Bronowski The Common Sense of Science

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ISBN: 978-0-571-28694-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Jacob Bronowski was, with Kenneth Clarke, the greatest popularizer of serious ideas in Britain between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s. Trained as a mathematician, he was equally at home with painting and physics, and wrote a series of brilliant books that tried to break down the barriers between 'the two cultures'. He denounced 'the destructive modern prejudice that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests'. He wrote a fine book on William Blake while running the National Coal Board's research establishment. The Common Sense of Science, first published in 1951, is a vivid attempt to explain in ordinary language how science is done and how scientists think. He isolates three creative ideas that have been central to science: the idea of order, the idea of causes and the idea of chance. For Bronowski, these were common-sense ideas that became immensely powerful and productive when applied to a vision of the world that broke with the medieval notion of a world of things ordered according to their ideal natures. Instead, Galileo, Huyghens and Newton and their contemporaries imagined 'a world of events running in a steady mechanism of before and after'. We are still living with the consequences of this search for order and causality within the facts that the world presents to us.

Jacob Bronowski was born in Poland in 1908. At the age of 12 he came to England, and within six years was a brilliant mathematics student at Cambridge. During the war he helped to forecast the economic effects of bombing Germany. After many years working for the National Coal Board, he moved to the Salk Institute in 1964 while developing his career as a broadcaster. In 1973, he presented for the BBC the ambitious 13-part series The Ascent of Man, which made him a household name. He died the following year.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bronowski, Jacob

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2

The Scientific Revolution and the Machine

1

THERE are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of chance. This book is concerned largely with these ideas. I begin at what is perhaps the most fugitive of the three, the idea of order.

None of these ideas is peculiar to science, and the idea of order least of all. They have applications to science; but all three are of course older than these applications. All are wider and deeper than the techniques in which science expresses them. They are common sense ideas; by which I mean that they are generalizations which we all make from our daily lives, and which we go on using to help us run our lives.

Unhappily, common sense has no recorded history. We often suppose indeed that it has no development, and that what we call common sense today has always been common sense to everybody – which certainly is not true.

Science records all this more conveniently. Science has a history in which the growth of these ideas can be traced plainly. More than this, we can in that history detect the moments of surpassing interest, when the common sense ideas were being formed afresh. Such a moment is now plain in the history of the seventeenth century. That age, which made Newton and which Newton made, was a climax and a fresh beginning in English science. And I go directly to Newton himself because nothing so reveals that age as the remarkable character of its greatest man.

2

No man of science, no man of thought has ever equalled the reputation of Isaac Newton. No other man has made so deep a mark on his time and on our world unless he has been a man of action, a Cromwell or a Napoleon. Like Cromwell’s and like Napoleon’s, Newton’s achievement was made possible by the coincidence, or better by the interplay of personality and opportunity. Each of these men, the man of thought as well as the men of action, entered history at a moment of social instability. Newton was born during Cromwell’s revolution in the troubled 1640s; he was eighteen at the Restoration in 1660; and he published the Principia during the intrigues which ended by bringing William of Orange to England in the revolution of 1688. These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken, and when he can inject into the uncertainties of others the creative ideas which will strengthen them with purpose. At such a moment the man who can direct others, in thought or in action, can remake the world.

Newton was such a personality. That complicated and nevertheless direct mind, that imperturbable engine of thought has stamped its mark on everything he did. The stamp is Newton’s style, and the style and the content are one; both are projections of the same single-minded personality.

Science is not an impersonal construction. It is no less, and no more, personal than any other form of communicated thought. This book is not less scientific because my manner is personal, and I make no apology for it. Science searches the common experience of people; and it is made by people, and it has their style. The style of a great man marks not only his own work, but through it the work of others for generations. The style of Newton’s work as much as the content dominated science for two centuries, and in that time shaped its manner and its matter. But style is not the monopoly of the great, nor is its appreciation a vintage reserved for experts. The schoolboy who can tell a neat proof from a dull one knows the style, and takes pleasure in it. Indeed, he finds it easier to appreciate the style of science than the style of Shakespeare.

I cannot hope to transmit that style, its feeling and its detail, at this remove. It cannot be bought, canned and dehydrated, on pages ten and eleven of somebody’s history of world knowledge, either in the chapters on science or on Shakespeare. We all understand that Shakespeare, the whole Shakespeare, cannot be got out of any book but his own collected works. So if we want the whole Newton, the man and the manner, the large nose and the strong thumb-print of his style, then we must read the Principia and the Opticks. Only in this way will we get the personality and the movement of the work, the massive ease and the fluent assurance which the Opticks shares strikingly with Antony and Cleopatra.

But we need not therefore come to a dead stop on aesthetics. After all few of us value the style so highly that we cannot bear to read Balzac and Stendhal in translation, and even Flaubert and Proust. Few of us certainly would learn French only in order to preserve this aesthetic Puritanism. And in the same way we must be content with science in translation. The science of an age, like its art or its music, has a style, yes. But it has a content and a structure too, larger than the work of any one man, within which the work of its men takes shape and meaning. Shakespeare was one of a group of playwrights, and he and they shared the expanding world of the Elizabethan voyagers and the patriotic adventures. Newton was one of the young discoveries of the Royal Society in its early days, in the restless setting which I have been describing. To know this does not of itself make us appreciate their achievement; and still less can such knowledge take the place of appreciation, in art or in science. But it does give us a context in which we can look beyond the single furrow of our own interest, into the whole fertile field of knowledge.

3

There never has been another moment in English history to equal the promise of that moment in the 1660s when the Royal Society was formally founded. And though it was less dramatic elsewhere, it was a high moment throughout Europe. The long tradition of astronomy in the seafaring nations was about to reach its climax, here with Newton, and in Holland with Huygens.

What was extraordinary about that moment at the Restoration? We all have a regard for Restoration times, and that in itself is something of a puzzle. What exactly commands the affection in which good King Charles II’s day is held? Surely not the political and literary achievements which the history books quote. The most romantic Tory could not call Charles II a great king. Dryden was a great poet; nevertheless as a poet he does not rank with his predecessor Milton. As for the Restoration playwrights, by all means let us make the most of their hearty fun; but it hardly earns them a major place in English drama.

No, at bottom our regard for the period is sound because it rests on wider and less familiar achievements than these. They are scientific rather than literary achievements, but they are not specifically one or the other, any more than is Dryden’s superb prose. They are the pioneer achievements of a liberal culture, and are part of a spontaneous widening of sympathy and interests throughout Europe. We can trace this even in the strange political conditions which made possible the recall of Charles II without bloodshed and with little vindictiveness after a long dictatorship born and perpetuated in blood and violence. And consider the circumstances in which, on Charles’s return, the Royal Society was founded. Most of its leaders were professors of Puritan sympathies and some of them held chairs from which Cromwell had evicted the royalist holders for them. Indeed, the mathematician John Wallis owed his eminence to his skill in applying science to Cromwell’s military needs: he was a pioneer in breaking enemy cyphers, and this has remained the traditional wartime service of mathematicians. Charles II cannot have relished these men, and he had no overpowering interest in science. Yet Evelyn persuaded him to give his name to their new-fangled society; and the literary men competed with them for places in it.

There is a parallel in the position of Huygens in the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. Christian Huygens was born in Holland in 1629. His father and his grandfather were diplomats in the service of the House of Orange. The family was friendly with Descartes, who during Huygens’s youth was an exile in Holland. In the 1660s Louis XIV was already putting pressure on the House of Orange and a little later he invaded Holland. Yet Huygens, a Dutchman, a Protestant, and a Cartesian, was called to France to help found the Académie Royale in 1666, and he remained its senior official into the 1680s, when anti-Protestant policy at last became too strong for him.

Huygens’s distinction and leadership were as important to the Académie as were those of Newton, who was thirteen years younger, to the Royal Society soon after. He was not the equal of Newton as a scientist; he had not quite Newton’s penetration and range in mathematics or in the principles of experiment. His temper was more that of the inventor and mechanic, and the English scientist most like him was Robert Hooke, curator of experiments and secretary to the Royal Society – a slightly fantastic character, whose dislike of Newton (and Newton’s dislike of him) gave an air of extravagance to the scientific arguments of the times. Like Hooke, Huygens made fundamental improvements to the clock as an aid to astronomy. Huygens in effect invented the pendulum as a time-keeping mechanism; and...