| "Fact, fact, fact!" said the gentleman. And "Fact, fact, fact!" repeated Thomas Gradgrind. "You are to be in all things regulated and governed," said the gentleman, "by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it." To many people, the collection of facts is the defining characteristic of science, and scientists are thought to be clones of Thomas Gradgrind and his visitor in Dickens's Hard Times. Do scientists indeed "discard the word Fancy altogether" and spend their time and efforts dryly deducing laws of nature from observations? Nothing could be farther from the truth. Imagination, passion, and ideas play at least as important a role in the development of science as in any other creative field of human endeavor. The motives behind our distant ancestors' first attempts to comprehend nature at large, rather than only their immediate surroundings, were both utilitarian and mystical-spiritual. They pursued astronomy in order to make predictions of the seasons for the purpose of better harvests, and also to forecast such awe-inspiring natural phenomena as eclipses of the sun and the moon. For the Babylonians as well as for the builders of Stonehenge, the primary stimuli for primitive astronomy included a need for religious ceremonies. To study nature in a systematic fashion for its own sake, simply in order to satisfy our urge to understand it, is one of the great legacies of ancient Greek civilization… Modern science, in the sense in which we now understand that term, began no earlier than the sixteenth century. The credit for its initiation is usually given to Galileo Galilei, born in 1564, and Isaac Newton, born in 1642, the year of Galileo's death. During the last 300 years the rise of science has been truly spectacular... What were the fundamental aims and purposes of the scientists and mathematicians who contributed to this explosive expansion of knowledge? Compare the works of two men of the Italian Renaissance, a century apart, Leonardo Da Vinci and Galileo Galilei. In addition to being a painter, designer, and architect, Leonardo was a most ingenious inventor of technical devices, and he offered the services of his technical imagination and ingenuity to dukes and princes for the enhancement of their military power. But even though medical science undoubtedly benefited from the drawings of his studies of the inner structure of the human body, we do not consider him a scientist. On the other hand, even though duplicates of Galileo's telescope became important tools for navigation and were, at the beginning, used for that purpose more than any other, Galileo did not consider such applications his primary aim, and we regard him as the modern scientist par excellence. The main reason for crediting Galileo and Newton with the origin of modern science is that they based their search for knowledge of nature on observation and experiment and did not believe that such knowledge could be gained by pure thought alone. This was their revolutionary advance over their Greek intellectual predecessors. In addition, their quest was not driven by any desire for useful applications. Though they were neither hostile nor even indifferent to such applications, their basic motivation was not to seek new knowledge for the benefit of society, or to enhance the power of their nation, king, or duke. It was to understand the world of nature. There can be no doubt that the urge to understand, to decodify the powerful universe around us had, for some, aesthetic motivation, and for others, a mystical, perhaps even a religious, component. Consider what John Maynard Keynes, the English economist whose hobby it was to collect Isaac Newton's unpublished manuscripts, said about the great scientist: In the eighteenth century and since Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light... Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage. | — Roger G. Newton, What Makes Nature Tick? | Indexes/12 |
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Study nature, in a systematic manner for its own interests, and it is purely in order to meet our request, to understand, is a great heritage of ancient Greek civilization…
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