新一代大学英语(1)第三单元 Characteristic of science

Characteristics of scienceCharles Van Doren1.Science, in our common everyday sense of the word, is a human activitycharacterized by three things.2.First, science is practiced by special people with a specific view of the world.Scientists try to be objective, unsentimental and unemotional. They do not let their feelings get in the way of their observations of real things, facts, as they call them.They often work in laboratories or in other areas where they can carefully control what they are working on. They do not just wander out onto the dock at sunset and look at the world with wonder, as a poet might. Ideally, they are also both honest and check them out and then utilize them in their findings so others can check them out and then utilize them in their own work. They do not claim more than they can prove, and often even less. But they are very proud of their calling and prefer to talk to other scientists rather than anybody else, especially poets, who tend to make them feel uncomfortable, to put them down.(Of course poets also feel scientists return the favor.)3.Second, science deals almost exclusively with things, not ideas or feelings, andwith the external world and its workings, not inner states and their workings, despite the effort of some psychologists to be or seem scientific. The human body is considered to be or seem scientific. The human body is considered to be a part of the external world; the soul is not. Therefore, scientists work to understand the body but not the soul. Most scientists doubt the soul exists. The solar system and the universe are also part of the external world, although we have little enough direct evidence of their mode of existence. Scientists tend to assume the basic conditions of nature on Earth are the same everywhere in the cosmos.4.Mankind is only questionably part of the external world in this sense. Scientistsare generally reluctant to deal with the behavior of large groups of men and women. Thus economists, for example, struggle to be considered scientists, but usually in vain. The external world of scientists contains some things, like quanta, quarks and quasars, that are as mysterious as angels and normally as invisible. But this does not trouble them, as they believe they can deal effectively with the elementary particles that they cannot see and according to the uncertainty principle never can see, but not with angels, which will probably never appear to scientists because scientists do not believe in them.5.When you come right down to it, the external world is anything that scientists canmeasure and describe in mathematical terms, and it excludes everything they cannot. This means the external world is a rather hazy notion, but the idea behind it is not hazy at all.6.Third, science deals with whatever it deals with in a special way, employingspecial methods and a language for reporting results that is unique to it. The best-known method, but not necessarily the most often employed, consists of experiment, Which involves getting an idea – from where, most scientists do not question – framing it in a testable hypothesis, and then testing the hypothesis in acontrolled environment to find out whether or not is id valid. The environment must be carefully controlled so that extraneous elements do not intrude to invalidate the experiments, and so that others can repeat the experiment in the hope of arriving at the same result, which is the best evidence of its reliability.7.But it is the language in which results are reported and in which the work itself isdone and with which it is controlled – namely, mathematics – that is perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of all. Most scientists would say that if you cannot describe what you are doing in mathematical terms, you are not doing science, and they prefer to report their results in mathematical terms because doing so is much easier and quicker (for them) and because scientists all around the world can understand them.8.It is also important that the work itself is done mathematically, which means thatthe observations being studied must be transformed into –or reduced to –numbers in the first instance, so they can be studied in a rational manner. The old idea of the earliest Greek scientists –that the world is essentially intelligible because it is some how conformed to the human mind – is thus converted into the Pythagorean view that the world, at least the external world that is the subject matter of science, is essentially mathematical and thus intelligible because the human mind is essentially mathematical, too.9.Wherever mankind has been able to measure things, which means to transform orreduce them to numbers, it has indeed made great progress both in understanding and in controlling them. Where human beings have failed to find a way to measure, they have been much less successful, which partly explains the relative failure of psychology, economics and literary criticism to acquire the status of science.10.Science was the major discovery, or invention, of the 17th century. Men of thattime learned – and it was a very great, revolutionary discovery – how to measure, explain and manipulate natural phenomena in the way that today we call scientific.Since the 17th century, science has progressed a great deal and has discovered many truths, and conferred many benefits, that the 17th century did not know. But it has not found a new way to discover natural truths. For this reason, the 17th century is possibly the most important century in human history. It instituted irrevocable change in the way human beings live on Earth. We can never go back to living the way we live in the Renaissance, for instance. We can only wonder whether the change was in all ways for the better.。