The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Michael
Polanyi
Science and Reality *
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 18 (3)
Nov. 1967, 177-196.
The purpose of this essay is to re-introduce a
conception which, having served for two millennia as a guide to the
understanding of nature, has been repudiated by the modern interpretation of
science. I am speaking of the conception
of reality. Rarely will you find it
taught today, that the purpose of science is to discover the hidden reality
underlying the facts of nature. The
modern ideal of science is to establish a precise mathematical relationship
between the data without acknowledging that if such relationships are of
interest to science, it is because they tell us that we have hit upon a feature
of reality. My purpose is to bring back
the idea of reality and place it at the centre of a theory of scientific
enquiry.
The resurrected idea of reality will, admittedly, look
different from its departed ancestor. Instead of being the clear and firm ground
underlying all appearances, it will turn out to be known only vaguely, with an
unlimited range of unspecifiable expectations
attached to it.
It is common knowledge that Copernicus overthrew the
ancient view that the sun and the planets go round the Earth and that he
established instead a system in which it is the sun that is the centre around
which all planets are circling, while the Earth itself goes round the sun as
one of the planets. But we do not see it
recognised that in the way Copernicus interpreted
this discovery, he and his followers established the metaphysical grounds of
modern science. We cannot find this recognised, since these grounds of science are
predominantly contested today.
The great conflict between the Copernicans and their
opponents, culminating in the prosecution of Galileo by the Roman hierarchy, is
well remembered. It should be clear also
that the conflict was entirely about the question, whether the heliocentric
system was real. Copernicus and his
followers claimed that their system was a real image of the sun with the
planets circling around it; their opponents affirmed that it was no more than a
novel computing device.
For thirty years Copernicus hesitated to publish his theory, largely because he did not dare to oppose the teachings of Aristotle by claiming that the heliocentric system he had set up was real. Two years before the
* HHC: Polanyi extensive comparison of Ptolemy’s system with Copernicus
has not been reproduced, pp. 180-184 plus part of page 185.
177
publication of his book in 1543, the
protestant cleric Osiander responded to preliminary
publications of the Copernican system by a letter pressing Copernicus to
acknowledge that science can only produce hypotheses representing the phenomena
without claiming to be true. Later, Osiander succeeded in introducing an Address to the Reader
into the published book of Copernicus denying once more the reality of the
Copernican system. The issue was still
the same, more than half a century later, in Kepler’s
defence of Tycho Brahe against his critic Ursus,
and the same again when Galileo confronted Cardinal Bellarmine
and afterwards Pope Urban VIII.
The conflict was settled, at least for secular
opinion, when the Copernican system was confirmed by Newton. Copernicus and his followers were recognised then to have been right; and for the two
following centuries their steadfastness in defending science was
unquestioningly honoured among modern educated
people.
I myself was still brought up on these sentiments; but
by that time some eminent writers were already throwing cold water on them. The
positivist critique of science, initiated by Ernst Mach, [1] and vigorously supported by Henri Poincaré, [2] declared
that the claim which Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo
so bitterly defended was illusory. This
radical positivism taught that science consisted merely in establishing
functional relations between the data observed by our senses and that any claim
that went beyond this was undemonstrable. A reality underlying mathematical relations
between observed facts was a metaphysical conception, without tangible content.
During the past half century these formulations of
positivism have been first sharpened into logical positivism, which claimed to
establish strict criteria for the meaning and validity of all empirical
statements. But logical positivism,
after reaching its highest prestige in the forties, presently declined for its
aims proved unattainable. Its theories
were softened down then by a series of qualifications, which amounted to
abandoning any attempt at establishing a formal criterion of the meaning and
validity of a scientific statement. The
rise of analytic philosophy confirmed this abdication by abandoning the
critique of science. Thus we are left
today without any accepted theory of the nature and justification of natural
science.
1. Ernst
Mach, Die Mechanik in ihrer
Entwicklung (1883).
2. Henri Poincaré, Science et Hypothese,
Paris (1902), pp. 140-1, and Henri Poincaré, La
Valeur de la Science, Paris (1914), pp. 271-4. In the latter book Poincaré
defends himself against being taken to reject Galileo’s affirmation that the
Copernican system was true. He
identifies convenience with coherence and ascribes to coherence the value of a
greater truth than that which Galileo had claimed.
There has been sharp opposition to the positivist movement by individual authors, among them Planck [1] and Einstein, [2] as well as the great historian of science, Alexandre Koyré; [3] but these authors supplied no statement of the true metaphysical foundations of science. This is the situation in which I shall examine the Copernican’s claim that the heliocentric system was a true account of reality. And I shall show that in their conception of reality we can find the actual grounds on which science has rested ever since Copernicus established modern science on these grounds.
[HHC: Fig 1
& related paragraphs not reproduced]
1.
See footnote to p. 17.
2.
Albert Einstein, Biographical Notes in Albert
Einstein Philosopher-Scientist, ed. P. A. Schilpp,
New York (1949), p. 49,
writes about Ostwald and Mach: ‘The antipathy of
these scholars towards atomic theory can indubitably be traced back to their
positivistic philosophical attitude. This
is an interesting example of the fact that even scholars of audacious spirit
and fine instinct can be obstructed in the interpretation of facts by
philosophical prejudices. The prejudice
- which has by no means died out in the meantime - consists in the faith that
facts by themselves can and should yield scientific knowledge without free
conceptual construction.’
3. Alexandre
Koyré, Les Origines de
la Science Moderne, Diogene,
October 1956, no. 16, attacks positivism for denying that science has knowledge
of reality.
179
[HHC: pages 180-184 not reproduced]
… [HHC: of Copernicus’s
theory]
Everything is now bound together, he claims, and this
is a sign that the system is real. [1]
But why did this claim evoke such protest among his
contemporaries, particularly by the clergy? The objection was not raised primarily in defence of the bible, but of the medieval philosophy held
by clerics and
1. ‘The
motion of the Earth, therefore, suffices to explain so many apparent inequalities
in the heavens’ wrote Copernicus in Commentariolus.
That coherence is a token of
reality, is expressed by Rheticus in his Narratio Prima (1540) by the words: ‘So wise
is our maker, that each of his works has not one use, but two or three or often
more.’
185
lay scholars alike, since the day of Aquinas
300 years before. The philosophic view
which clerics from Osiander to Bellarmine
and lay scholars like Melanchton defended, goes back
to Aristotle. It assumed that all basic
features of the universe can be derived from necessary first principles; for
example, the perfection of the universe required that the course of all
heavenly bodies be represented by steady circular motions. Such views excluded the possibility of
discovering basic features of nature by the empirical observations of the
astronomer; any theory established by representing astronomical observations
could only be regarded as a mere computing device, and this applied as much to
the Ptolemaic system as to that of Copernicus. Only philosophy was competent to arrive at an
understanding of essential reality in nature.
Centuries later the positivists declared once more
that science can say nothing about ultimate reality, but theirs was a very
different reason, namely that they thought any such claim to be meaningless. Their purpose was not to preserve to philosophy
the competence for metaphysical theories, but on the contrary, to purify
science from making any such empty claims.
The meaning of these two different attacks on Copernicanism, the medieval and the positivist attacks, and
the position of Copernicus himself, can be illustrated by a diagram as follows.
[HHC: not reproduced]
(1) In the medieval position first principles bear
directly on reality, while excluding science from such bearing. (2) The positivist movement is shown isolating
science on the one hand from any extra-scientific first principles and on the
other hand from reality, since neither of these is recognised.
Science, regarded merely as a convenient
summary of given facts, is strictly self-contained. (3) Copernicanism is
shown, thirdly, claiming to apply basic principles through empirical science
for discovering reality.
Copernicus did not contest the competence of
philosophy to arrive at necessary conclusions about the nature of things. When Osiander
reminded him that his astronomy fails to explain the motions of the planets, [1] he must have agreed that these motions could
be understood only from first principles and not from his astronomy. His strict adherence to the steady circular
motion of heavenly bodies, which made his system inordinately complicated and
clumsy, showed him to be basically an Aristotelian. But he was irresistibly compelled by the
appearance of his own system to claim that this particular feature of the
celestial order, though derived essentially from experience, was true and real.
Thus did he make for the first time the
metaphysical claim that science can discover new knowledge about fundamental
reality and thus did this claim eventually triumph in the Copernican revolution.
Such is the claim of science to know reality, that positivism disowned in our time; and it is
this same metaphysical claim, now widely discredited, that I want to
re-establish today.
Let me start by asking, what Copernicus meant by
saying, that his system was real? What
had he actually in mind when believing that the planets really circle the sun? We shall find a clue to this question if we
first look at the more active form of this belief which Kepler
and Galileo manifested when undertaking their enquiries. They testified to their belief that the Copernician system was real, by relying on it as a guide to
discovery.
I shall show this for Kepler. His Third Law, discovered seventy-six years after the death of Copernicus, developed the feature of the heliocentric system, which Copernicus had mentioned as its most striking harmony, namely the fact that all six planets recede steadily further from the sun in the sequence of their longer orbital periods. Kepler lent precision to this relationship by showing that the cube of solar distances is proportional to the square of the orbital periods. His other great discovery -
1. In his Address to the Reader prefacing the De Revolutionibus,
Osiander says of the celestial movements, that
the astronomer “… cannot by any line of reasoning reach the true causes of
these movements…”
187
ten years earlier - of his First and Second
Laws, was in some sense a departure from Copernicus. It broke away from the doctrine of steady
circular planetary motions and introduced instead an elliptic path and a law of
variable velocities related to the ellipse. Yet this elliptic path, with the sun in one
focus of it, was firmly tied to the heliocentric system. It could not have been discovered from
Ptolemy’s image of the planetary system.
I would not hesitate to say that these discoveries proved
the reality of the Copernicus system, but this is only because I know that
Newton discovered towards the end of the same century that these three laws of Kepler were expressions of the law of universal gravitation.
At the time at which Kepler
put his laws forward, mixed up with a number of other numerical rules that were
to prove fallacious, the effect of his three laws was not widely convincing;
Galileo himself was unimpressed by them. But for the moment I can set these questions
aside, for I am only trying to understand what Kepler
and Galileo themselves believed about the Copernican system, when they relied
on their conviction that it was real and thus a proper guide to their
enquiries.
At first glance it seems easy to see what happened in Kepler’s and Galileo’s minds. Relying on the reality of the Copernican
system, they recognised the presence of problems, which
by many years of labour they proved to have been
fruitful. But this leaves open the
question, how the Copernican system could indicate to them good problems
that were not visible in the Ptolemaic system.
We meet here a general issue, which to my knowledge,
has never been systematically examined. We must ask: What is a problem? Not the kind of problem set to students of
mathematics, or to chemists in practical classes, but a scientific problem the
solution of which is unknown, and on which the scientist may yet embark with a
reasonable hope of discovering something that is new and that will prove also
worth the labour and expense of the search.
I would answer that to have such a problem, a good
problem, is to surmise the presence of something hidden, and yet possibly
accessible, lying in a certain direction. Problems are evoked in the imagination by
circumstances suspected to be clues to something hidden; and when the problem
is solved, these clues are seen to form part of that which is discovered, or at
least to be proper antecedents of it. Thus
the clues to a problem anticipate aspects of a future discovery and guide the
questing mind to make the discovery.
We may say then that Kepler’s conviction that
the Copernican system was real, was expressed by his belief that its image
anticipated aspects of something hidden and possibly accessible by an enquiry
in a certain direc-
tion. And we may add that he confirmed these
anticipations when, by following their guidance, he discovered his three laws.
Nor was this all. For in their turn, Kepler’s
discoveries raised new problems in Newton’s mind, insofar as they anticipated
aspects of the still hidden laws of gravitation, which Newton was to discover. Thus Newton was guided still further by a
belief in the reality of the Copernican system.
The confidence which the followers of Copernicus
placed in the reality of the Copernican system consisted, then, in surmising
still hidden implications in it, as were suggested to them by certain features
of the system. Their belief in the
system’s reality was an act of their imagination that spurred and guided them
to discovery.
Let us take stock of the position we have reached so
far. In the history of the Copernican
Revolution we have found it possible to discriminate the explicit statements of
a theory from its anticipatory powers. The celestial time-table set out by Copernicus
was not markedly different from that of Ptolemy. Close on to a century following the death of
Copernicus, all efforts to discriminate convincingly between the two systems on
the grounds of their observable quantitative predictions had failed. While the discoveries of Kepler
and Galileo based on the heliocentric system greatly increased its plausibility
and eventually convinced most astronomers, the general effect, judged for
example by the critical responses of Bacon or Milton, was far from conclusive. Yet all this time the theory of Copernicus was
exercising heuristic powers absent in the system of Ptolemy. We are faced with the question then how one of
two theoretical systems, having virtually the same explicit content, could
vastly exceed the other in its anticipations.
In a way I have given the answer to this question in
the anticipatory suggestions offered by the Copernican system to the followers
of Copernicus. Its anticipatory powers
lay in the new image by which Copernicus recast the content of the Ptolemaic
system. It is in the appearance of
the new system that its immense superiority lay; it is
this image that made the Copernican revolution.
I am drawing here a distinction which will prove
decisive. I distinguish between the
precise predictive content of a mathematical theory consisting in a functional
relation of measured variables and a meaning of the theory which goes beyond
this. While the functional relations
remain the same, the surplus of meaning which goes beyond them may vary, as
manifested in this case by the appearance of the theory.
The way this may come about can be illustrated from
everyday life. Suppose we have a list of
all the towns of England, each with its precise longitude and latitude, and the
number of its inhabitants, and we now
189
represent these data in a map, each town being
marked by a circle corresponding to its size. The mapping of the list adds no new data to
it, yet it conveys a far deeper understanding of these data. It reveals, for example, the way the
population is distributed through the country and suggests questions about the
reasons of physical geography and history which will account for this
distribution. The map will guide the
imagination to enter on fruitful enquiries to which the original list would
leave us blind.
E. M. Forster has shown a similar difference between
two kinds of characters in a novel. There are flat characters whose behaviour can be precisely predicted and round characters
which develop creatively; the latter, says Forster, are
more real and hence have the power convincingly to surprise us. By bearing on reality, scientific theories too
have the power convincingly to surprise us.
But here I must enter a warning. The distinction between explicit content and
informal heuristic powers is profound, but not absolute. No mathematical theory means anything except
as understood by him who applies it, and such an act
of understanding and applying is no explicit operation; it is necessarily
informal. Indeed, great discoveries can
be made by merely finding novel instances to which an accepted theory applies. For example, Van t’Hoff’s
demonstration that the mass action law of chemistry was an instance of the
Second Law of thermodynamics was a fundamental discovery. When I speak of the explicit content of a
theory, I refer to such applications of it which are fairly obvious, and I
distinguish these from a yet indeterminate meaning of a theory that may be
revealed only much later, through a scientist’s imagination.
But was Copernicus himself, when expressing his belief
in the reality of his system, in fact asserting that it had anticipatory
powers, which the Ptolemaic system had not?
It is not clear how anticipatory powers can be known
at all, apart from relying on them as clues to an enquiry. Copernicus obviously did not know that his
system represented an aspect of Kepler’s laws and of
Newton’s theory of general gravitation; indeed, being wedded to an explanation
of the planetary system in terms of steady circular motions, he would have
strictly rejected Kepler’s laws and Newton’s theory
based on these laws. Yet his belief that
his system was real, was basically akin to that of his
great successors. For
he saw the essence of his system in those features of it which were to serve as
clues to the problems of Kepler and Newton. He saw in the increase of orbital periods with
increasing solar distance the characteristic feature of a system in which the
sun centrally controls the order of planets, and this is the feature on which Kepler and Newton were to build their discoveries.
But there is actually a more general kinship between
the commitment of Copernicus to his belief that his system was real and that of
his followers relying on it for their problems. What Copernicus believed of this system was
what we all mean by saying that a thing is real and not a mere figment of the
mind. What we mean is that the thing
will not dissolve like a dream, but that, in some ways it will yet manifest its
existence, inexhaustibly, in the future. For it is there, whether we
believe it or not, independently of us, and hence never fully predictable in
its consequences. The
anticipatory powers which Kepler, Galileo and Newton
revealed in the heliocentric system, were as many
particulars of the general anticipations that are intrinsic to any belief in
reality.
This defines reality and truth. If anything is believed to be capable of a
largely indeterminate range of future manifestations, it is thus believed to be
real. A statement about nature is
believed to be true if it is believed to disclose an aspect of something real
in nature. A true physical theory is
therefore believed to be no mere mathematical relation between observed data,
but to represent an aspect of reality, which may yet manifest itself
inexhaustibly in the future.
We can ask then why the general appearance of the
heliocentric system made Copernicus and his followers believe that it was real
- why its close coherence, its intellectual harmonies had such power to
convince them of its reality. And to
this we reply that the existence of a harmonious order is a denial of
randomness, and order and randomness are mutually exclusive. Moreover, anything that is random is
meaningless, while anything that is orderly is significant. [1]
To recognise the principle
at work here, think of the difference between a tune and a noise; or, more
generally, between a message and a noise. Communication theory defines a noise, in
contrast to any distinctive series of signals, as random sequence, and it says
that, being random, noise conveys no information - means nothing. This implies an important difference in the identifiability of an ordered sequence, as compared with a
noise. Any single message is represented
ideally by only one configuration of signals, while for a noise the very
opposite holds. No significance must be
attached to any particular configuration of signals that are a noise; we must
indiscriminately identify any one configuration of a noise with any other
configuration of it.
This is true of any aggregate deemed random: we must
assume that the chance events which compose it could have as well happened
otherwise. And, by contrast, once we
have recognised an aggregate of events as
1. I
disregard here statistical laws, as they apply to another level of reality.
(See my Personal Knowledge, p. 390.)
191
orderly and meaningful, we may not believe
that they might as well have happened differently. Such an aggregate is an identifiable thing,
possessing reality in the sense I have defined it; namely, that it may yet
manifest itself inexhaustibly in the future. To distinguish meaningful patterns from random
aggregates is therefore to exercise our power for recognising
reality.
Our capacity for discerning meaningful aggregates, as
distinct from chance aggregates, is an ultimate power of our personal judgment.
It can be aided by explicit argument but
never determined by it: our final decision will always remain tacit. Such a decision may be so obvious, that in it
our tacit powers are used effortlessly and thus their use remains unnoticed;
our eyes and ears continuously commit us to such effortless decisions. But other decisions of the same class may be
hard and momentous. A jury may be
presented with a pattern of circumstantial evidence pointing to the accused. It is always conceivable that this pattern may
be due to chance; but how unlikely a chance should they admit to be possible? Or else, what degree of coincidence should be
deemed quite unbelievable? The
prisoner’s life and the administration of justice will depend on the decision,
and there is no rule by which it can be decided. This is precisely why it is left to the jury
to decide it.
I have said that reality in nature is a thing that may
yet manifest itself inexhaustibly, far beyond our present ken. Something must be added to this description,
if the pursuit of natural science is to be justified. Consider that the Copernican revolution was
but a continuation of a structuring that had its origins in antiquity. Copernicus deepened and beautifully clarified
a coherence transmitted to him by Ptolemy. And this triumph pointed further beyond itself
in the mind of Copernicus. In Kepler, passionately embracing the system of Copernicus,
its image was to evoke anew the kind of creative hunger which Copernicus had
satisfied by discovering it. And the
presence of yet hidden truth worked its way further. To Newton, Kepler’s
three laws appeared to hang covertly together and he established this fact by
his theory of gravitation, which derived all three laws jointly from the
mechanics of Galileo. Nor was this the
end, for a quarter of a millennium later, Einstein was to find unsatisfying the
coexistence of the Newtonian system with the electromagnetic theory of light,
and was to discover an even deeper coherence reconciling the two.
The continued pursuit of science is possible, because
the structure of nature and man’s capacity to grasp this structure, can be such
as is exemplified by this sequence of discoveries covering two millennia. It does happen, that nature is capable of
being comprehended in successive stages, each of which can be reached only by
the highest powers of the
human mind. Consequently, to discover a true coherence in
nature is often not only to discern something which, by the mere fact of being
real, necessarily points beyond itself, but to surmise that future discoveries
may prove the reality of the thing to be far deeper than we can at present
imagine.
It may seem strange that I insist on a belief in the
reality of theoretical suppositions as the driving force to discovery. Such belief would seem a conservative
assumption, rather than a source of innovation. The positivist view of science would indeed
claim that the major discoveries of modern physics were based on a sceptical attitude towards the framework of hitherto
accepted scientific theories. The
discovery of relativity involved the abandonment of the current conceptions of
space and time, and quantum mechanics achieved its breakthrough by discarding
Bohr’s planetary system of electrons circling the nucleus. Einstein himself acknowledged that Mach’s
positivist philosophy had inspired his work and Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics
was deliberately framed to reduce atomic theory to a functional relation of
observable quantities.
These revolutionary heresies may seem to contradict my
thesis, but I think they fall in line with it, once I make clearer the opposite
extreme of creative procedure, based on a firm belief in the reality of the
current framework of scientific theory. We may recognise the
prototype of such a feat in the discovery of America by Columbus. He triumphed by taking literally, and as a
guide to action, that the earth was round, which his contemporaries held
vaguely and as a mere matter of speculation. The egg of Columbus is the proverbial symbol
for such breath-taking originality guided by a crudely concrete imagination. I remember having this feeling when first
hearing of Einstein’s theory of Brownian motion. The idea that the meandering oscillations of
small floating particles seen by a botanist under the microscope,
should reveal the impact of molecules hitting the particles in tune with the
highly speculative equations of the kinetic theory of gases, impressed me as
grossly incongruous. I experienced the
same shock of a fantastic idea, when I heard Elsasser
suggesting (in 1925) that certain anomalies observed in the scattering of
electrons by solids may be due to the optical interference of their de Broglie waves. We
had all heard of these waves since 1923, yet were astounded by the fact that
they could be taken literally as Elsasser did. [1]
1. This
paper was delivered as a lecture at Duke University, Durham, N.C., in February 1964.
James Franck lived at that time in Durham and we met to discuss my talk. Franck began very quietly, almost in a
whisper, saying: ‘You know, I am one of those literals.’ He clearly was very pleased. During his great career, spent among
conceptual revolutionaries like Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Born, he must have often doubted the quality
of his own genius and he was glad to find its place acknowledged in [my analysis. I think that among great discoveries the
one most purely based on a literal acceptance of current ideas, was Laue’s discovery of the diffraction of X
rays; but Langmuir too triumphed by the powers of a
literal imagination, and many of Rutherford’s discoveries were based on
daringly primitive conceptions.]
HHC: [bracketed] displayed
on page 194 of original.
193
This should remind us that the first great move
towards the discovery of quantum mechanics was de Broglie’s
idea of the wave nature of matter. This
revolutionary idea and Schrodinger’s development of
it into wave mechanics, shows no trace of positivistic influences. Add to this, that Max Planck, the founder of
quantum theory, actively opposed Mach’s analysis of science and also dissented
from Heisenberg’s claim of basing physical theories on directly observable
quantities [1]; and that Einstein himself,
whose principle of relativity served as an inspiration to modern positivism,
was sharply critical of Mach’s analysis of science as a mere relation of
observed facts. [2] It
appears then, that the predominant principle that shaped modern physical theory
was not the positivist programme, but the transition
from a mechanical conception of reality to a mathematical conception of it,
which sometimes coincided with the positivistic programme
for the purification of science.
We can thus bring the revolution of the twentieth
century in line with the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Both revolutions consisted in
a stepwise deepening of coherence with a simultaneous extension of its range. The modern revolution differed from its
precursor only in establishing mathematical harmonies in place of beautiful
mechanical systems.
The mathematical image of reality is more abstract
than the mechanical, but its capacity to point beyond its immediate predicative
content is similar to that of the mechanical image. I have said that the fact that the wave nature
of particles postulated by de Broglie could be
confirmed by
1. Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, Philosophical
Library, New York (1949), p. 129, Tr. Fr. Gaynor. (Original title of this essay was ‘Der Causalbegriff in der Physic’ first published in 1948.) ‘It is absolutely false, although it is often
asserted, that the world picture of physics contains, or may contain, directly
observable magnitudes only. On the
contrary, directly observable magnitudes are not found at all in the world
picture. It contains symbols only.’ In this essay (p. 139) he also objects to the
elimination of seemingly unverifiable statements: ‘I must take exception to the
view (a very popular one these days, and certainly a very plausible one on the
face of it) that a problem in physics merits examination only if it is
established in advance that a definite answer to it can be obtained. If physicists had always been guided by this
principle, the famous experiment of Michelson and Morley undertaken to measure
the so-called absolute velocity of the earth, would never have taken place, and
the theory of relativity might still be nonexistent.’
2. In his Autobiographical Notes 1. C, p. 53, Einstein writes
about his re-definition of reality as follows: ‘The type of critical reasoning
which was required for the discovery of this central point was decisively
furthered, in my case, especially by the reading of David Hume’s and Ernst
Mach’s philosophical writings.’ But
Einstein did not confirm Mach’s teaching that the Newtonian doctrine of
absolute rest is meaningless; Einstein proved, on the contrary, that Newton’s
doctrine, far from being meaningless, was false.
diffraction experiments, came as a fantastic
surprise to physicists. The discovery of
the positron occurred just as unexpectedly in confirmation of a prediction
contained unnoticed in Dirac’s quantum theory of the
electron (1928).
In my account of the Copernican revolution and of the
modern revolution in physics, I have mentioned only in passing the
contributions made by new experimental observations. But the examples I gave were typical of the
way at this time experiments often followed their theoretical anticipation, the
connection being sometimes not recognised at first. Usually, theoretical speculation and
experimental probing enter jointly into the quest towards an ever broader and
deeper coherence.
This brings up the question, how the actual process of
discovery is performed. Much has been
written about this with which I disagree, but for the moment I can put my own
views only quite summarily. To see a
good problem is to see something hidden and yet accessible. This is done by integrating some raw experiences
into clues pointing to a possible gap in our knowledge. To undertake a problem is to commit one-self
to the belief that you can fill in this gap and make thereby a new contact with
reality. Such a commitment must be
passionate; a problem which does not worry us, that does not excite us, is not
a problem; it does not exist. Evidence
is cast up only by a surmise filled with its own particular hope and fervently
bent on fulfilling this hope. Without
such passionate commitment no supporting evidence will emerge, nor failure to
find such evidence be felt; no conclusions will be
drawn and tested - no quest will take place.
Thus the anticipatory powers that we have seen at work
in historical perspective, arouse and guide individual
creativity. These powers are ever at
work in the scientist’s mind, because he believes that science offers an aspect
of reality and may therefore manifest its truth ever again by new surprises.
In this essay I have tried to define the mental powers
by which coherence is discovered in nature. But the coherence achieved by the Copernican
Revolution filled with dismay those brought up on the medieval order of the
universe. The Earth’s central position
which had been the symbol of man’s destiny as the only thinking morally
responsible being, was lost. Gone was the divine perfection of an immutable
firmament encircling the place where fallen man was ever to strive for
salvation beyond this place. ‘It is all in pieces, all coherence gone’,
wrote John Donne as early as 1611.
The destruction was deepened by the revival of
atomism. Dante had said of Democritos that he ‘abandoned the world to chance’. And
Dante
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was right. The assumption that all things are ultimately
controlled by the same laws of atomic interaction,
reduces all forms of existence to mere collocations of ultimate particles. Such is the kind of universe that we have
inherited from the Copernican Revolution. In it no essentially higher things exist, nor
can intangible things be real. To
understand the world then consists in representing throughout all that is of
greater significance in terms of less meaningful elements and if possible, in
terms of meaningless matter. Accepting
such a conception of truth and reality, man is confused by his own lucidity and
blighted by his self-doubt.
The anti-metaphysical critique of science marks the
stage at which a false conception of truth and reality attacks science itself,
from which it had first originated. If
we can overcome these false ideals of knowledge in science, this might set an
example for our whole outlook and, backed by the very prestige of science,
might help to overcome scientism everywhere.
Once the recognition of anticipatory powers in science
establishes a conception of reality transcending tangible things, we might be
able generally to acknowledge higher entities, intangible and yet real - as
real as matter and yet meaningful. We
shall recognise thus a cosmic hierarchy in which man
has once more his own place.’
22 Upland Park Rd
Oxford
1. The
basic ideas of this paper were first stated in Chapter 1, ‘Science and Reality’
of my Science, Faith and Society (1946), and summarised
in the introduction to the Phoenix Edition (1964) of that book. For the relation of Copernicus to Medieval
thought I have benefited from Ernan McMullin ‘Medieval and Modern Science: Continuity or Discontinuity’,
International Philosophical Quarterly (1965), 103. Mr Rom Harré (Oxford) showed me unpublished evidence of Melanchton’s anti-realistic views on astronomy expressed in
his violent attack on Averroes. Mr Harré, Professor Samuel Sambursky
(Jerusalem) and Mr J. R. Ravetz
(Leeds) all read my manuscript and suggested corrections from which I
substantially benefited. Dr J. D. North (Oxford) helped me not only by
commenting on the finished manuscript, but also before this, by discussions
during my final formulation of my historical account of Copernicus. But I am,
of course, responsible for all the content of this paper.
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