Science

Abstract

Abstract The greatest collective work of art of the twentieth century. —Jacob Bronowski (1973, p. 328), referring to physics Are scientists really creative? After all, you might think that scientists simply discover truths by looking at the world; though of course, by using some very fancy equipment. The astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar said that when he discovered a new fact, it appeared to him to be something “that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up” (quoted in Farmelo, 2002a, pp. xi-xii). If a good scientific theory is just an accurate reflection of reality, then a good scientist is one whose theories directly copy reality (Barrow, 2000). And it goes without saying that copying is not creative. However, this “copy theory” of science is wrong. The copy theory was famously argued by a group of mid-20th century philosophers known as logical empiricists.1 To an empiricist, science is a game of deduction: taking observations from experience and using them to derive statements about regularities in nature. However, when scholars began to study how scientists actually work, it turned out that empiricism and deduction weren’t very good explanations. Beginning with Karl Popper just after World War II, continuing with the influential analyses of science of Thomas Kuhn, through today’s studies of scientific laboratories by Bruno Latour and Karin Knorr-Cetina, we now know that scientific theories can’t be derived in any simple or mechanical way from observations.