A guess as to what is science

JUN 01, 1961

A MEMORANDUM on the above topic (addressed to “The Record”) has been received from Prof. McLachlan of Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif. The original document, dated January 24, 1961, was prefaced by the following explanatory remarks: “Although this subject has been of interest to us for a long time, the first clue as to how to pursue it came to the present author through a midnight argument in a barroom during the 1959 meeting of the Geological Society of America in Pittsburgh. The participants were Professor Garrels of the Geology Department of Harvard, Dr. Charles Christ of the Geological Survey, Washington, Professor Zwolinski of Carnegie Tech, and McLachlan of SRI. It all started when Professor Garrels said ‘I wish there was some way to make a science out of geology.’ The accompanying memorandum represents what I got when I tried to patch together the pieces of the fight which Garrels put up when the chemists and physicists present attempted to help him glue geology into a single package by means of quanta and a bunch of laws of diffusion, crystallization, thermodynamics, and kinetics. It turned out to be more complicated than I had planned.”

DOI: 10.1063/1.3057598

Dan McLachlan

That the meaning of science is somewhat weakly defined is exemplified by the following popular concepts. “Cavendish discovered hydrogen, De Soto discovered the Mississippi River, and Ziegfield discovered Gypsy Rose Lee.” Only one of these discoveries is considered scientific. By scientific evaluation, the discovery of Pikes Peak has a different rating than the discovery of the Van Allen Belts. When James Corbett beat John Sullivan in 1892, he established a reputation that still holds today, of being the most scientific boxer of all time; and when farmer Jones ran a wire from his house to the barn to attach an incandescent lamp on it in the Ozark Mountains in 1922, he was hailed by the neighbors for being a modern, scientific farmer. Scientific research can be carried on in the laboratory, out in the field, or in the library. Some people will tell you that psychology is not a science while physics is, that mathematics is the only one hundred percent exact science, that genealogy ceases to be a science when the investigator looks up his own family tree, and so on.

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References

1. J. R. Newman, The World of Mathematics (Simon and Schuster, Inc., New York, 1960), Vol. 1, pp. 10–14, 79–80, 170.
2. This was discussed by the author in a memorandum to the record dated September 25, 1957,
and in a paper “Description Mechanics”, Information and Control 1, 240–266 (1958).

More about the authors

Dan McLachlan, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif..