| Themes > Science > Physics > About Physics, Generalities > A Brief History and Philosophy of Physics > Development of The Scientific Method |
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) takes credit for providing much of the philosophical basis for our modern scientific method. His major works, published in 1605 and 1620, were very influential in directing the approach to science over the next two hundred years and remain relevant today. Bacon had a vision that science could greatly improve the lot of humanity, and set out how he thought this could best be accomplished. This belief in human "progress", that humanity is moving towards some ultimate state of happiness in which war, illness and poverty will be abolished, was unique to the west. Part of this vision was his belief, founded in the Genesis story of creation, in the right of man to dominate nature, "to bind her to your service and make her your slave" [French, p.117]. This right of domination over the rest of nature has been a guiding principle of science and technology for most of the time since Bacon. It is only now beginning to be challenged by the developing ecological awareness that people, too, are part of nature, and that they ignore the inter-relationship at their peril. Marilyn French goes on to argue that, since nature has generally been seen as "female", Bacon's claim for the right of men to dominate nature has helped perpetrate the domination of women by men. Bacon's approach was basically experimental, qualitative and inductive. He rejected a priori assumptions such as the idea of the perfection of spherical motion used by the Greeks. Rather, Bacon believed that if enough observations could be made which involved a particular phenomenon, an observer could use these to induce the fundamental principles involved. The first step of this process, then, was the gathering of as many unbiased facts as possible, drawing heavily on information already available in craft and industrial processes. The next was to correlate these so as to discern the fundamental truths within them. René Descartes (1596-1650), from France, proposed a different approach to the development of science. Instead of starting with raw facts, as Bacon had suggested, Descartes believed that the basic principles ruling nature could be obtained by a combination of pure reason and mathematical logic (e.g., "I think, therefore I exist.") His approach was analytic. It involved breaking down a problem into its parts and arranging them logically, a technique which is still used constantly in science today. It is termed "reductionism", because its basic assumption is that we can reduce a phenomenon to a collection of independent components; if we can understand each of them taken independently, then we can understand the entire phenomenon, in a way similar to our understanding of the operation of a machine. This approach has dominated scientific investigation over the last three hundred years, and has proven very successful in areas in which in which the parts really are largely independent. "Holism", the opposite of reductionism, assumes that some phenomena, at least, can only be understood as integrated wholes, and so cannot be broken down into independent parts. An excellent discussion of the need for more holistic thinking in modern science can be found in Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point. Capra argues that the need for a holistic approach has a theoretical basis in the quantum nature of matter, as discussed below. Descartes' "mathematical-deductive" approach was diametrically opposed to Bacon's "qualitative-inductive" method, whereas modern science uses a combination of the two. Given Bacon's emphasis on experimentation, and Descartes' emphasis on deductive reasoning, it is not too surprising that in the next hundred years English scientists stressed experimentation while French scientists stressed mathematical theory. In developing his approach, Descartes made several important mathematical contributions of his own. Principal among these was the invention of cartesian geometry, which describes geometrical figures in the form of algebraic equations. Descartes really believed that the world and most of what was in it were essentially machines. God had created and wound up the system at the beginning, and it had been running ever since under the laws of nature without further intervention. The one exception to a machine was the soul (or mind) of a human, which was divine and separate from the mechanical body. Since animals did not possess a mind, they were pure machines which could not feel pain. For a period there were Cartesian followers who would vivisect animals to show how well a machine made by nature could mimic suffering. This concept of the world as a machine persisted for many years, and was strengthened by Newton's mechanics. In fact, in 1812 Laplace, a great mathematical physicist, made the following statement, [Schneer, p.129] "If an intelligence, for a given instant, recognizes all the forces which animate Nature, and the respective positions of all things which compose it, and if that intelligence is sufficiently vast to subject these data to analysis, it will comprehend in one formula the movements of the largest bodies of the universe as well as those of the minutest atom; nothing will be uncertain to it, and the future as well as the past will be present to its vision. The human mind offers in the perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a modest example of such an intelligence. |
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