Science and ideology

Abstract

I have composed this text with considerable humility because it is addressed to scholars and scientists many of whom speak more authoritatively on the history and philosophy of science than I. My own preferred reading list on the subject would include Gerald Holton's Science and AntiScience and the wonderfully scorching book, Higher Superstition, by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. For a full reading list that could compose a complete college course on the subject, I would add John Passmore's Science and Its Critics, published in 1978, and Steven Weinberg's adamantine image of the power and ideology-demolishing reach of m o d e m physics in his book Dreams of a Final Theory. In many ways I would defer to these authors. I hope they nonetheless might agree with me that the nobility of science as a human endeavor was well encapsulated by the physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar when he used the Icarus metaphor in praise of Sir Arthur Eddington. He said, Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. And on the appropriateness of the rosette of the National Academy of Sciences, the other NAS, that is splendidly symbolic in this sense: the gold of science is placed solidly in the center, surrounded by the purple of natural philosophy. Members are elected primarily or solely on the basis of objective discoveries they have made, expressible in clear declarative sentences, and not by any ideological test. By science in common parlance is meant natural science, which gathers knowledge of the world as an organized, systematic enterprise and attempts to condense it into testable laws and principles by a wide-ranging and shifting set of methods. The diagnostic features of science that distinguish it from pseudoscience are, first, repeatability: the same phenomenon is sought again, preferably by independent investigation, and the interpretation given it confirmed or discarded by means of novel analysis and experimentation. And second, economy: scientists attempt to abstract the information into the form that is simplest, most easily recalled, and most esthetically pleasing--the combination called elegance--while yielding the largest amount of information with the least amount of effort. Third, mensuration: if something can be properly measured, using universally accepted scales, generalizations about it will be rendered less ambiguous. And fourth and finally, heuristic: the best