Asimov and the Scientific Method

Continuing my comments on Isaac Asimov's Introduction to Adding a Dimension (1964):

The history of science teaches [that]:

Since science originated as the product of men and not as a revalation, it may develop further as the continuing product of men.If a scientific law is not an eternal truth but merely a generalization which, to some man or a group of men, conveniently described a set of observations, then to some other man or group of men, another generalization might seem even more convenient. Once it is grasped that scientific truth is limited and not absolute, scientific truth becomes capable of further refinement. Until that is understood, scientific research has no meaning.

It reveals some important truths about the humanity of scientists. Of all the stereotypes that have plagued men of science, surely one above all has wrought hatm. Scientists can be pictured as "evil," "mad," "cold," "self-centered," "absent-minded," even "square" and yet survive easily. Unfortunately, they are usually pictured as "right" and that can distort the pocture of science past redemption.

Scientists share with all human beings the great and inalienable privilege of being, on occasion, wrong, of being egregiously wrong sometimes, even monumentally wrong. What is worse still, they are sometimes perversely and persistently wrong-headed. And since that is true, science itself can be wrong in this aspect or that.

With the possible wrongness of science firmly in mind, the student of science today is protected against disaster. When an individual theory collapses, it need not carry with it one's faith and hope and innocent joy. Once we learn to expect theories to collapse and be supplanted by more useful generalizations, the collapsing theory becomes not the gray remnant of a broken today, but the herald of a new and brighter tomorrow.

By following the development of certain themes in science, we can experience the joy and excitement of the grand battle against the unknown. The wrong turnings, the false clues, the elusive truth nearly captured half a century before its time, the unsung prophet, the false authority, the hidden assumption and cardboard syllogism, all add to the suspense of the struggle and make what we slowly gain through the study of the history of science worth more than what we might quickly gain by a narrow glance at the narrow edge [of the tree of science] alone.

In my next post, therefore, the history of nuclear physics begins with the history of the discovery of the atom.