Eric Hutchinson
Stanford University Stanford, California 94305
Fashion in Science and in the Teaching of Science
Observation clearly demonstrates the operation of fashion and, doubtless, economic opportunism in the choice of fields to he studied. I n my own professional lifetime inorganic chemistry has passed through two peaks and one trough of fashionability, and so has natural products chemistry: analytical chemistry has passed through two troughs and one peak. No doubt similar examples can he drawn from other sciences. I n everyday matters we almost intuitively distinguish between fashion and style, though we might find it hard to define the two in crisp, clear terms. I n common usage, t o describe a person as a man of style is generally to convey some measure of admiration whereas to describe a person as a man of fashion is not so flattering. We tend to hold the notion that style, however bizarre, is individualistic and implies unusual creativity whereas fashion implies the not,ion of helping oneself to concepts, articles, or methodologies created by others. It is a humbling experience to admit that most of us who practice science are men of fashion rather than men of style, yet candor and 1,ack of humbug require that we make the recognition explicit. We should feel no shame in doing so, for de Jouvenel ( 1 ) only rephrases statements made by Aristotle when he writes: "Man is no great inventor of ideas. The good ones are far from new and the had ones are no less antiquated." I hope it may he taken for granted that, by definition, men of fashion are followers, not leaders, though this is not to deny to men of fashion the freedom to be selective in choosing what they follow. Nor does it deny freedom or need t o be critical regarding the items from which choice must he made or the styles from which fashions are derivative. The Spread of Fashion
It is claimed that the physical sciences represent the application of philosophy to real things and to concrete experience. Style and fashion in the physical sciences operate in two broad, overlapping areas: experiment and theory. Even though it is to he expected that these two areas are to he stylistically judged in different ways or by different judges, judgments in hoth cases depend to a large extent on the common criteria of: (1) elegance and beauty, and (2) economy and efficiency. As regards experiment, it is generally true that the information sought in a given experimental problem in science can he obtained in more than one way. It is assumed that scientific problems are puzzles (2) and Taken in part from a talk given at a meeting of the California Association of Chemistry Teachers, Santa Barbara, Ilecember 28, 1966.
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that the solution which is ingenious, or even cute, is a better solution than one which is accurate but pedestrian. This is illustrated by the determination of structure in organic molecules. Organic chemists of the later uineteenth century were skilled in this discipline, using what we now call classical methods, e.g., the identification of functional groups by standard reactions and by controlled degradation studies verified by resynthesis from simple materials of known structure. Such structural studies continue to play a part in undergraduate education under the name of qualitative organic chemistry, but if I understand correctly what organic chemists are saying these days, the major value of a course in qualitative organic chemistry lies not so much in the analytical techniques that the student learns as in the systematic demonstration of organic chemical reactions. That is, the tool of analysis is used as a (no doubt justifiable) pedagogic device rather than as a methodology seriously intended for solving structural problems. For the professional organic chemist today structure determination in non-pedagogic cases is more a matter of infrared, nuclear magnetic, and mass spectrometry. The widespread availability of instruments such as spectrophotometers has been a crucial factor in the spread of fashion in science. It is one for which science is indebted to technology-a debt which scientists sometimes overlook, forgetting that the interchange between science and technology occurs in hoth directions. One of my colleagues, the late Professor R. A. Ogg, was among the first to appreciate that the chemical environment of a proton is reflected in its resonance spectrum and that this fact disclosed a novel method of structural aualysis. The development of stable, sensitive instruments, which could be operated without a detailed knowledge of the principles underlying the method, placed in the hands of normal chemists a tool of great flexibility. For a year or two it was almost enough to succeed in applying for public funds simply to mention the words nuclear magnetic resonance: without much regard for the quality of the problem on which it was to he employed, the novelty of the method almost ensured that funds would be granted. And this was as i t should he, for novel methologies need encouragement. Yet after less than twenty years the fashion of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is so widespread that organic chemists who do not have ready access to an instrument count themselves underprivileged. But although there are indeed some structural prohlems for which the instrument is the only possible diagnostic tool, the majority of cases in which it is used would yield satisfactory information by alternative methods.
The Arbiters of Style
Judgment and evaluation of method are as much a part of scientific as of other human activities. Although decisions relating to value and quality are rarely unanimous, it is remarkable (but not a cause for scientific complacency) how often there is a strong majority view in favor of one course of action than another. Now the arbiters of style would appear to be the hody scientific just as, in a democracy, the arbiters of political style are the body politic. In a very general sense this is no doubt true. But in science, as in politics, there are Inner Councils and Establishments, which quite properly render primary, klitist, judgments which the rest of the body scientific later considers and generally endorses. It may he unflattering to argue that the hody scientific is as sheeplike in its behavior in science as the populace is in public affairs, but to deny this would be to deny the objective fact that in all human affain there are some leaders and some followers, some Establishments and some masses. An Establishment is an oligarchy which exercises leadership, authority, and power without being subject to popular electoral process, and in the U.S. and Britain, respectively, the Establishments for science are the National Academy and the Royal Society: primary responsibility for judgments relating to scientific style reside in these bodies. In experimental science the ultimate power for rendering decisions on style resides in the Nobel Prize Committees, to the extent that their awards are regarded as the pinnacle of recognition. On a lower level, since many of the prominent scientific stylists serve as advisors to government fund-granting agencies these latter have, in some measure, come to assume a secondary style-defining group. The Political and Economic Consequences of Scientific Fashion
Among other criteria, efficiency and economy of means enter the evaluation of style. This is the commonest argument heard in favor of the rapid and widespread dissemination of styles and fashion in the teaching and practice of science: everyone wishes to be or to appear efficient and economical, though one may suspect that the stronger motivation is that few choose to appear to be inefficient and uneconomical. The difficulty in estimating efficiency and economy in science is that these terms can be evaluated only when the goals are clearly set. While short-term goals in science and t,eaching are often clear, the long-term goals are generally obscure. However, assuming for the moment that the goals of a given scientific problem are clear enough to permit a cost-benefit analysis to he made, the real question raised is: whose efficiency and whose economy are to be considered in this context? Scientists tend to argue almost by reflex that of course the scientists' efficiency and economy are the ones to be considered, but this is accidentally or willfully to blind oneself to the truism that, given limited means, a gain in resources by one section of tlhe community is achieved only a t the expense of another. Assume that there are 2,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. with departments of chemistry; that in order to sustain the morale of a t least the younger faculty recruits it is desirable that each should have access to
a recording infrared spectrophotometer, a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, and a moderate amount of computer time. By conservative estimate, application of egalitarian ideologies would involve capital costs of $100 million. In all probability these costs would be borne by Federal funds, so that someom other than the scienlist has to make good this lien on the community's resources. The economy and efficiency of the students and faculty of each institution represents about ten years' labor by someone operating a t the minimumwage level. We may argue, of course, that economy and efficiency in science provide a feedback-that the efficiency and economy of our hypothetical laborer are in due time increased. That much is true, though the argument overlooks two important principles. First, there is still a considerable time-lag between normal scientific practice and its economic fruit. Second, man notoriously exhibits a give-me-more passion. If the existing fashion for costly equipment continues-as i t shows all signs of continuing-the next round of demand in the name of the scientists' efficiency and economy may well be made before the original social mortgage has been redeemed. All can agree that in a technological age scientists are needed and that their training is a charge to be borne by some section of the community. Even so, it is proper to examine the consequences of advocating a fashion for science under the guise of economic necessity. In 1910 Federal expenditures on academic research were practically nil; by 1960 they amounted to nearly $900 million (3). In 1910 chemical abstracts amounted to about 20,000; in 1960 they numbered nearly two million (4). These are crude quantifiers, certainly, hut can it seriously be claimed that the gain in style in chemistry since 1910 has been a hundred-fold, or that the economic contribution of Federally supported chemical research has raised the living standard of the average citizen by as much as ten-fold? Price has carried out an interesting analysis of scientific ability (6) from which i t appears that although it is difficult to define unusual scientific ability the growth in the number of outstanding scientists is much smaller than the growth in the total number of scientists: the rate of growth of outstanding scientists varies as the square root or cube root of the total scientific population. Hence, to an ever increasing extent the function of teachers of chemists is to train normal chemists. The economic burden of the growth of normal science education could easily become crushing. Out of a field of almost limitless problems that could be tackled by normal science only a relatively small proportion are actually undertaken. After allowing for the elimination of some experiments as unworthy of action because, as Schrodinger bas pointed out (67, they add little that is significant even in normal science, the fact remains that even in pedestrian research some choice of problem has to be made. There are grounds for presuming that the existence of elaborate and costly tools often skews the choice of the normal science problem to be undertaken. That is, if certain outstanding scientists use certain elaborate techniques for the solution of certain stylistically important problems in science, there is a tendency for normal scientists to use the same techniques, whether necessary or not, in the Volume 45, Number 9, September 1968
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misplaced hope that by repeating the methodology they will obtain results of comparable significance. This transformation of style into fashion is not merely a cheapening influence; it is a generator of vain hopeshopes no more justified in the context of science than those of the young person who is misled by advertisements of clothing fashions into imagining herself transformed by X-brand garments. The Consequences of the Fashion of Ignoring the Philosophical Basis of Science
So far, attention has been directed to the effects of fashion in instrumentation in experimental science. The effects of fashion in theoretical science are quite as far-reaching and are, in some respects, more subtle. It is not possible to begin a discussion of theoretical science without preliminary consideration of the philosophical foundations of science, yet in the middle of the twentieth century there are current philosophical inconsistencies which make this a particularly thorny problem for in the minute quantity of philosophy that is ever explicitly articulated in the teaching of science there resides a hard core of determinism which can he traced back to the influence of Mill (7). A science which claims only to deal with effective causation can obviously find much that is congenial in determinism. At the same time, the Heisenberg principle introduced the element of indeterminacy, to which is infused a strain of positivism which, if taken as seriously as Mach intended, would require a disavowal of all metaphysics and would require scientists to forbear to make predictions. Positivist science, in its strictest terms, is simply a historical chronicle of past events. This uneasy amalgam is permeated by a t least the language of romanticism, putting scientists in the uncomfortable position of being unable to describe inanimate matter save in the anthropomorphic terms of love and hate (as in electrophilic and oleophobic), in economic terms (valency), and so on. Science, above all, is a human activity (8) part of whose concern is to observe, to record, and to form ideas about the parts of our material world which readily lend themselves to this activity. I t is a cardinal principle of some scientific philosophies that science has nothing to do with phenomena that are not accessible to the human senses in an essentially impersonal way. Of the human senses sight is preeminent since instrnmental methods of observation have largely reduced all operations to observing the movement of a pen or pointer over a scale. It is commonly taught that a science typically grows from multiple observations, followed by classification and theorizing, but, in fact, no science can proceed very far withont launching into abstraction. Abstraction is essential. Yet, as Whitehead has pointed out (9),ahstraction readily transforms from servant to master. Thought is abstraot; and the intolerant use of abstractions is the major vice of the intellect. This vice is not wholly corrected by the recurrence to concrete experience. For after d l you need only attend to those aspects of your eoncrete experience which lie within some limited scheme.
I n most scientific textbooks of today scant attention, if any, is paid to the central importance of abstractions, e.g., of such abstractions as the atom. I n most instances the existence and concretized reality of atoms is 602
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taken as so self-evident that to question whether enough attention is paid to the period and context in which the abstraction was conceived is almost to invite doubt about one's scholarly soundness. Current fashion in the teaching of science is unfavorable to the explicit recognition of: (1) the fact that abstraction necessarily removes much of science from the arena of reality and concrete experience; (2) the fact that such abstractions have occurred in a historical setting which is dynamic, not static; (3) the fact that such abstractions have always occurred within the framework of some human intellect, not, as it were, by direct exposure in natural events. The acceptance of this fashion by teachers of science can be traced without mnch difficulty to the publication of a number of texts and monographs which, a t the time of their appearance, made enormous contributions to chemical style (10). What is unfortunate is that these style-setting works are commonly adopted withont sufficient re-tailoring to the needs of the teacher, the needs of the student, or the need to hark back, frequently and open-mindedly, to the realm of concrete experience. Scientifically, the results of this nonadaptive acceptance of style and its transformation into uniform, mass-produced fashion are generally as ill-fitting as the results of trying to cram all fe male figures into a single model of a dress designed to fit well on an unusual and nearly ideal mannequin's frame. It is readily understandable that the climate of fashion is unfriendly to the proposal to make mnch more explicit the large part that abstraction plays in science. Many of today's scientists are operationally unaware that abstraction and reality are distinct: others suspect that if a lay public were as fully informed as it should be regarding the prevalence of abstraction in science the public would erroneously conclude that science has nothing much to do with reality. And in a world in which science depends heavily on the public purse this is no small risk. Models
I n teaching and in public statements about science it has for a long time been considered that the essence of the physical sciences resides in quantification and in the construction of models. Two famous remarks of Kelvin-cometo mind (if). They have colored much of science, not always to its advantage, and outside science they are fatuous. I often say that when you can mmeure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may he the beginning of knowledge, hut yon have scarcely, in your thought, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may h e . . .. If I can make a mechanical model then I can understand; if I cannot make one, then I do not understand.
These remarks illustrate perfectly Whitehead's strictures on the vice of abstraction. If Kelvin had confined them to mathematical models they would occasion no comment, since they degenerate into the trivial. But to suppose that they have much to do with concrete reality is absurd. No mechanical or mathematical model yet devised ever did nore than provide a partial insight into reality, and the more sophisticated and exact the model the less, in general, it has to do
with the description and behavior of. concrete reality. Thus quantum mechanics, in itself a beautiful and sophisticated subject, can deal elegantly with the ground state of the hydrogen atom-an entity so rare in chemistry, let along in concrete reality at large, as to be of almost trivial interest. With the helium atom quantum mechanics is already involved in estimates as much as five percent at variance with concrete experience yet, apropos of this case, I recall the incident of a distinguished physical chemist lecturing on a model of the helium atom and then, with all appearances of sincerity, remarking that "nature does a very good job of integrating all these functions in the real helium gas." No Pygmalion was ever more besotted by a Galatea than some scientists are by models as a substitute for reality. It is of interest to see what has happened while quantification has been occurring in the physical sciences. For example, numbers have entered organic chemistry, through infrared spectroscopy, etc., in a degree that would have startled chemists of thirty years ago. Physical chemistry has moved further toward chemical physics, so that the computer has become an everyday tool for the. physical chemist. The concrete reality which, for me in my teens, was represented by lengthy descriptive inorganic chemistry, by the daily handling of chemicals and the difficult problems of their identification and purification, has largely been replaced by theoretical discussions, e.g., by considerations of bonding in terms of molecular orbitals. Loosely speaking, physical chemistry has "taken over" most of chemistry. However, when we speak of physical chemistry's having taken over much of chemistry we no longer intend the remark to imply simple quantification and precise measurement. These two features, though they were common in the physical chemistry of the 1930Js, were never the sole prerogative of physical chemistry. If quantification and precision are to be the hallmarks of science in chemistry, then since the time of Berzelius analytical chemistry could claim the palm-though it is a subject now in rather low repute. 'h1uch of the classical physical chemistry, e.g., classical reaction kinetics, dep~ndedvery heavily on analytical chemistry. Exact and clear thinking in chemistry began in analytical chemistry and continued in classical thennodynamicsnow almost as disregarded as analysis. It is of no minor interest that analysis and thermodynamics are marked by their minimal dependence on models. What is nowadays considered to be the thrust of physical chemistry into the subject as a whole is really a preoccupation with models, or rather with one particular model, that of the wave mechanical atom and its perturbations. I n fact, most theoretical chemistry is shockingly inexact. The five percent errors which have to be accepted in the trivial case of the helium atom turn into much larger errors when we try to apply wave mechanics to molecular systems. It is an almost accepted fact of life that accurate wave mechanical solutions to molecular problems are not only unattained; they are unattainable. Standard procedures in some areas of theoretical chemistry call for a parametrizing technique which one feeds into a computer so as to produce minimum energies, the argument heing that the solution which produces the minimum energy corresponds most closely to concrete reality. The widespread availabil-
it,y of computers makes this kind of operation all too easy. At the risk of exposing my outdatcdness, I venture the opinion that if one properly disregards the sophistication of mere computer programming much of the theoretical work now heing carried out is the rankest kind of empiricism: sophistication resides in the tool, not in the concept. As far as models and mathematics are concerned, Holton's position seems to me the only defensible one (18) . . .our mathematical world in which the calculations could proceed is justified and taken seriously by physical science only insofar as it does yield new knowledge about the real world around us. [My italics.]
Two points are to be noted about the relevance of this remark to the permeation of chemistry by applied mathematics. First, however uncertain we are, and may have to remain, concerning concrete reality, we might anticipate-were we to take Kelvin seriously-that at least our models would be clear. Yet in wave mechanics the models themselves lack clarity. Schrodinger writes ( I S ) How can one ever determine the weight of a carbon nucleus and of a hydrogen nucleus, each to t,he precision of several decimals, and detect that the former is somewhat lighter than the twelve hydrogen nuclei combined in it, without accepting for the time being the view that these particles are something quite concrete and real? This view is so much more convenient and intuitive that we cannot do without it, just as the chemist cannot discard his valencebond formulas, fully realizing that they represent a dra.tic simplification of a rather involved wave mecbmical sitnatian.. .. If you finally ask me: well, what are these corpuscles really, these atoms and molecules?-I most confess honestly I knaw the answer just a3 lit,tle as I knaw where Sancho Pmna's second donkey came from. To say something a t all, though nothing momentous: at the most, it may be permissible to think of them as more or less t,emporary entities within the wave field, whose form.. . and stroctural manifold in the widest sense, ever repeating themselves in the same manner, are so clearly and sharply det,ermined by the wave laws that many processes take place as if these temporary ent,it,ieswore suhst,ant,ialpermanent beings.
Thus, to a major contributor in the field of wave mechanics t,heartificial model itself lacks clarit,y. Where Doer Concrete Reality Entet Chemical Education?
I doubt that I would object so strongly to the intrusion of theoretical chemistry into the training or education of young chemists if it were operationally compatible with yielding "new knowledge about the world around us." What concerns me is t,hat, given the limitations of finite time, theoretical chemistry can be learned only a t the expense of something else-in my opinion at the expense of experience of the concrete reality of empirical chemical knowledge. Many of today's young chemists know so little of the concrete reality of chemistry that to reduce it still further is to remove the subject almost completely from the realm of the concrete. Dainton has argued (14) that from time to time theoretical chemistry provides some sweeping generalizations. That no one would deny, hut it is simply not the case, or even predictably close t,o the case, that theoretical chemistry has reached the point that it can yield "instant chemistry" in the sense of obviating the need for concrete experience. I am Volume 45, Number 9, September 1968
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seriously concerned that many of today's students are so deficient in the vocabulary of concrete chemical reality that, for example, they neither know nor particularly care to know the empirical facts of inorganic chemistry or the treatment of the raw materials on which our nation's bountiful economy depends. No doubt it is to be expected that, in these days, a literary allusion slipped into a chemistry lecture should go unnoted: it is devastating that an allusion to the colors of copper salts or to the scarcity of high quality manganese ores should produce equally small effect. The Hazards of Fashionable Enthusiasms
I have a possibly cynical impression that unless teachers are strongly self-disciplined they teach from a basis of personal enthusiasms rat,her than from a balanced perspective of the subject matter. This subjectivity is, I fancy, by no means confined to the teaching of chemistry and would cause me less concern if I believed that it were not a purely fashionable adoption of the ideas of the genuine stylists, whose function may often very properly embrace the unbalanced exaggeration of certain viewpoints. But to put the mat,ter in what may seem very old-fashioned terms, much teaching, particularly by young teachers, has become self-indulgent. The mathemat,ical language in which much theoretical chemistry is expressed is mildly difficult: it does require some degree of effort to mast,er the algebraic vocabulary. Is it possible that some teachers, having struggled to acquire a limited mastery of the language, cannot forbear to demonst,rate their linguistic skill regardless of the irrelevance or triviality of the message conveyed? Certain it is that, teachers need to be on guard against their personal enthusiasms. Writing about scientific education some forty-five years ago Whitehead had this to say ( t 5 ) You cannot learn science in passing: what you do learn in some definite h o w of work is perhaps the effect on the tempersture of a given weight of boiling water obtained by dropping into it n. given weight of lead a t another temperature, or some analogous detailed set of fact& It is true that all teaching has its rhetorical moments when attention is directed to aesthetic values or to momentous issues. But practical schoolmasters will tell you that the main structure of successful education is formed out of the accurate accomplishment of a. succession of detailed tasks. I t is necessary to enforce t,his point at the very beginning of discussion, and to keep it in mind throughout, because the enthusiasm of reformers so naturally dwells on what we might term the "rhetoric of education".. . . The interest of a sweeping generalization is the interest of a. broad high road t,a men who know what travel is; and the pleasure of the road has its roots in the labour of the journey. Again facts are exciting to the imagination insofar as they illuminate some scheme of thought, perhaps only dimly discerned or recognized, some daydreams begotten hy old racial experience, or some clear-cut theory exactly comprehended. . . . . .I am simply enforcing the truism that no reform in education can abolish the necessity for hard work and exact knowledge.
I suppose that what I am arguing-and not against the evidence, as I perceive it-is that in these educationally affluent times the execution of detailed tasks has been largely relegated to mere instrumentation and that the acquisition of hard facts has been pretty well abandoned; that we have succumbed to the fashion of using sophisticated, automated methodologies in an attempt to compensate for rather pedestrian ideas. I believe 604
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that this state of affairs is a consequence of the marked turn towards the purely theoretical in chemistry during the last decade or two. My impression is that this has had some effects on the comprehension of chemistry as a whole which are far from desirable in that, for example, chemists have become less critical in assessing and acceptingfacts which are supposed to be hard facts. Possibly it is tiresome for a student to learn and dull for his teacher to insist that he learn, say, that the solubility of potassium chloride in water increases considerably with a rise in temperature whereas that of sodium chloride is much less altered: yet to have accomplished so small a "detailed task" helps t,o put a student on his guard against simplistic theories regarding the solubilities of electrolytes, and it keeps his feet firmly planted on a ground of concrete reality. More than thirty years ago Ortega y Gasset wrote the following penetrating comments (16). He was writing only incidentally about science, yet his understanding of the inner core of science was far more perceptive than that of many professional scientists and bears repeating. But for the very reason that we arc unable to have directly complete knowledge of reality, there is nothing for us hut arbit,rarily to eonslruel a reality, t,o suppose that things are happening after a certain fashion.. . . Life is a struggle with ihings to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack. Hence if we penelrate to the t,rr~einwardness of n concept, we find that it tells us nothing of the thing itself, but only sums up what we can do with it, or what i t can do to one.. . . All of the matters of which science speaks, whatever the science he, are abstract,, and abstract things are always clear. So that the clarity of science is not so much in the heads of the scientists as in the matters of which they speak. What is really confused, ,intricate, is the concrete vit,al reality, always a unique thing. For life is a t the start, a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened a t finding himself face-to-face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. I t does not worry him that his "ideas" are not troe, he ~ s e st,hem ai trenches far the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.. . .This is true in every order, even in science, in spite of science being of its nature an escape from life.
It seems to me that we have a duty in teaching science, particularly to the lay masses, to emphasize the obstinacy of hard fact and to reiterate time and again how unrelated to concrete experience many of our concepts may turn out to be. The fashion of'the times is to operate in the contrary manner, to act as if our constructs were the ultimate reality, and to disdain the hard facts for the understanding of which the constructs were originally fabricated. We need to relate science, repeatedly, to hard facts which must be the familiar items of vocabulary, especially in teaching science to non-scientists. And we need to do this not onlv because the nonscientists must ultimately register judgment on science, but also to prevent the layman from valuing intellectual constructs above things and above people. For theory invariably carries with it the seeds of utopianism, if not as regards the current state of theory then at least as regards successive theories. But, as Boguslaw has pointed out (17) One of the more familiar elements of utopian thought is the aspiration to transcend present reality. This aspiration is normally seen as something less than a dream hut more than s. simple acceptance of the status quo. Utopians are builders who reject their contemporary status quos and
reach out for new forms within which to shape their wishedfor worlds. David Riesmsn once described utopia as a plan that is nowhere but that some day may he somewhere. I n t,he contemporary world, this utopian "plan" has become known as the process of "system design." But utopian thinking embraces much mare than a plan. It. cont,ai~~s the implicit notion that societiw must be built free from. human imperfeet,ions. The classical utopians tried to achieve this end by populat,ing their social systems with perfect hnman heings, perfect sorial stracture~,perfect sibuat,ions, or perfect principles. They were do-goade1.s in tbe finest sense of the term. They desperately wished to escape from the melancholy world irt whirh they lived into fi happier, more moral, more just, or more prosperow one. Their primary concern wm people-although some focussed their allenl.ion on saving souls while others focrmsed on filling stomachs. Bnl the new ,lt,opians are concerned wit,h uon-people, and with people-sllbstit,~~t,es. Their planning is dorie with computer hardware, syst,em procedwes, fonct,ianal andysis and heuristics.. . .Impat,ience with "human error" has become a unifying imperative among the new utopians. The theoretical and practical solutions they seek call increasingly for decreases in the number and in the scope of responsibility of human beings within the operating structures of their new machined systems.
Descriptions of this kind, unhappily, are no longer purely Orwellian. Responsibilit.y for t,he fact that such descriptions can nowadays be written with plausible application lies, in the first instance, on the shoulders of scientists and the teachers of science, for the social engineers are merely adaptiug as fashionable ideas methodologies which originated in scientific style. Who can read in Boguslaw's rematks above parallel statements about perfect gases (which do not exist), perfect solutions (which do not exist), and anomalous reactions (which are universal if we really take reaction kinetics seriously)? It may be argued very plausibly that a utopian science, as represented by all the idealizations that we teach, is not in itself such a terrible thing; and I would agree. It may be argued-without contradiction, I think-that without utopian idealizations in the early stages a science can never be nurtured into growth. Yet these two stateme&, harmless enough in themselves, may have quite undesirable consequences. In the first place, unappreciative workers in other fields adopt a strategy which has been invaluable in dealing with inanimate matter hut may well be disastrous in dealing with human beings. I n the second place, as Schrodinger has pointed out (IS), scientists have marked tendencies to regard the theoretical constructs of their subject as the only really valuable content of their knowledge, in spite of a history of science which suggest,^ that theories are not particularly enduring things. Utopia and Course Content
There appears to be a measure of discrepancy between the publicly proclaimed, public-relations aspects of science, with t,heir emphasis on the realist nature of science, and the practice and teaching of science as they are performed in the relative obscurit,y of academic classrooms away from public attention. If my reading of current. elementary texts and discussions with many teachers are dependable guides, I venture the opinion that a student who, for instance, has studied chemistry for a year has had a much greater exposure to watereddown wave mechanics than to the problems of preparing a really pure sample of potassium nitrate whose prop-
erties, among others, wave mechanics purports to explain. When I attempt to argue that a knowledge of the hard, detailed facts of chemist,ry is at least as serviceable as a detailed knowledge of a quantitatively not very descriptive wave-mechmical theory, I frequently encounter the riposte that the former is all in the textbooks-as if the latter were not! The fact is, I suppose, that in the present stat,e of its development chemistry has acquired a small number of paradigms and that the current fashion is to be enamoured of its matahematical paradigms, under the mistaken impression that to be mathematical is necessarily to be quantitative. The error, it seems to me, lies in supposing that to be quantitat,ive about a model is the same thing as being quantitative about the objects of nature. I n t,rying to arrive a t a balance between the hard objects which initially prompt scientists to begin experiment,al investigations and the headier flights of conceptual fancy to which their theoretical studies may ultimately lead, I am much impressed by some remarks made by one of my colleagues, Dr. William Linvill (19). Dr. Linvill, who is an engineer, has been much exercised by the problems of educating engineers in an age in which technological obsolescence is supposed to render an engineer seriously out-of-date within ten years after graduation. If colleges and universities have as their aim, in engineering and the exact sciences, the training of personnel to carry out research, I have no doubts that to expose the traince to the most recent fashions and methodologies is the appropriate course to pursue. If t,he experience of engineering is any indication, it is also an excellent nkthod of inducing technological obsolescence, for it focusses the trainee's attent,iori on a narrow field of study so that if, for whatever reasons, the fashions in t,hat area should change rapidly the unfortunate fellow has no other scientific resources to fall back on. However, if colleges and universit,iesst,illhave a function to perform in educating students, i.e., in giving them a broad background of fact and philosophy as well as methodology and theory, the task of select,ing materials for study is much harder. Education has never been based on utopian coucepts: on the contrary, it has attempted to equip the student to deal with a real, vital world, and, consequently, must involve compromise. Some balance must be struck between rugged fact,s as they are and utopian models as they are conceived to be. For the real world the student must be offered prose as well as poetry. Dr.'J,invill's suggestion is that we should try to determine the half-lives of the various potentiatingredients of an educational course and build, in the main, on a foundation of facts and ideas which have very long half-lives. The advice is much easier to profer than to adopt. But it has t,he laudable objective of smoothing out the essentially distracting effects of fashion and of concentrating attention on the lasting things. The hard facts from which chemistry derives its impetus and which, according to its own claims, it ultimately exists t,o accommodate have a half-life infinitely longer than any theory whatever, and deserve rather less cavalier treatment than they currently receive. Overemphasis on models and mathematies in science may well have very practical consequences for the fuVolume 45, Number 9, September 1968
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ture of science and recruitment of scientists. Lord Rohbins, who has made valiant attempts to reform the specialist curricula of British universities, recently made the following remarks ($0). But it is 4 grave national problem that a larger proportion of prospective students are turning away from natural science and technology. The causes are difficult to disentangle. Personally I am convinced that one of the causes a t m y rate is t,he terror of mathematics; that in turn arises from the fact that mathematics teaching in the schools is inadequate, and that goes back to the fact that mathematical departments in the leading universities are apt to concentrate on training aces rather than people who are less than aces. Consequently there are all sorts of students who would make fair mathematicians, and who would be useful. as school teachers in that subject, who are terrified to enter for s. specialized mathematics degree because they feel that unless they secure very high honors they will be no good at, all.
I believe that the criticisms raised by Lord Rohhins on the teaching of mathematics can be applied to much present day teaching of science. Certainly at the undergraduate level the increase in the numbers of students pursuing higher education, in theU.S. as well as in Britain, has not been matched by increased numbers of students opting for science. I t is my impression, reinforced by discussions with others, that as regards physical chemistry, in particular, many students who have the mathematical skill t,o deal with the currently fashionable problems in some areas of physics and physical chemistry prefer to opt for mathematics itself in preference to either. Every field of human activity is marked by its dependence on the skills of a small number of genuine stylists and originators and by a large army of fashionable followers. Every style and every fashion is characterized by an emphasis, even an exaggeration, of some small number of features which then temporarily overshadow others. The current fashion in much science teaching emphasizes t,he model a t the expense of concrete reality; indeed in far too many instances the student runs the risk of not being helped to distinguish hetween model and concrete reality. To raise this criticism is not to deny that some of the models of modern science are extremely elegant in their sophistication.
It would he well, however, to remind ourselves from time to time that medieval scholasticism, in its own period and manner, dealt with models of great sophistication to which it brought great powers of logic and imaginative argument. It nonetheless died, and deservedly died, because it fell into the trap, first of all of elevating sophisticated argument above concrete reality and, later, of completely mistaking the two, so that it ended by dealing with a system that had no contact with concrete reality a t all. Literature Cited ( 1 ) nE JOUVENEL, B., "Sovereignty," Phoenix Books, Chicago, 1963, p. 199. (2) KUHN,T. S., "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1962, pp. 35-37. ( 3 ) DUPES,J. S., AND LAKOFF,S. A,, "Science and The Nation," Spectrum Book., Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962, p. 43. (4) PRICE,D. J . DES., "Little Science, Brg Science," Columbia University Press, New York, 1963, p. 10. (5) PRICE,D . J . DES.,ibid., pp. 3 3 4 1 . A,, AND COLVER, A. W., (Editors), "Science and ( 6 ) VAYOULIS, Society," Holden-Day, San Francisco, 1966, pp. 58-59. ( 7 ) WHITEHEAD,A. N . , "Science and the Modern World," Mentor Boob. New York. 1963. D. 87. E.; J. CHEM.E D U C . ; ~ ~261 , (1967). ( 8 ) HUTCHINSON, A. N., op. cit., q. 24. ( 9 ) WHITEHEAD, (10) Choice is invidious, hut two notable landmarks were: PAULING,L., "University Chemistry," Freeman, San Francisco and MOORE, W., "Physical Chemistry," John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York. (11) Quoted in HOLTON,G., "Inbroduetion to the Concepts and Theories in Physical Science," Addison Weqley, CamDD. 234, 140. bridee. Mass.. 1952.... (12) HOLT&; G., ibid., p. 230. ( 1 3 ) ~ C H R B D I N G E R , E . , "What is Life," lloohledny Anchor Books, Garden City, N. J., 1956, p. 177. (14) ~ A T N T O N , F. S., "The Listener," B.B.C. Pnhlicntions (London), Jone 22, 1967. (1.5) WHITE HE^, A. N., "Science and Philosophy," Wisdom Library, New York, 1948, p. 199. Y GASSET, J., "The Hevolt of the Masses," Norton, ( 1 6 ) ORTEGA New York, 1957, pp. 130-131, 156-157. (17) BOGUSLAW,R., "The New Utopians," Prentice-Hall, Englewood Clifls, N. J., 1966, p. 2. E., o p . tit., p. 194. (18) SCHR~DINGER, (19) LINYILL,W. K., Talk to the Fellows of the National Institut,e of Public Affairs Program, May, 1967: see also, I.E.E.E. Spectrum, April, 1966. (20) Lon" RolnlrNs, "The Listener," B.B.C. Pnblieations (London), July 6, 1967.
Deadline Dates for Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Nominations Deadline dates in the Woodrow Wilson Nrttionel Fellowship Foundation's annual search for prospective college teachers will be advanced to October 20 for nominations and November 15 for the filing of all required documents. The Foundation expects to announce to graduate departments by January 22, 1969, the names of 1,000 students in the United States and Canrvla.selected by 15 regional committew as Woodrow Wilson Designates. A candidate for Woodrow Wilson Designation must he nominated by a faculty member of his undergraduate college. The Foundation will then invite the nominee to enter the competition. Nominees should file all required documents with the chairman of their Regional Selection Committee in October or early November and no later than
in the academic ye& but in no case later than October 20.
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