Every Judgment In Science Stands On The

We Are All Afraid For Our Confidence, For The Future, For The World. That Is The Nature Of The Human Imagination. Yet Every Man, Every Civilization, Has Gone Forward Because Of Its Engagement With What It Has Set Itself To Do.

But Nature - That Is, Biological Evolution - Has Not Fitted Man To Any Specific Environment. On The Contrary, ... He Has A Rather Crude Survival Kit; And Yet -this Is The Paradox Of The Human Condition - One That Fits Him To All Environments. Among The Multitude Of Animals Which Scamper, Fly, Burrow And Swim Around Us, Man Is The Only One Who Is Not Locked Into His Environment. His Imagination, His Reason, His Emotional Subtlety And Toughness, Make It Possible For Him Not To Accept The Environment But To Change It.

Da Vinci Was As Great A Mechanic And Inventor As Were Newton And His Friends. Yet A Glance At His Notebooks Shows Us That What Fascinated Him About Nature Was Its Variety, Its Infinite Adaptability, The Fitness And The Individuality Of All Its Parts. By Contrast What Made Astronomy A Pleasure To Newton Was Its Unity, Its Singleness, Its Model Of A Nature In Which The Diversified Parts Were Mere Disguises For The Same Blank Atoms.

Progress Is The Exploration Of Our Own Error. Evolution Is A Consolidation Of What Have Always Begun As Errors. And Errors Are Of Two Kinds: Errors That Turn Out To Be True And Errors That Turn Out To Be False (which Are Most Of Them). But They Both Have The Same Character Of Being An Imaginative Speculation. I Say All This Because I Want Very Much To Talk About The Human Side Of Discovery And Progress, And It Seems To Me Terribly Important To Say This In An Age In Which Most Non-scientists Are Feeling A Kind Of Loss Of Nerve.

The World Is Made Up Of People Who Never Quite Get Into The First Team And Who Just Miss The Prizes At The Flower Show.