快猫短视频

REVOLUTIONS in science have tended to follow a similar pattern: a genius, wrestling with questions difficult to answer, breaks the mould by imagining questions difficult to ask. Something like this happened with Antoine Lavoisier鈥檚 theory of oxygen, John Dalton鈥檚 atoms, Charles Darwin鈥檚 natural selection and Albert Einstein鈥檚 relativity.

Distinguishing a genius from a crank is not easy. Both take bold leaps of faith fuelled by imagination and sustained by belief, yet the former is a visionary and the latter a fool. Respectable science often demands belief in things we cannot directly observe. In the 19th century, for instance, we had not only phrenology and psychic force, but also the ether, which many scientists believed to exist. 快猫短视频s are constantly faced with the decision of whether to accept or refuse untested theories and nascent research programmes.

Science is often billed as a discipline based on simple observation. But it has always been much more. 鈥淭here are Tories even in science who regard imagination as a faculty to be feared and avoided rather than employed,鈥� John Tyndall told the Liverpool meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1870. He opposed the idea that science is a process of cautious generalising from indubitable facts. He saw that imagination was not just the stuff of fairy tales: controlled by experiment and mathematics, it lay behind the science of Isaac Newton, John Dalton, Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday. Tyndall insisted that science required active and powerful minds capable of brooding and leaping, not just technicians. The message was timely. That year, in the Franco-Prussian war, the better-educated country roundly defeated what seemed the more formidable military power. German universities, where research and teaching went hand in hand, had won the day.

Four years later, in his native province in Belfast, Tyndall spoke as president of the BAAS. He broke with the genial tradition in which presidents reviewed recent science, praised the work of colleagues in attendance, and appealed for more state support. Instead he presented a big picture: with atomic theory, conservation of energy and evolution, scientists now understood the world, he said, leaving no room for clergy and organised religion. This generated a furore. Like his friend, the biologist Thomas Huxley, Tyndall was a prominent agnostic. Unlike atheists, they saw refusal to believe in the unverifiable as crucial in both science and life. No wonder Matthew Arnold heard on Dover beach 鈥渢he melancholy, long, withdrawing roar鈥� of the ebbing sea of faith.

But can science, like Tyndall, retain both imagination and scepticism? Many great scientists of that age certainly sought wisdom beyond the lab. Tyndall himself was a daredevil climber who worshipped nature on mountain tops. His hero, Faraday, had been a Sandemanian, believing in the literal truth of the Bible. Most of his contemporary scientists believed in God and, around 1900, many were supporters of psychical research. Then came the scientific revolution we are marking this 鈥淓instein year鈥�. Tyndall鈥檚 big picture, like Prospero鈥檚, dissolved. Atomism, confirmed by studies of Brownian motion, was transformed by the discovery of the electron; mass and energy were redefined; and Mendelian genetics threw into doubt the prevailing notions of evolution. Suddenly the long-standing idea of British prime minister and president of the BAAS in 1904, Arthur Balfour 鈥� that science rested on beliefs 鈥� looked highly plausible.

But beliefs need not be like the White Queen鈥檚 six impossible things before breakfast. Beliefs can be perfectly reasonable. David Hume argued that we cannot prove that the future will resemble the past. Still, we are reasonable in believing that it will. Otherwise there would be no point in doing science at all. Faraday said: 鈥淏efore we proceed to consider any question involving physical principles, we should set out with clear ideas of the naturally possible and impossible.鈥� Furnishing such ideas is what a scientific education is about, and the result is that scientists have hunches, do things that somehow feel right 鈥� and don鈥檛 drop everything to investigate reports of flying saucers or miracles.

The role of belief in science is nowhere as poignant as in the face of revolution. Just as the Copernican system and the wave theory of light were not self-evident, so in more recent times continental drift and neo-Darwinism were at first met with doubt. When a novel interpretation is proposed, there is never enough evidence to lead to a firm conclusion. So, as the 18th-century Bishop Butler put it, informal probability 鈥渋s the very guide to life鈥�. Those who chose not to believe that these ideas were right were left behind, becalmed in backwaters while the scientific flotilla sailed off to conquer the new world. The key is to realise that it is possible both to take a well-reasoned leap of faith and to remember that all science is provisional 鈥� but that isn鈥檛 easy.

What is reasonable faith for a scientist? Cardinal Newman made a distinction between beliefs that we hold in the abstract and beliefs that affect our everyday behaviour. In religion it is practice more than abstract belief that binds people together, and the same is true of science. We can differentiate belief that something is ultimately the case from belief and trust in someone and some course of action. Both are important, in science and in life. When I graduated in chemistry in 1961 and took up history of science, two of my friends also embarked upon doctoral theses. One picked biochemistry, having faith that this was the way to go. He was right. Another joined a bright group of physicists working on fusion, believing in their vision of endless cheap and clean energy, sure that it would happen in his working lifetime. He was wrong. In science there are spin-offs from projects that don鈥檛 work out, but real success comes from choices based upon reasonable faith to embark upon some line of enquiry, because we believe in it or in those carrying it on, or to abandon it.

Take Davy, contemporaries of whom contrasted his method of imaginatively seeking truth with the crystallographer and metallurgist William Hyde Wollaston鈥檚 method of carefully avoiding error. Faith in insights about electricity brought Davy spectacular successes 鈥� and failures 鈥� denied to his cautious colleague. Great science often demands great leaps into the dark. But the decision to jump is not a roll of the dice; it comes from a set of well-nurtured, reasonable beliefs.

鈥淒istinguishing a genius from a crank is not easy. Both take bold leaps of faith sustained by belief鈥�

Assuming, with reason, that the past is a guide to the future, we can expect that science will continue to be, as it always was, based on a judicious mixture of empiricism and faith. If it were not, and were instead a safe road to timeless truth, how much less challenging it would be: it is an imaginative, fully human activity after all, with what we must believe to be intimate connections to a real world.