SCIENCE
Deduce, intuit?
Bernard Dixon
I see that Professor Dennis Gabor, whose Nobel Prize for Physics was announced this month confessed to having had the idea behind his discovery of holography not while working in the laboratory or library, but while sitting on a bench watching tennis. It was the most exciting moment of his life. Most of his scientific ideas, Gabor told the world's press, emerged while he was shaving. This episode will have heartened those commentators on science who prefer the romantic, as opposed to the rational, interpretation of scientific discovery. "There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws," wrote Albert Einstein about the physical laws governing the behaviour of matter and the universe. "There is only the way of intuition." Similar assertions of the importance of flashes of inspiration akin to those of the poet or composer, are almost commonplace amongst the greatest scientists, and support the view that science progresses by imaginative leaps into the unknown, rather than by dour application of 'logic and experiment. Yet the &her more mundane interpretation has a long and honourable history. In its most popular form (popular, that is, among philosophers of science
rather than working scientists, who tend to scorn the whole process of introspection about their activities), it locates the process of induction at the very heart of science. The idea, which began with Francis Bacon, is that scientists operate bY collecting, indiscriminately, large numbers of facts, and the formulation of absolutes emerge. When the scientist garners and scrutinises lots of observations or measurements, new relationships become apparent, new laws of nature emerge. The mathematician Karl Pearson was one of the greatest exponents of induction, and his classic book The Grammar of Science enshrined his belief that "the classification of facts, and the formulation of absolute judgements upon the basis of , this classification — judgements independent of the idiosyncrasies of the modern mind — is peculiarly the scope and method of modern science."
This interpretation is now out of favour. (Apart from anything else, we now recog° nise that idiosyncrasies of the mind are vitally important in generating new scientific insights.) In its place as a rival to the romantic view, and to some extent 8 reconciliation between it and the rationa■ school, is the " hypothetico-deductive system of science. Its historical ante. cedents include the ideas of John Stuart Mill and the economist Stanley Jevons, but in this century it has been formalised and popularised largely by Sir Karl Popper. In his view, the scientist is a creature who alternates, often rapidly, between imaginative and critical phases. During the imaginative phase he has an imaginative guess about some aspect of the world, and frames a speculative hypothesis. Then he subjects his speculation to ruthless criticism. By deduction and experiment, he tries to falsify — to disprove — the hypothesis, which must survive severe intellectual scrutiny before it can be even tow porarily accepted. Sadly this description is not simPlY taken as an intelligent description of how, some scientists perform, and excluding all alternative explanations, it has been translated into holy writ, laying down how all, scientists perform, and excluding ab alternative explanations. That is whY Arthur Koestler's book The Act of Creation, in which he emphasises the similaritY between artistic creation and scientific diecovery, was so savagely attacked when it was published in 1964. More recently, Sit Peter Medawar, foremost and disarminglY perceptive British spokesman for the h)'' pothetico-deductive school, even disputed Charles Darwin's view of his own research methods in formulating the theory df evolution. "I worked on truly Baconian principles, and without any theory CO leeted facts on a wholesale scale . . • wrote Darwin in his 'autobiography. 140,: so, claimed Sir Peter in a broadcast in 196'' "he did not reason in this way at 11." The truth of the matter, surely, is simPlY that' different scientists work in different ways, with much less in common between them than is implied •by talk of the scientific method.' Science, once a PO' suit for the leisured amateur, is now B highly organised profession, enclosing 8, wide variety of, differput approaches. I wish schoolmasters 'Wbuld stop telling schoolboys otherwise. '
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