Common Sense of Science (Harvard Paperbacks)

Rating:
Summary: Sense and Sensibility
Review: ...P>This book was written in 1951. "The Ascent of Man" was still 20 years in the future; the richly humanistic outlook of that celebrated series of programs is the same, but here Bronowski restricts himself to examining science, and putting it in the context of other sorts of mental activities that people engage in.

Most of what people think about (or for that matter animals in a more rudimentary way) involves using their experiences to guide their actions, and then evaluating how well they did. "Learn from your mistakes" epitomizes much common sense. Science does the same sort of thing; what makes it difficult for people is the often technical language it is couched in, and the exactness of the conditions it specifies and predictions it calculates. Yet over time science tries to learn from its mistakes (in spite of the rearguard actions of many older scientists!) and revise its views of the world, just the way a sensible individual does. The only difference between the common sense of an individual and that of a scientist is this business of technical language and precise definition. In our ordinary lives we don't bother to define things very well, because we are talking to ourselves or a few others in our circumstances. Besides, we have only one life, and setting up controlled experiments is usually out of the question.

Still, people form theories of the world that they act upon in their personal affairs, and change those theories if they don't seem to work. In this way, Bronowski insists, we are all scientists. We may believe in angels and lucky numbers, but we know that boiling an egg or shooting a basketball well or getting a good seat in the movies requires the application of our intelligence to the world. (For that matter, we may believe in angels but find that it makes more sense to depend on ourselves.)

Bronowski wrote this book in 1951, in the shadow of WWII, the atomic bomb and the new and more terrible hydrogen bomb. Moreover, quantum mechanics was still quite bizarre and controversial to the mass of scientists, nor had they really absorbed the deeper message of Relativity Theory. In 1905 Einstein had shown that there is no "out there" to be studied: the observer and the observed are, and must be, intertwined; to look at something is to interact with it.

The workers building up quantum mechanics absorbed this tremendous insight and added one of their own: that cause-and-effect descriptions of the world may not always be available. One should be satisfied, in the realm of the very small, with predicting a range of probable outcomes and specifying no particular underlying mechanism that controls them.

This book discusses the massive shift in attitudes these two new views required of scientists. Ironically, the average layman was more used to dealing with the world in these ways: one learns about the world by participating in it, and all thought of the future must be provisional, because the world always has surprises in store.

While these thoughts were penned half a century ago, the issues are still current. Also, of course, there are a myriad of newer and sexier books discussing these issues, and relating them to newer technologies and more recent science. Yet Bronowski's book is still a good authoritative read. He was a mathematician and participant in much of the intellectual ferment of the time, and knew many of the thinkers, such as Fermi and von Neumann. He is a master of the intellectual history, and this is a book that relates scientific attitudes to the cultural milieus in which they grew up. But especially, this book is worth reading because it gives a rounded picture, in rich, intelligent prose, of an issue that is of concern not merely to scientists, but to all of us.

Rating:
Summary: Sense and Sensibility
Review: ...P>This book was written in 1951. "The Ascent of Man" was still 20 years in the future; the richly humanistic outlook of that celebrated series of programs is the same, but here Bronowski restricts himself to examining science, and putting it in the context of other sorts of mental activities that people engage in.

Most of what people think about (or for that matter animals in a more rudimentary way) involves using their experiences to guide their actions, and then evaluating how well they did. "Learn from your mistakes" epitomizes much common sense. Science does the same sort of thing; what makes it difficult for people is the often technical language it is couched in, and the exactness of the conditions it specifies and predictions it calculates. Yet over time science tries to learn from its mistakes (in spite of the rearguard actions of many older scientists!) and revise its views of the world, just the way a sensible individual does. The only difference between the common sense of an individual and that of a scientist is this business of technical language and precise definition. In our ordinary lives we don't bother to define things very well, because we are talking to ourselves or a few others in our circumstances. Besides, we have only one life, and setting up controlled experiments is usually out of the question.

Still, people form theories of the world that they act upon in their personal affairs, and change those theories if they don't seem to work. In this way, Bronowski insists, we are all scientists. We may believe in angels and lucky numbers, but we know that boiling an egg or shooting a basketball well or getting a good seat in the movies requires the application of our intelligence to the world. (For that matter, we may believe in angels but find that it makes more sense to depend on ourselves.)

Bronowski wrote this book in 1951, in the shadow of WWII, the atomic bomb and the new and more terrible hydrogen bomb. Moreover, quantum mechanics was still quite bizarre and controversial to the mass of scientists, nor had they really absorbed the deeper message of Relativity Theory. In 1905 Einstein had shown that there is no "out there" to be studied: the observer and the observed are, and must be, intertwined; to look at something is to interact with it.

The workers building up quantum mechanics absorbed this tremendous insight and added one of their own: that cause-and-effect descriptions of the world may not always be available. One should be satisfied, in the realm of the very small, with predicting a range of probable outcomes and specifying no particular underlying mechanism that controls them.

This book discusses the massive shift in attitudes these two new views required of scientists. Ironically, the average layman was more used to dealing with the world in these ways: one learns about the world by participating in it, and all thought of the future must be provisional, because the world always has surprises in store.

While these thoughts were penned half a century ago, the issues are still current. Also, of course, there are a myriad of newer and sexier books discussing these issues, and relating them to newer technologies and more recent science. Yet Bronowski's book is still a good authoritative read. He was a mathematician and participant in much of the intellectual ferment of the time, and knew many of the thinkers, such as Fermi and von Neumann. He is a master of the intellectual history, and this is a book that relates scientific attitudes to the cultural milieus in which they grew up. But especially, this book is worth reading because it gives a rounded picture, in rich, intelligent prose, of an issue that is of concern not merely to scientists, but to all of us.