The Common Sense of Science Jacob Bronowski 9780571241897 Books
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Jacob Bronowski was, with Kenneth Clarke, the greatest popularizer of serious ideas in Britain between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s. Trained as a mathematician, he was equally at home with painting and physics, and wrote a series of brilliant books that tried to break down the barriers between 'the two cultures'. He denounced 'the destructive modern prejudice that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests'. He wrote a fine book on William Blake while running the National Coal Board's research establishment. The Common Sense of Science, first published in 1951, is a vivid attempt to explain in ordinary language how science is done and how scientists think. He isolates three creative ideas that have been central to science the idea of order, the idea of causes and the idea of chance. For Bronowski, these were common-sense ideas that became immensely powerful and productive when applied to a vision of the world that broke with the medieval notion of a world of things ordered according to their ideal natures. Instead, Galileo, Huyghens and Newton and their contemporaries imagined 'a world of events running in a steady mechanism of before and after'. We are still living with the consequences of this search for order and causality within the facts that the world presents to us.
The Common Sense of Science Jacob Bronowski 9780571241897 Books
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The Common Sense of Science Jacob Bronowski 9780571241897 Books Reviews
First of all, James McCall is right about one of the purposes of this book to discuss how, in fact, nearly every action we take has a scientific basis in that we have learned from our previous experiences and, following any action we take, we will then evaluate the consequences and adjust our future actions accordingly, even if all this analysis is done unconsciously.
But this discussion is fully developed in only the last one-quarter to one-third of the book. In its entirety, The Common Sense of Science is looking at three critical steps in the development of science and scientific thinking first, the union of logic and observation where the two had been separate and distinct activities; second, the rise of a new attitude about investigating the world cause and effect; and, third and where we find ourselves today, the establishment of statistics and uncertainly as the criteria for developing new theories about how the world, and, indeed, the universe work.
A long time ago, a friend of mine who was a physics student explained uncertainty to me this way if you know how fast something is going, you don't know where it is, and if you know where it is, you don't know how fast it's going. This is, of course, an oversimplification, but it serves to demonstrate a critical point of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that observations, by definition, are not static, that the observer is part of the phenomenon he or she observes.
In addressing these three issues (the union of logic and observation, cause and effect, and uncertainty), Bronowski has given us a broad and deeply thoughtful analysis of the three most critical steps in the history of science. Although the book was written in 1951, its discussion is as pertinent today as the day it was written. And that may be one of the problems that intimidate most non-scientists about science. Because, in fact, we are still getting used to the idea of science as something that is, by definition, uncertain and what Einstein would call, "a local phenomenon" in terms of both time and space. That is, the old safe and comforting certainty has gone out of science, the kind of certainty that says, yes, smoking causes lung cancer or no, apples never fall up, and gives the exact causes why these things should be so. In fact, we know that smoking does not always cause lung cancer (or at least not in the time frame we're working with here on Earth). It might eventually cause lung cancer in everyone who smoked if they lived long enough, but we don't know what "long enough" is and, in the meantime, we're stuck with the current lifespan. That's Einstein's "local phenomenon." Instead of certainty and cause-and-effect, we now have to make do with correlation and probability, and that is not nearly as comforting as certainty.
But the real core of The Common Sense of Science is the development of scientific thinking from the original point of reasoning without observation, to reasoning based on observation and the consequent development of cause-and-effect thinking, to the current reliance on statistics and uncertainty. While Bronowski spends the last two chapters dealing with the "truth and value" of scientific thinking and the degree to which, in our daily lives, we are all scientific thinkers, I think this portrait of the development of scientific thinking is the real core of the book, and its real value. It should be on everyone's Must Read list.
The point of the story of Newton coming up with universal gravitation after being hit in the head with an apple is his realizing that the same gravity that applies to apples also applies to the Moon. Of course it was known before Newton that apples fell, and according to Bronowski, Aristotle explained a particular apple falling at a particular time by it being the nature of apples, or heavy things in general, to fall down. This doesn't seem like a good explanation to us, but it's not nonsense "The mere creation of a permanent class of apples, the mere generalisation of the concept of apples, is an act of the first importance…. What nature provides is a tree full of apples which are all recognisably alike and yet are not identical, small apples and large ones, red ones and pale ones, apples with maggots and apples without. To make a statement about all these apples together, and about crab-apples, Orange Pippins, and Beauties of Bath, is the whole basis of reasoning." (chapter II, section 4)
In chapter V, Bronowski talks about machines and models. He says that science demands that what it studies be a machine. The closest he comes to defining machine is that "A machine in science is a concept with definite properties which can be isolated, can be reproduced in space and in time, and whose behaviour can be predicted." He seems to be asserting that the world really is mechanical, although it's not clear to me if he means that the world would be mechanical without people to think about it or if we people come up with a mechanical order for the world; in the latter case, I don't see how this is different from models. He says that we make models that tell us how this machinery works "The model sets up behind the machine a hypothetical world which yields the same ends. In the model, the steps by which these ends are reached from these beginnings are exhibited."
I actually read this book by mistake I meant to borrow Bronowski’s "Science and human values” from the library instead. But I’m glad I read this. It is a very interesting read; a look into what a serious intellectual thought of the changing nature of science in 1951. I found Bronowski’s analogy of science as a language to be very useful, and one that has stood the test of time. Bronowski’s reflections on the reduced role of `cause', and the new role of statistics in science is less compelling. It would be interesting to know what Bronowski would have thought of the modern proliferation of poor science, based on weak statistical correlations where there is no causal relation, that has done so much to undermine the public’s confidence in science. The title is an intentional variation on that of Clifford’s 19th Century book "The common sense of Exact Science”.
Jacob Bronowski was one of the greatest minds of the last century. This, but one of his books, is well written and in such a manner that allows practically any educational level, apart from the modern "stupid American, to fully understand. I highly recommend this book to everyone unless you place more value on "Dancing with the stars", etc.
A classic.
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