Galileo … lived and worked during a period
when the intellectual standard adhered to in the universities
was one of absolute authoritarianism. In all intellectual
discussions the highest authority and the last court
of appeal was the sacred writings of the Church or
the profane writings of the Greek philosophers, particularly
Aristotle. Galileo’s whole career was a lifelong
fight to establish the proposition that the highest
court of appeal with respect to natural history phenomena
was not a human authority, ancient or modern, but
a valid observation or experiment – a proposition
that is the foundation stone of all subsequent science.
The validity of any proposition in science is
entirely independent of the person by whom it is stated.
From this it follows that no man’s knowledge
of science can be said to be any more extensive than
those propositions which he himself can establish
by means of the essential logical steps from primary
observational data.
The acceptance of any proposition by an individual
who is not familiar with the observational data on
which it is based and the logic by which it is derived
is an act of pure faith and a return to authoritarianism.
If students are indoctrinated with propositions, valid
or otherwise, that are not properly derived from primary
data, the process is a complete negation of science
and a return to authoritarianism no less absolute
than that with which Galileo had to deal
Within the university it is easily seen that (the)
system strongly favors the opportunist capable of
grinding out scientific trivialities in large numbers,
as opposed to the true scholar working on difficult
and important problems whose solutions may require
concentrated efforts extending over years or even
decades. It took Kepler, working on the lifetime of
astronomical observations of Tycho Brahe, 19 years
to solve the puzzle of planetary motions, but the
results were the now celebrated Keplerian Laws of
Planetary Motion. Newton, with few intervening scientific
publications, spent altogether some 20 years studying
the mechanics of moving bodies before writing his
great treatise Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica (1686) in which are derived the Newtonian
Law of Motion and the Law of Universal Gravitation.
Twenty-two years of work, the last 11 essentially
free of other writings, preceded Charles Darwin’s
publication of On the Origin of Species by Means
of Natural Selection (1859). How long could any
of these men survive in an American university of
today
... scientific knowledge has become so vast as compared
with the limited capabilities of the individual human
intellect that one man can only hope to know “authoritatively”
a minute fraction of the whole ... Hence ... the only
way of knowing anything outside of our own speciality
is to accept the word of an authority or specialist
in that field. ... according to this view, we are
condemned to accept authoritarianism (because of)
the very immensity of human knowledge.
In support of this, one need look no further than
the magnitude and rate of increase of scientific literature.
... for the last 200 years the number of scientific
journals has been increasing tenfold every 50 years
and is now approaching the total number of 100,000.
In geology alone, if he worked continually during
all waking hours, using every system of accelerated
reading that could be devised, no one of us could
read more than a small fraction of the literature
coming off the printing presses currently, let alone
that which has accumulated already. Every working
scientist is accordingly plagued with the question
of how much of his time may be profitably spent in
reading; and, more important still, what should he
read?
... let me summarize by stating that the common denominators
of all phenomenological sciences are; (1) an initial
chaos of phenomena, infinite in amount; and (2) the
simplicity and finite capacity of the human intellect.
Since it is impossible for human beings to understand
chaotic phenomena, it is necessary that these be reduced
to a state of simplicity if they are ever to be understood.
... if one is educated in science in accordance with
the specialistic view that science has become so vast
and so complex that the human individual can only
hope to comprehend a minute fraction of the whole,
then it is unavoidable that the initial chaos of phenomena
must remain a chaos to such an individual simply because
he has had no opportunity of becoming informed of
the extent to which this chaos has already been reduced
to understandable terms … thus one hears repeatedly
that the future advancement of science is more likely
to be the result of such co-operative teamwork than
of work done by individuals … It may be well
to remind ourselves, however, that thinking is peculiarly
an individual enterprise, and that the greatest of
all scientific achievements – those of the great
synthesizers from Galileo to Einstein – have,
almost without exception, been the work of individuals.
In large measure, we appear to have lost sight of
our intellectual foundations and to have reverted
to authoritarianism … it is urgent that we restore
our universities to their primary purposes as educational
institutions and provide for them a more orderly form
of support than that which they now receive.
It is also urgent that universities abandon their
present preoccupation with trivial “research”
and its bookkeeping based on the number of papers
published per year and attempt to achieve an atmosphere
in which a Galileo, a Kepler, a Newton, a Darwin,
or a J. Willard Gibbs would find it congenial to work.
