ESSAY

by Gerald Holton
origin of scientic method : Man seeks to form, in whatever manner is suitable, a simplied and lucid image of the world, a world picture. Once a world image has been achieved on the basis of that simplication, it is extended to every natural phenomenon as it actually occurs, in all its complexity. From general laws, Einstein argues, it should be possible to obtain by pure deduction the description, that is to say the theory, of every natural process, including those of life. The journey toward that goal will be neither fast nor direct, in part because to the [ grand ] elemental laws there leads no logical path, but only intuition. Yet despite the limitations of the human mind, the order we put in our theories can, and often remarkably does, correspond to the order others nd in nature when they check our predictions. Why is that possible? Einstein boldly suggests that our minds are guided by preestablished harmony, a concept postulated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz holding that God allows productive resonance between the material and spiritual realms. Scientists today are likely to invoke a less theological argument, one relying on the evolutionary basis of a correspondence between our ideas and our environment. Either way, for the linearist the synthesis of rationality and intuitionrather than their oppositionis the key to answering all questions of science, as we now understand the term. The pessimism of the cyclicist and the optimism of the linearist are not the only current models. Some scientists can live quite comfortably with a third, hierarchical view of their practice. In it, each level of scale and complexity has its own properties and laws, not reducible to those on the next level. But linearists and hierarchists agree on one thing : the cyclicists view of the imminent, ignominious end of science is an ominous fantasy. GERALD HOLTON is Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. This essay is condensed from chapter 5 of Science and Anti-Science ( Harvard University Press, 1993). 191

The Controversy over the End of Science

ven while science is asserting ever greater success in explaining natural phenomena, the cry is being raised that it may now be coming to a closenot merely to the recognition of the limits of its intellectual power but to a true end of science as a productive activity. Such attacks are often associated with postmodern thought or New Age concepts. But historians recognize that the notion of the possible decay and death of science has ancient and robust roots. Virtually all attitudes regarding a possible end of science have been driven by one of two thematic ideas. Scientists themselves often take a linearist view, conceiving of science as an endeavor intended to provide eventually a coherent and complete understanding of the natural world. An opposing camp perceives a process of ebb and ow. These cyclicists think of science as developing from its childhood and youth to old age and death, or at best as a sequence of changes of commitment that leave little hope for certiable progress or even for the idea of progress itself. Cyclicist views abound in the literature of the 19th-century Romantic movement and in its recent revival and seem to grow strongest during periods of political and economic uncertainty. So it is instructive that one of the most fascinating and outrageous explications of cyclicist thoughtone that has uncanny analogies within the current debate was published at another turbulent time, just as World War I was grinding to its bitter ending in 1918. The author was an obscure and impoverished German high school teacher named Oswald Spengler. Spenglers 1,200-page book, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (translated as The Decline of the West ), caused an immediate and lasting sensation. In it we nd precursors of todays arguments, familiar from the writings of thinkers ranging from Arnold Toynbee ( Spenglers direct successor ) to various New Age authors and other critics. Spenglers key conception is that in every epoch, history has taken fundamentally the same course, obeying the same morphology. Each of the mighty cultures of humankind was not only as valid and signicant as Western civilization, but

JOHNNY JOHNSON

each in turn followed a parallel, seasonlike cycle. The 20th century, according to Spengler, corresponds to Rome under the brutal Caesars; we are at the last days of our winter. Scientists play a special role in Spenglers somber drama. In their Faustian desire for knowledge, they turn away from nature as appreciated by intuitive perception and replace it with a structured, measurable order. Spengler points to the famous confession of the 19th-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, who wrote that the nal aim of natural science is . . . to dissolve all natural science into mechanics. Such quests to reduce the variety of phenomena to mathematical formula, Spengler believes, are a sign of sciences internal tendency to degenerate into a kind of number mysticism. In Spenglers eyes, the signs of decay and disintegration of science were already clear by 1918. Physics, he says and note how familiar this view also has becomehas been infected by an annihilating doubt, as shown by the rapidly increasing use of statistical methods, which . . . forgo in advance the absolute scientic exactitude that was a creed to the hopeful earlier generations. Relativity theory strikes at the very heart of dynamics. Quantum ideas are equally destructive; our inability to specify which atom in a sample of radioactive material will decay next points directly to the Achilles heel of modern science, by abandoning causality and reintroducing the prescientic idea of destiny.

ne could cite from any number of sources to rebut Spenglers cyclicism. But it is singularly appropriate to select as the linearist exemplar an essay that also appeared in 1918, written by a man of almost the same age as Spengler and one who was then also still almost unknown outside his circle. The name of the young writer, whose research Spengler had singled out as a symbol of civilizations collapse, was Albert Einstein. In that essay, Principles of Research, Einstein metaphorically describes the

Copyright 1995 Scientific American, Inc.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN October 1995