All Science Is The Search

[john] Dalton Was A Man Of Regular Habits. For Fifty-seven Years He Walked Out Of Manchester Every Day; He Measured The Rainfall, The Temperature-a Singularly Monotonous Enterprise In This Climate. Of All That Mass Of Data, Nothing Whatever Came. But Of The One Searching, Almost Childlike Question About The Weights That Enter The Construction Of These Simple Molecules-out Of That Came Modern Atomic Theory. That Is The Essence Of Science: Ask An Impertinent Question, And You Are On The Way To The Pertinent Answer.

By The Worldly Standards Of Public Life, All Scholars In Their Work Are Of Course Oddly Virtuous. They Do Not Make Wild Claims, They Do Not Cheat, They Do Not Try To Persuade At Any Cost, They Appeal Neither To Prejudice Nor To Authority . . .

We Receive Experience From Nature In A Series Of Messages. From These Messages We Extract A Content Of Information: That Is, We Decode The Messages In Some Way. And From This Code Of Information We Then Make A Basic Vocabulary Of Concepts And A Basic Grammar Of Laws, Which Jointly Describe The Inner Organization That Nature Translates Into The Happenings And The Appearances We Meet.

The Act Of Imagination Is The Opening Of The System So That It Shows New Connections. Every Act Of Act Of Imagination Is The Discovery Of Likenesses Between Two Things Which Were Thought Unlike. An Example Is Newton’s Thinking Of The Likeness Between The Thrown Apple And Moon Sailing Majestically In The Sky. Hence, The ‘discovery’ Of The Laws Of Gravity.

Every Animal Leaves Traces Of What It Was; Man Alone Leaves Traces Of What He Created.