Alvin M. Weinberg
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831
The Two Faces of Science
In his brilliant book of essays, "The Art of the Soluble," the distinguished British biologist Sir Peter Medawar pokes fun at his Cambridge scientifio forebears because of their concern with quaint and seemingly unconnected detail. To give the flavor of middle nineteenth century biology, Sir Peter quotes from an examination in Comparative Anatomy at University College, London, in February, 1860 (1): B y what special structures me bats enabled to fly through the air? and how do the gdeopitheci, the pteromys, the petaurus, and petauristaesuppo~tthemselves in that light element? . . . explain the structures by which the cobra expends its neok, and the saurian dragon flies through the atmosphere. B y what structures do serpents spring from the ground, and fishes and cepbdw pods leap on deck from the waters? and how to flying-fishessupport themselves in the air? . . .
This, according to Sir Peter, is hardly science: science is DNA and protein synthesis and molecular biology. It is what concerns the most advanced and modern scientist, the one who represents the most modern and unifying point of view. It is indeed "The Edge of Knowledge." All else is irrelevant or idle diddling, possibly natural history, but surely not science. I believe that Sir Peter, for all his impressive erudition and brilliance, errs: that in fact science has two faces. The one is the edge of scientific knowledge. This face is concerned with the search for new knowledge; I call it Science as Search. But there is another face of science-science as the codification of consolidated knowledge. This face I call Science as Codification. It is my contention that both faces of science are essential, but, because of a distortion of values imposed largely by our academic scientists, we tend to ignore science as codification in favor of science as search. Thus we read in Professor Schwab's Biology Teacher's Handbook from the admirable Biological Sciences Curriculum Study ($), "Scientific knowledge is revisionary. It is a temporary codex, continuously restructured as new data are related to old." To this one must retort that if science is all that ephermal, if in order to qualify as science Newton's second law or the law of combining proportions must indeed be temporary codexes, then science itself must be one of the least useful of human undertakings. It will be my purpose to examine these two faces of sciEDITOR'S NOTE: Dr. Weinberg, a biophysicist by training, a reactor engineer by circumstance, is the Director of the Oak Ridge National Lhxatory. He serves on many science advisory panels for the government and is widely recognized for his incisive appraisals of the role of science in our present culture. The paper here presented was part of the program at Denison University, Granville, Ohio, October 6, 1967, on the occasion dedicating newly constructed facilities for chemistry instruction.
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ence and, in so doing, to assess the future of science. Since such assessments underlie our strategy for the teaching of science, I hope that my remarks may be helpful to the teaching community as it sets its future course. The Inevitable Course of Science as Search
Science as search is characterized primarily by its growth. We are all familiar with the dismaying statistics-how the number of scientifio journals increases exponentially, doubling every generation or so. According to Derek Price (3) there were 1000 scientific journals in the world in 1850,10,000in 1900, and 100,000 in 1950, and if the trend continues unchecked there may be a million journals by the year 2000. The pressures toward growth are obvious and need little elaboration. Insofar as growth makes it impossible for one man who as a young scientist knew all of a subfield to know more than a small part of it as an old man, growth implies fragmentation. Moreover, there are other pressures that accentuate this fragmentation. One of the most important is the disciplinarity of our educational institutions. We usually organize universities into departments of chemistry, physics, mathematics; interdisciplinary institutes are difficult to establish, and hard to keep going. For the standards of excellence within the academic community are the standards set by the disciplines, not by the institutes. Since the disciplines tend to remain separate, they develop in isolation from each other. Gradually the mathematician loses interest in what the physicist does, the physicist in what the chemist does, the physical chemist in what the organic chemist does. Thus along with fragmentation comes a specialization. A mathematician has less status than a topologist, a general physicist less status than a high-energy physicist. The paths along which the specialties develop tend to become ingrown: the high-energy physicist loses contact with the solid-state physicist, the nuclear chemist with the organic chemist, the molecular biologist with the holistic biologist. Science tries to combat this fragmentation by devising new and more general principles that encompass larger and larger parts of science. Quantum mechanics subsumes all of modern physics; Hamilton's principle contains all of classical mechanics. Yet in the process of so unifying itself science tends to become more abstract, more pure; and in so doing it loses something essential. Though the relativistic Dirac equation implies the location of the Balmer lines, it is still no substitute for the lines themselves showing darkly in the sun's sprectrum. There is a difference between knowing and knowing in principle. Though the scientific explosion requires us to
know more in principle and less in detail, we should not kid ourselves into believing that the two are the same, nor that we may not have lost as much as we have gained as we move to greater abstraction. I believe it is this "reintegration at a higher level of abstraction" that explains Sir Peter's impatience with the beautiful detail of classical taxonomic biology. Today, of all the sciences, biology seems to be experiencing the most far-reaching unification at a higher level of abstraction. The new molecular biology with its marvelously ingenious picture of protein synthesis and of reproduction has become a powerful unifying force for large parts of biology-so much so that Sir Peter, in a burst of explosive exuberance says, ". . . biology is over the humpn(1). And indeed, the unification provided by the new molecular biology has provided a framework for the teaching of cellular biology that is comparable in usefulness to the framework the theory of evolution has provided for systematic biology. This is very noticeable in the new biology curricula: they surely present a beautifully unified view to the student. Yet the frameworks provided by the newer molecular biology or by the older theory of evolution are imperfect frameworks. They cannot reproduce the detail and infinite variety that is an intrinsic part of nature: the iridescence of the wings of the flying fish, or the miraculous dances of the honey bee. And in rejecting those matters that are not completely subsumed in the gross theoretical structure as not being part of science, one is committing a serious philosophic blunder that is no more acceptable for its being so much the fashion today. Kor am I williug to accept at face value the rationalization that these more general points of view are necessary for the applications of a science to neighboring sciences. I n a most interesting essay on the teaching of mathematics for physicists, Professor Bernard Friedman says, "we must use more and more general concepts to understand and to control nature. This need for more general concepts can he met only by the use of the more abstract mathematics" (4). To this I would rejoin by pointing out that the example of abstract mathematics-namely group theory-which Professor Friedmnn quotes as being useful in modern physics is not really very new. Insofar as the really successful sciences go, they utilize mostly the rather classical parts of analysis and algebra. Because mathematics moves to a more general and abstract level so as to impose an orderliness on its own structure, there is no a priori reason to believe that these more abstract, generally nonmetrical aspects of mathematics will be the more useful to the science of the future. Rather this is a hope articulated by mathematicians who, I suspect, want their product in the future to be as useful ns it has been in the past. The Other Face of Science: Codification of Existing Knowledge
What I have described is the face of science that interests the professional scientist working at the edge of knowledge: Professor Schwab's temporary codex always undergoing change. What about the obvious other face of science: the body of consolidated scientific knowledge that, once discovered, does not change; those hard won and precious nuggets of scientific
knowledge that our forebears have dug out and that have become an immutable part of our tradition? I refer here to things like h'ewton's laws or the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of combining proportions; I refer to the store of taxonomic knowledge that constitutes systematic biology, or the classification of the rocks and the clouds and the waters. It is inconceivable to me that Newton's laws, or the second law of thermodynamics will be any less correct or valid 500 years from now than they are today. There are closed parts of science, parts that are changing hardly at all vet which remain tolerably accurate descriptions of nature. To the expert within a narrow branch, these parts of science are uninteresting since for him science is primarily the search for further truth within his own branch. By contrast, the consolidated, older parts of science are of much more interest to the practitioner outside the branch in question. The research mathematician looks upon his subject as the search for the newest relations suggested by the logic of a particular branch of mathematics. But to the physicist, mathematics is largely the mathematics discovered before 1920. To the chemist, physics is not elementary particle physics, the subject that most strongly excites the professional physicist; instead, it is the physics of nuclear magnetic resonance, or of X-ray crystallography, all of which are by now vell consolidated within physics. And, for the technologist,applicable science tends to be the older, consolidated science, which usually does not interest the professional-not the newest, unconsolidated science that claims the professional's interest and emotion. The Crisis in Science Education
I see a deepening crisis in science education, especially undergraduate education, implied by these trends. The growth of science itself poses an overwhelming problem: what does one leave out when one adds to the curriculum? Inevitably, I believe the science curriculum will respond by becoming more abstract, by moving to higher levels of abstraction or higher vantage points, from which one sees more but from which the details become blurred. Already we see this in some of the newer textbooks: chemistry is now the chemistry that is explainable by orbital bonding theory; mathematics is the mathematics of the abstract algebraist; biology is the biology of the molecular biologists. Whether, on balance, one has gained or lost in the progression to more abstraction is a matter of opinion, and probably varies from science to science. As I have said, I am impressed with the power of the new molecular biology to unify disparate parts of biology, and thereby to simplify the presentation of the subject. I am less impressed with the usefulness of the chemical bond approach in chemistry; and in mathematics I believe the imposition of the algebraists' view on the curriculum-the notion that eighth graders of the 1990's should be introduced to the complex numbers as residue classes on the field of polynomial modulo x 2 1 (as suggested by one over-enthusiastic group of mathematicians)-is close to a catastrophe. The conflict between science as search and science as codificat,ionis a real conflict, and one that we, as educa-
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tors and as scientists, must face up to and cope with, not ignore and submerge. As our science becomes more elaborate and differentiated, the separation between the newer, growing parts of science, and the consolidated, closed parts of the science will increase. And indeed, there are consolidated portions of science that, despite what our more ardent curriculum reformers say, do not change and that continue to be important: the thermodynamics of van't Hoff is as correct today as it was 70 years ago, and just aa important to vast parts of science; the mathematics of Gauss and Poincar6 is timeless, and is not displaced, at least as far as its usefulness to other science goes, by the more modern developments. Herein lies the dilemma of the undergraduate scientific university: how can it a t one and the same time present both the growing tip of science and the consolidated portions of science? If the university does cling to a rather traditional curriculum and stresses the consolidated parts of science, its graduates are presumed to be at a disadvantage when they enter specialized graduate schools. If the university bows to the prevailing mood and presents its elementary courses from the most modern standpoint, it deprives the undergraduate in one field of science of the useful insights and help he needs from the other sciences. The undergraduate physicist needs to develop power in simple integration more than he needs to learn the most modern theories of integration, even though the latter are much more interesting to his professor of mathematics. I cannot help hut point out that so many of the "modernists" in curriculum reform themselves learned their subject in the traditional way, using traditional textbooks. Perhaps, in presenting only the modern viewpoints to their students, they forget that they themselves have been influenced by the old traditions, and that disembodied modernism and abstraction resting on no foundation of tradition may remain just that-disembodied abstraction. There is advantage in knowing what motivated the pathfinders in a branch of science: what bothered Newton when he invented calculus, or how Planck wrestled with the problem of black body radiation when he invented the quantum. It is much easier to diagnose the illness than to prescribe potent remedies. One obvious way to impart more scientific knowledge to students would be to lengthen the undergraduate curriculum, say, to five years. This has already been done in engineering physics at various institutions, and it is worth considering in other fields as well. Certainly with the trend toward early retirement and a shorter work week, I should think our society could afford to keep its young people in school at least another year. Another, possibly more practical, approach would be to strengthen the science given in the lower schools. Much can be said for this, provided that at the same time we improve the curricula, we also improve the high school teacher. But the exponential gmwth of science will defeat any such stopgaps. It will even defeat our attempts to devise more ingenious ways of handling information, and of teaching these methods to our undergraduates. What we shall have to aim for, in science education, as we do in all education, is an overall competence and confidence that equips the student to fend for himself in the changing scientific world. And this means stressing 76
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the consolidated parts of science, no less than it does bringing in the newer, more glamorous parts. For the methods of science do not change that much. The painstaking measurements that led the way to the discovery of heavy hydrogen in the 1930's are the same genre that led to the identification of the Quasars in 1963. The style of science, its excitement and its charm, can be taught without losing touch with the tradition of science. Of course, our science will change, and of course our science curriculum will reflect this change. But I am rash enough to predict that at least the physical sciences will not change as drastically as our curriculum reformers imply: that the truly productive and educated physical scientist of 1990 will be able to recall Cauchy's theorem and Gibbs' phase rule, even as he pushes ahead in his ever-narrower specialty. And the habits of thought he has acquired from his undergraduate study-when he was steeping himself deeply in the traditions of his science and learning its corpus no less than its growing edge--will always prove indispensable to him both when he applies science and when he seeks new truths within science. I would go further, though, and argue that a thorough grounding in the consolidated parts of science and an appreciation for the history and motivations underlying the great discoveries could well constitute the best background for ultimate careers even in the purest scientific disciplines. I am always impressed with the wide erudition and sense of tradition for their science that I find in the truly great pure scientists I have been privileged to know. Perhaps this is a sign of age-that my acquaintances among the scientific great are all my own age or older and are therefore people who were exposed as a matter of course to what we now view as the consolidated parts of science. But I think the matter is not so easily explained. The waning of our sense of tradition may indeed be an intrinsic attribute of the modern style of science. For example, could the modern generation's over-concern with the computer have devastating effect on the future of science? The computer, perhaps more than any other device, represents a mode and a style at the growing edge of science which breaks sharply with the older traditions. I see every day at my own institution the enormous power of the computer. I see equally every day evidence that this new mode has cast out a certain kind of intuitiveness that was a part of the pre-computer scientific scene. Without computers it was necessary to analyze the essential physical elements in a scientific situation; with the computer it is much more possible to arrive at an acceptable answer without ever understanding in an intuitive, and I may say traditional, way the essentials of a problem. I am convinced that it is only this kind of deep intuitiveness upon which the truly great advances in science and even in technology are based, not upon vast computations. Thus, what I plead for is a kind of balance and pers p e c t i v e a recognition of the unique value of classical mathematical or, more broadly, scientific methods even as we learn about IBM-360's; a concern and feeling for the taxonomic detail of science even as we learn about the more abstract unifying principles like chemical bonding theory and SU1 symmetry-in short, an appreciation for both faces of science.
The Role of the Small College
The small college obviously faces a most serious crisis in dealing with the explosive growth of science. T o some, the small college, with its limited resources, and its consequent inability t o maintain its position a t the growing edge of science, is doomed as far as teaching science is concerned. But I believe there is an approach for the small college which deserves consideration. 1 have already pointed out that of the two faces of science--search and codification-the former is of primary interest to the highly disciplinary professional, the latter t o the more broadly based applier of science. For the small college, it is evidently easier to maintain contact with the consolidated parts of science than with its growing edge. Now, in the calculus of values set up by, say, the National Science Foundation, this is very had. A center of excellence by definition operates at the growing edge of science. I submit that this may be an error. For, as has been stressed most recently in the NAS report, "Applied Science aud Technological Progress" (6),our country's capacity to do jobs that apply science may he eroded by our commitment to discipliuarity and purity. But what is this hut an overvaluation of science as search and an undervaluation of science as codificatiou? For, as I have said, the applied scientist, and even the interdisciplinary pure scientist, is concerned more with older science than with the growing edge of new science. The really expert applied scie~~tist is the one whose knowledge is most broadly based, who has a thorough grounding in the fundamentals of wide reaches of science--in short, who is thoroughly a t home with the consolidated face of science. Would it be too far-fetched to suggest then that the small scicllce schools step in where the university "centers of' excelleuce" have failed-that they focus upou application of science, that they create in their students this eclecticism and taste for the traditional parts of science that to my miud are so necessary for successful careers in applied science? I n short, could not the small schools fiud their scientific future in the applica, .. tions of scietme? Obviously such a course presellts dawers. Olle danger is the loss of prestige that a school faces if it does not try t o be a center of excellence in the terms defined by the ~revailineelite. Another, and related danger, - is that'preoccupation with the cbnsolidated parts of scieuce can be stultifying-but only if one allows it to he so. The consolidated parts of science are less iuterestirrg only if one forgets that these are the parts that thc whole application of science depends upon. The secotld law of thermodynamics becomes uninteresting the 20th time it is taught, unless one realizes that by 1972 large desalting plants will be built whose design depends on this law. Thus one would hope the professors in such schools, which specialize in the consolidated parts of the sciences, would remain fresh, and could convey this freshness to their students by a sensitive awareness of new applications of their consolidated knowledge-either to practical mattels or to neighboring disciplines.
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Arld, in spite of the dangers that I have enumerated, I can see possible advantages to such a course. The most important is the practical one; it is easier for the scientist a t the somewhat remote small school to be concerned with consolidated science than to compete in scientific search with his colleague in the large center of excellence. But there are more positive virtues in such a course. I refer to what many consider to be a rising tide of application of science to social problems. Our society is faced with urgent, almost desperate, social problems-housing, crime, transportation, the environment, race relations. I n a lumbering, but perceptible way, we arc beginning to mobilize around these. We have created the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation, among others. I n many of these situations, notably crime, technological components of the social problems have been identified or are being identified. For example, during the summer of 1966 HUD sponsored a study, "Science and the City" (6), that purported to show how science could be applied t o such social problems. But the science one speaks of here is uot the science of the elementary particle physicist or of the abstract mathematician; it is the science of the older chemist and physicist and mathematician; the science of the environmental ecologist who knows the names of the fish that are being polluted in Lake Erie; of the chemist who can identify criminals by activation analysis; of the metallurgist who can devise materials for a nuclear reactor that will produce power so cheaply that sewage can he treated by its heat. So I can foresee, and in this I echo a view expressed by W. G. Pollard (7), that application of science can become a predominant mode in the next generation. And in hecoming strongly identified with application--with the consolidated face of science-one can hope to find a meaningful avenue of approach for the small college of the future. Perhaps as our concern for broad social questions whose resolution depcnds, in significant degree, upon applications of older science we shall find that the scientific traditionalism of the small colleges can yet become one of the most sought after Edges of Knowledge. Literature Cited Methue,, & MEonwaR, P, B,, '.The Art of the Ltd., Lrmdun, England, 1967, p. 114. (2) "Biology Teacher's Handbook, BSCS," (Supemisor: JOSEPH SCHWAB); John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1964, p. 39. PRICE,DEREKJ. UE SOLLA, "The Beginning and End of the Scientific Revolution: 1670-1970," The Lehigh Alumni Bulletin,p. 6-9 (March, 1961). "Mathematics in the Training of a Physicist," in "The Eduealion of a. Physicist" (Edilom: BROWN,S. C., AND CLARKE, N . C . ) ; Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, London, 1966, p. 63. "Applied Science and Technological Progress," A Report to the Cummitee on Science and Astronautics, U. S. House of Represent,atives, by t,he National Academy of Sciences, May 25, 1967. 11. S. Department, of Eoosing and Urban Development, Science and the City," HUD MP39, Superintendent of Documents. U. S. Government Printine Office. Washington, D . C., January, 1967. "Man on a. Spaceship," Claremont Graduate School, University Center, Calif., 1967, p 59.
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