The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [125]
The claim is also sometimes made that science is as arbitrary or irrational as all other claims to knowledge, or that reason itself is an illusion. The American revolutionary, Ethan Alien - leader of the Green Mountain Boys in their capture of Fort Ticonderoga -had some words on this subject:
Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.
The reader can judge the depth of this argument.
Anyone who witnesses the advance of science first-hand sees an intensely personal undertaking. There are always a few - driven by simple wonder and great integrity, or by frustration with the inadequacies of existing knowledge, or simply upset with themselves for their imagined inability to understand what everyone else can - who proceed to ask the devastating key questions. A few saintly personalities stand out amidst a roiling sea of jealousies, ambition, backbiting, suppression of dissent, and absurd conceits. In some fields, highly productive fields, such behaviour is almost the norm.
I think all that social turmoil and human weakness aids the enterprise of science. There is an established framework in which any scientist can prove another wrong and make sure everyone else knows about it. Even when our motives are base, we keep stumbling on something new.
The American chemistry Nobel laureate Harold C. Urey once confided to me that as he got older (he was then in his seventies), he experienced increasingly concerted efforts to prove him wrong. He described it as ‘the fastest gun in the West’ syndrome: the young man who could outdraw the celebrated old gunslinger would inherit his reputation and the respect paid to him. It was annoying, he grumbled, but it did help direct the young whipper-snappers into important areas of research that they would never have entered on their own.
Being human, scientists also sometimes engage in observational selection: they like to remember those cases when they’ve been right and forget when they’ve been wrong. But in many instances, what is ‘wrong’ is partly right, or stimulates others to find out what’s right. One of the most productive astrophysicists of our time has been Fred Hoyle, responsible for monumental contributions to our understanding of the evolution of stars, the synthesis of the chemical elements, cosmology and much else. Sometimes he’s succeeded by being right before anyone else even understood that there was something that needed explaining. Sometimes he’s succeeded by being wrong - by being so provocative, by suggesting such outrageous alternatives that the observers and experimentalists feel obliged to check it out. The impassioned and concerted effort to ‘prove Fred wrong’ has sometimes failed and sometimes succeeded. In almost every case, it has pushed forward the frontiers of knowledge. Even Hoyle at his most outrageous -for example, proposing that the influenza and HIV viruses are dropped down on Earth from comets, and that interstellar dust grains are bacteria - has led to significant advances in knowledge (although turning up nothing to support those particular notions.)
It might be useful for scientists now and again to list some of their mistakes. It might play an instructive role in illuminating and
demythologizing the process of science and in enlightening younger