Arbitrariness in physics

DEC 01, 1967

To what extent is physics a body of external truth independent of the student, and to what extent is it a set of man‐made constructs that describe the world as we find it?

DOI: 10.1063/1.3034055

R. Bruce Lindsay

WHAT IS SCIENCE? Briefly it is a way of talking about human experience with gestures. Talking makes all that happens in our daily lives intelligible to ourselves and others; gestures are overt activities by which we attempt to manipulate our experience into more tractable form. They are the operators by which we carry out our experiments. Science is a game in which we pretend that things are not wholly what they seem in order that we may make sense out of them in terms of mental processes peculiar to us as human beings. To approach an assessment of science less flippantly and with more modesty about its relation to other ways of coping with experience, we may say that science is a method for the description, creation and understanding of human experience, in which “experience” means the sum total of everything that happens to us in life plus our reflections on these things with our minds.

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References

1. J. Hadamard, Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Princeton University Press, Princeton (1945).
2. R. Taton, Reason and Chance in Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson, London (1957).
3. A. Moles, La Création Scientifique, Editions Rene Kister, Geneva (1957).
4. H. Simon, “Scientific Discovery and and the Psychology of Problem Solving,” p. 22 in Mind and Cosmos—Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy (G. Colodny, ed.), U. of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh (1966).
5. W. C. Salmon, “The Foundations of Scientific Inference,” ibid., p. 135.
6. G. F. Chew, “The Dubious Role of the Space‐Time Continuum in Microscopic Physics” Science Progress 51, 529 (1963).

More about the authors

R. Bruce Lindsay, Brown U..