made of atoms...'"
• Strathern, Paul, Mendeleyev's Dream, New York
  Berkley Books, 2000, p.245.

71

• "Fleming's discovery illustrates the concept of
  'selective coding,' the ability to sift important
  information from irrelevancies... Another path to
  creative insight is called 'selective
  combination,' seeing a way to combine the
  relevant information once you've detected it...
  Another skill useful to creativity is the ability
  to draw comparisons and analogies. Many
  breakthroughs are the result of juxtaposing
  elements or ideas that ordinarily do not go
  together or detecting a hidden pattern of
  connections among things. "
• from Goleman, Daniel et al., The Creative
  Spirit, Plume, 1992, p.35.

72

• "I've given up trying to be rigorous. All I'm
  concerned about is being right."
• Hawking, Stephen, quoted in Thorpe, Scott, How
  to Think Like Einstein, Barnes Noble Books,
  Inc., 2000, p. 30.

73
Uncertainty and the Quantam Theory

• Neils Bohrenergy controls electron motion
• Erwin Schrödingerwave mechanics
• Werner Heisenberguncertainty principle
• Enrico Ferminuclear chain reaction

74
Implications of Quantum Uncertainty

• Determinism questioned
• Time/Mass/Dimensions reexamined
• Scientific method questioned
• Thoughts and feelings more real than substance
• Cause and effect relationships false

75

• "Resistance to technological change derives
  from two sources that aid and abet each other,
  though they can exist independently. One is the
  economic and political interest of the
  technological status quo. The other is the
  resistance of intellectuals, who, for one reason
  or another, are genuinely and sincerely fearful
  of technology. Though at times the
  intellectuals' sincerity may be in doubt, it is
  reasonable to distinguish between these selfish
  and selfless currents in technophobic responses.
  Whatever its motives, the resistance to
  technological change has to rely on non-market
  forces, above all the control of political
  power."
• Mokyr, Joel, The Gifts of Athena, Princeton
  University Press, 2002, p.262-263.

76

• A theory is a set of basic rules, supported by a
  great many confirmed observations by many
  scientists, that explains and makes sensible a
  large number of facts that, without the theory,
  would seem to be unconnected...Theories are not
  necessarily correct in every detail, to begin
  with, and might never be entirely correct in
  every detail, but they are sufficiently correct
  (if they are good theories) to guide scientists
  in understanding the subject the theory deals
  with, in exploring further observations, and,
  eventually, in improving the theory. No
  scientific theory is instantly accepted by
  scientists. There are always those scientists
  who are suspicious of anything new and this is
  perhaps a good thing. Theories should not slide
  into acceptance too easily they should be
  questioned and tested vigorously. In this way,
  weak spots in the theory will be uncovered and,
  perhaps, strengthened.
• Isaac Asimov, Atom, pp. 12.

77

• "But where evidence is sparse or absentas it is
  for a growing number of questions in physics
  other criteria, including aesthetic ones, come
  into play in an essential way, both for
  formulating a theory and for evaluating it. In
  view of this fact, it is imperative that
  physicists know what they mean when they make
  appeals to such standards as elegance, coherence,
  and inner beauty. Many professional scientists
  use these terms to refer to their work, but few
  take the trouble to define them. What, then, is
  meant by elegance? By coherence? And What is
  beauty, in the context of mathematical formulas
  and physical theories?...All science is the
  search for unity in hidden likenesses...The
  equality of ratios is to physics what rhythm is
  to poetry, and balance to painting."
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.69-71.

78

• "But our understanding of nature does not proceed
  simply by means of scientific method, however
  understood. It frequently involves the kind of
  discovery that turns on less predictable (and
  less definable) factors such as accident and
  luck, as well as such personal traits as
  intuition, empathy, passion, openness to
  surprise, etc. that have to do with the
  personality of the individual scientist."
• John Hatton and Paul Plouffe, Science and its
  Ways of Knowing, 1997, pp.x.

79

• "Quantum theory implies the universe is basically
  an indivisible whole, even though on the larger
  scale level it may be represented approximately
  as divisible into separately existing parts. In
  particular, this means that, at a quantum
  theoretical level of accuracy, the observing
  instrument and the observed object participate in
  each other in an irreducible way. At this level
  perception and action therefore cannot be
  separated."
• David Bohm, The Special Theory of Relativity

80

• Science is the daughter of faith, the sister of
  hope, and the mother of charity.
• Louis Pasteur

81

• "The central core of the old belief system, one
  that lasted into the twentieth century, rested on
  three dogmas... (1) To all genuine questions
  there is one true answer, all others being false,
  and this applies equally to questions of conduct
  and feeling, to questions of theory and
  observations, to questions of value no less than
  to those of fact. (2) The true answers to such
  questions are in principle knowable. (3) These
  true answers cannot clash with one another."
• Einstein, History and Other Passions, Gerald
  Holton

82
Knowledge vs. Imagination

• Imagination is greater than knowledge.
• -Albert Einstein

83
Why Scientists Should Read Shakespeare
and

• Why Humanists Should
• Understand Einstein