Professor Wolpert explained that, although he was going to address the nature of science, he did not claim to be a philosopher; indeed he felt considerable antipathy to traditional philosophers of science. But he has been much involved in the popularisation of science and he became concerned with the problem of why there is so much hostility to science. Two particular points struck him:
He was primarily concerned with the latter point. Even well established facts such as the revolution of the Earth around the Sun are very counter-intuitive and are actually believed by only 60% of the population. Members of his audience - and readers of this Newsletter - will find that it is not a trivial exercise to prove that the Sun does not go round the Earth.
Professor Wolpert therefore postulated that, with the exception of Ohm’s law and Hooke’s law: "When an idea fits with common sense, it is almost certainly scientifically false."
Dynamics offers a number of examples. Consider a weight dropped from an aeroplane - what will its trajectory be? Few people get the answer right (see Figure 1). Or consider two bullets, one fired horizontally from a rifle and the other simultaneously dropped to the ground. Few people find it obvious that they will land simultaneously - that vertical motion is not affected by horizontal motion. Newton’s laws are not a natural way of thought.
Scientific thinking clearly involves an unusual viewpoint. We are not as rational as we would like to think and most widely held scientific theories are accepted by virtue of authority rather than understanding or persuasion by evidence.
People are intuitively hopeless at statistics. We live by common sense, not scientific principle. Indeed, science had absolutely no impact on the way people lived until the 19th century. Double blind clinical trials are only 40 years old, yet they are the only way to discover whether a treatment works.
Professor Wolpert argued that science began with the Greeks. Although pre-Greek technology, especially metallurgy, might appear to require much hypothesising and testing, in fact it was based on nothing but trial and error. And this continued to be true of all technology (apart from navigation) until the 19th century. The whole of the industrial revolution was actually science-free.
So, the whole of modern science began with the Greeks. Science originated only once and it need not have happened at all. It started with Thales who postulated that everything is made of water. This was against common sense - and still wrong! But that didn’t matter. It was the first recorded offering of a detached view of nature that had no social purpose. The debate was started and culminated with Aristotle who thought that the world was founded on common sense - which is why he was often so consistently and irrevocably wrong. He introduced the method of postulate and deduction that was so successfully exploited by Euclid and he formulated extraordinary insights into the natural world. All science is derived from these beginnings - there was no African science, no Colombian science and, despite books offering a contrary view, no true Chinese science.
Much has been written about the unity of creativity in science and the arts. Professor Wolpert will have none of this romantic nonsense. Creativity in the arts stands in its own right but scientific ideas are assimilated and anonymised. The measure of success of a scientific theory is the number of previous publications it makes irrelevant.
As for philosophy of science, its contribution to the understanding of science in this century is totally arid. Bold conjecture and refutation is simply not the way science works. After all, how do you test whether the falsification of a theory is right? But Professor Wolpert’s real condemnation was for the sociologists of science. Statements such as "... the natural world has only a small or non-existent role in science ..." and the concept that all science is relative to culture are negative and destructive. Such ideas can be motivated only by jealousy on the part of sociologists of science who, unable to discover any knowledge in their own field, resort to undermining the efforts of those who have been more successful.
Finally, Professor Wolpert stressed the limitations of science. There are realms of human activity about which science has nothing to say. For example, science and religion are totally different ways of thought and so can coexist in the same person without interfering.
Robert Peel