The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens

In this thoughtful book, Gerald Holton considers both blades of our sword of Damocles, the thoughtprovoking advancements and the concomitant burdens of science. Holton, a renowned historian of science, takes the philosophical and historical high road on his trip from the past glories of Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Robert Oppenheimer to the burdens of the broader societal implications that scientists must consider – the bad along with the good. It is pedagogically wise for our graduate students to have this book to bridge the river of human events from those glorious achievements to the other side of burdens, at once less precise and less logical. Holton's approach works extremely well when addressing the "achievements" side of the coin, but is less satisfactory for the flip side because the burdens are more complicated than nature itself.

The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 79 Jefferson persuaded Congress to back the Lewis and Clark expe dition as a venture with commercial potential; but to the Spanish authorities, through whose territory they were to pass, he described it as a purely scientific mission.That was shrewd, but also right.The mixture of both motivations was correct.Jefferson regarded the expedition as a scientific survey of the place to which the nation's destiny was likely to lead.This dual-purpose style of research?basicscientific study that had no certain payoff in the short term but was targeted at an area of national importance?deserves a name.We would do justice to call it the "Jeffersonian Research Program." 8o Gerald Holton The old credo was that "if mind were cleared of its inherited illusions and prejudices,... what has long been accepted as the inevitable rule of harsh necessity, might be overthrown, and mankind will achieve a felicity which was its immemorial dream and its clear evolutionary destiny."That was once true.But Trilling thought the title of the last book by H.G. Wells was a more appropriate summary of our present condition: Mind at the End of its Tether.Trilling pointed to two causes for the weakening of what had been a master belief for Jefferson and his time.One reason was our diminishing awareness of the past, what he called our "disaffection from history."But if the loss of history in our time has been, in a sense, self-inflicted and voluntary, such was not the case for the second, equally disorienting disability.For, Trilling continued, "the old humanistic faith con ceived science, together with mathematics, to be almost as readily accessible to understanding and interest as literature and history." Jefferson, of course, could take that for granted; but this faith has been lost.Science, in our day, Trilling explained, "lies beyond the intellectual grasp of most men_Its operative conceptions are alien to the mass of educated persons.They generate no cosmic specula tions, they do not engage emotion or challenge imagination.Our poets are indifferent to them." Having despaired of the hope Wordsworth expressed in the 1802/1805 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, that the remotest discov eries of the scientists "will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which can be employed" if these things "shall be familiar to us," Trilling added a paragraph that captures the anguish of the modern intellectual, to whom nothing is more devastating than the irredeemable remoteness of a whole continent of fundamental knowledge: This exclusion of most of us from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age is bound to be experienced as a wound given to our intellectual self-esteem.About this humiliation, we all agree to be silent; but can we doubt that it has its consequences, that it introduces into the life of the mind a significant element of dubiety and alienation which must be taken into account in any estimate that is being made of the present fortunes of mind?
Trilling's chillingly accurate assessment has implications far beyond the concerns of a few academics.It would be a great error to dismiss The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 81 it as the parochial anguish of intellectuals, unmindful of the dangers in the real world, a world where over half a billion people cower at the edge of starvation; where some fifty thousand nuclear warheads stand ready; where numerous states subjugate their people under totalitarian rule; and where even the majority of citizens in our democracy regularly fails to exercise its right to select who will govern.On the contrary, there is a direct link between those problems and Trilling's observation.As he noted at the end of his lecture, "this falling off [of the confidence of the power of mind] must be felt as a diminution of national possibility, as a lessening of the social hope.... Mind at the present time draws back from its own freedom and power." Trilling reveals both the intellectual and the political consequences of being denied knowledge without which some of our best thinkers cannot be sure they have a proper hold on the world.This sense of impotence in the face of the social and political decisions being made for us in this scientific age mirrors a fact that has even been documented in opinion polls: It used to be the case that the more educated the individual, the more he approved of science.Distrust was greatest among the least educated.Now there has been a complete reversal; the distrust is least among the most naive.From among the others we are beginning to hear the sentiment with which Bertold Brecht ended his play, The Life of Galileo: "In time you may discover all there is to discover?butyour progress will only be progress away from mankind.The gulf between you and the people will become so great that one fine day you will cry out in jubilation over a new achievement?andbe greeted by a cry of universal horror."William Faulkner, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, said simply: "There are no longer problems of the spirit.There is only the question: When will I be blown up?"We must look first into the intellectual machinery of scientific advance itself, to see what is causing these antipodal trends.Is there one common reason for both the euphoria and the despondency?How can an activity be seen as the isolated, esoteric pursuit of a few souls engaged in rapturous contemplation, and also as the dominant, perhaps uncontrollable force directing the very course of society?
What is there about modern science that makes it so successful in the hands of relatively few, and so difficult or ominous for the rest?
A key to the answer will be to see that the progress of science and of science-based technology follows a pattern that is built in, and rather different from the progress of other activities.This order conflicts with the layman's impressions, produced by the daily stream of cheerful announcements of new findings and new products, emanating from university laboratories and technology-based indus try.Their sheer quantity and lack of coherence must be as disorient ing to the average person as the cacophony of events that buffeted Tolstoy's Pierre while he stumbled through Napoleon's battlefield.But despite their appearance of randomness, scientific and technical advances reflect a development akin to tree-like growth, a motion with two components: one vertical, toward a higher, more abstract state of scientific specialty; the second horizontal, branching toward the sides, where applications and repercussions radiate into other fields, from engineering to literature.This two-dimensional unfolding can be traced over history.Some components of the development indicate a tendency toward discernible goals?more so for the physical sciences, to which I shall necessarily restrict my specific examples, and less so for some of the other sciences, although in this respect they are all qualitatively similar.We shall find that the model of tree-like growth helps us understand the two main benefits of the advancement of science, and also the two main burdens.Solovine concerning "the high degree of order in the objective world": "One has no justification to expect it a priori.Here lies the sense of 'wonder' which increases ever more with the devel opment of knowledge." Leaving aside the incomprehensible roots of its success, we do know what stimulates the search for unities and simplicities at ever higher levels of abstraction.While it takes seemingly different forms in different sciences, the upward thrust has been motivated in the physical sciences by the frank desire for "the complete [intellectual] mastery of the world of sensations.99With these words, Max Planck, inventor of the early quantum ideas and author of the book Where is Science Going?(1932), answered the question posed by his title.That aim?reaching for omniscience about the world accessible to positive science, and hence for a complete scientific world picture?and the way to attain it, might be called the "Newtonian Program," because Newton, while not the first or last to embrace it, adhered so explicitly to it.
In the Preface to the Principia, Newton described his aim and procedure: The observable phenomena (e.g., the fall of objects to earth; some celestial motions) led him to postulate the existence of one general force of gravity by which all bodies attract one another, and from this he was able to deduce in detail "the motion of the planets, the comets, the moon, and the seas."But no sooner had he acknowledged this stupendous achievement than he added, with a hint of his deep disappointment: "I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of Nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles."These would include optics, chemistry, the operation of the human senses.There was the Holy Grail: the mastery of the whole world of experience, by subsuming it ultimately under one unified theoretical structure.Einstein similarly taught that "the noblest aim of science" was the attempt to grasp the "totality of empirical facts," leaving out not "a single datum of experience."Newton hoped even to go beyond that, to an understanding of the Godhead itself, as well as to the laws of social behavior.As he wrote in the Opticks: "And if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged.For so far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty toward him, as well as that toward one another, will appear to us by the light of Nature." Even without this additional aim, and similar ones proposed by the physiocrats of the eighteenth century and the technocrats of the twentieth, the ambition of the scientists' Newtonian Program is breathtaking.To understand better its dynamics, consider the pursuit of the Newtonian Program in terms of a simple diagram.Imagine a horizontal plane on which each point corresponds to a datum of experience, an observation, or a sensation.For example, in the left corner of this plane are points that represent observations of regular planetary motions, from Hipparchus to Tycho Brahe and onward.Next to it, to the right, are points representing the trajectory of projectiles and the falling of an apple; the data of motions of comets; the motions of the moon; the behavior of the tides; the shape of our spinning earth; the variation observed in the time kept by pendulum clocks at different parts of the globe; the propagation of sound and motion in fluids generally.Further toward the right side of this vast plane of experience are the data obtained from various phenomena of optics, from rainbows to diffraction.Beyond that is the curious behavior of charged amber, of currents, magnets, chemical reactions, and so on: the whole accumulation of the "facts" of nature that, at first glance, have little in common with one another.Newton added what he called the three "axioms or laws of motion," some definitions (of mass, momentum, and the like), and a slew of mathematical propositions which nowadays could be greatly con densed.Together, the postulated force, the laws of motion, and the propositions formed Newton's axiom system, suspended above the plane of experience.The reason for this construction was to make logical deductions that were inherent in the axiom system, and to see whether these deductions coincided, or at least were not incompati ble, with the known facts, i.e., the "points" on a good portion of the plane of experience below.
The Newtonian synthesis was an overwhelming success because it allowed a wealth of apparently disparate phenomena to be related in a very economical way, by seeing that they coincided with deductions from one simple, mechanical axiom system.Moreover, as new phenomena came into view, such as the motion of Uranus and Neptune, the rotation of the galaxies, and other previously uncharted extensions of the plane of experience, they too fell into place under the same "pyramid" formed by the initial axiom at the peak and the deductions radiating down from it.
The next major advance of that sort was Hans Christian Oersted's achievement in 1820, showing that two other, similar pyramidal structures?one accounting for static and current electricity, and the other for the phenomena of magnetism?couldbe regarded as subsets within a larger and higher pyramid.Oersted found that a magnet needle could be deflected by an electric current, that currents surround themselves with magnetic lines of force.In this way, magnetism and electricity were fused into one conception, the first such unification of apparently separate forces of nature.Oersted's publication provoked an explosion of scientific work, including the discoveries of Amp?re and Faraday.Technical applications followed quickly, starting with an electric telegraph.
Half a century later, the plane of experience had become crowded with many more discoveries, but the urge to achieve synthesis had succeeded again, and raised further the height of the axiom system embodied in the structure of physical theory.Maxwell was able to show that the phenomena involved in the propagation of light could be brought under the same roof with the unification of electricity and magnetism that Oersted had discovered.It was another achievement on the scale of Newton's, showing that phenomena that appeared diverse were really closely related.
Advances in the physical sciences have continued in this same style.
The experiential horizontal plane has become more extended and the upward thrust remains powerful.One set of phenomena, such as the emission of beta rays in radioactivity, has been interpreted as the action of a force called the weak nuclear force that acts among leptons (of which the electron is an example).Another large set of nuclear phenomena is now understood in terms of the strong nuclear force acting among quarks.
Einstein had nourished the lifelong hope that a theory could be found to subsume the phenomena involving gravitation and those of electromagnetism under one greater axiom system, incorporating Newton's and Maxwell's pyramids into a yet higher pyramid, a unified field theory.It turned out, however, that this upward move ment was achieved in a different way, by uniting the Maxwellian and the weak-force structures under one axiom system, characterized by the action of the "electro-weak" force.
Our attention is now focused on the next candidate for further unification, at yet a higher level of new axioms.The name "grand unified theory" has been coined for it.When the fog lifts, the two peaks symbolizing the electro-weak force and the strong force should turn out to have been just the lower portions of a still greater mountain range.If that is true, leptons and quarks would be related, and a lepton-quark conversion, indicated by the decay of protons, should be observable.This further widening of the plane of experi ence involves exacting experiments to bring into view phenomena that had not even been thought about previously.And beyond that?The attempt will surely be to subsume all four forces?gravity, the electromagnetic, the weak, and the strong force?inone theory, a tentative version of which is referred to simply as "supergravity." In this schema of the Newtonian Program much has been left out, not least the intense analytic activity in the lower foothills without which these upward synthetic thrusts would not be possible.As in the building of the Rocky Mountains, a vast amount of energy has to be supplied from the base.Here it takes the form of painstaking experiments to test the flexibility and limits of provisional theories.

Nor have I dwelt on a curious consequence of this mode of advance,
The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 87 namely, that it constantly cannibalizes earlier achievements, incorpo rating the useful parts within the newer setting.The labors of scientists are not really cumulative; rather the new growth makes the old invisible by absorbing it.This is, of course, one of the chief differences from the arts and literature, in which each work retains in principle its individual claim to respect from later practitioners or the public, and perhaps also maintains continued vitality as a source of new inspiration.
Despite its limits, the model I have proposed does illustrate that science, in the words of the philosopher W.V. Quine, is not an assemblage of "isolated bits of belief, but an interconnected system which is adjusted as a whole to the deliverances of experience."The schema also indicates why this audacious method of construction does not result in the Tower of Babel: it is at the bottom of the schema that the various languages are spoken, whereas at the top they all become one.In addition, it helps to understand the historic fact that science seems to follow what Alexandre Koyr? called "an inherent and autonomous" development.One answer to the common, plaintive question "Where is science going?" is therefore the practical response of most scientists: If you give us the means, and a flow of spirited young people to assist us at the frontiers of inquiry, and if the sciences are allowed to follow their own manifest destinies, there is virtually no limit to their continued perfection.The haunting promise is that we may achieve a panoramic view of the whole physical world, one that will allow the mind's eye to obtain, at a single glance, a unified perception of all physical events, causes, and effects.In Einstein's words: "The confident belief that this ultimate goal... may be reached, is the chief source of the passionate devotion of the researchers."Even if that great project proves endless, it now provides science with a purposeful drive toward a goal, a telos.Even though there are always many more "diversifies" than "unifiers," the vision of the latter helps organize the smaller local tasks; it tides us over the inevitable periods of stagnation and failure; and it will continue to stimulate the commu nity long after our current achievements have come to look small from the new heights.
In the exact sciences other than the physical ones, the upward thrust toward a more encompassing view has been organized on different lines and around other key conceptions.Such differences are of immense interest to the historian of science, but are not significant here, because what will concern us shortly, as one set of consequences of the mode of advance I have sketched, are the costs of this method of achieving a scientific world picture?and these costs are much the same for all scientific fields.Yet, before we turn to that, I must refer briefly to the second process in the unfolding of science, the outward movement to the right and left.Here we shall be concerned not with the building of higher conceptual structures in the pursuit of omni science, but with the primarily instrumental aim of increasing human power through "mission-directed" research.The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 89 the Bell Telephone Laboratories.Unlike the classic "pure" or "basic" research which generally starts and ends in the minds of scientists, this development quickly triggered a proliferating set of devices, from heart pace-makers to high-speed computers?devicesthat have be gun to change civilization itself, including, indeed, how basic research can be done effectively in the sciences and in some areas of the humanities.
At the ceremony presenting the three Nobelists to the King of Sweden, E.G. Rudberg of the Royal Academy in Stockholm com pared them to the "small party of ardent climbers" who have reached the "summit of Everest," even though they had started their assault from a high-altitude camp that "more than a generation of moun taineers had toiled to establish."Such an image applies to the Newtonian Program of autonomous, basic research, but it is not really appropriate for this case or others of the type.A historical study would quickly show that many factors essential to the achieve ment of these scientists were absent from the typical project we discussed earlier?most important, a mission orientation, embodied in the institutional policy of the Bell Laboratories, announced in 1945, to obtain "new knowledge that can be used in the development of completely new ... elements of communication systems."The pressure during World War II to develop rectifiers acting as crystal detectors for radar provided a strong impetus, as did an old hope of making amplifiers that avoid the power drain of vacuum tubes, and switching devices without the usual problems of corrosion and slow response.The work was "problem-focused"; it depended as much on the expectation of relatively short-term payoff as it did on the quantum physics of the 1920s and 1930s.
When the three scientists were later interviewed, they revealed that much of their success depended also on "extraneous factors," for example, the particular style of work of the laboratory?a pragmatic experimentalism nourished by the rather American mix of science, engineering, and improvisation?and on the mobility of young concepts into the polity, a lateral outreach that is not a mere by-product but a chief aim of mission-directed research.In essence, the motivation here is instrumental.This style of work might be termed the "Baconian Program," for it was Francis Bacon who urged the use of science in the service of omnipotence, "the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the affecting of all things possible."Whether the title is quite appropriate is unimportant.The signifi cant fact is that in our time a remarkable symbiosis has established itself between the Newtonian and Baconian Programs.There have always been occasional cross influences?historians of science are still debating whether Galileo learned more from the workers in the Venetian shipyards, or they from him?but now these two ap proaches have come to interpenetrate each other thoroughly, just like two mechanical systems that exchange energy more rapidly and vigorously while they resonate with each other.The "pure" and the mission-oriented versions of research send their respective products back and forth, increasing their own rate of advance as they do so?tightening their coupling further, and also blurring the distinction between them.
The marriage of science and technology is undoubtedly permanent and beneficial to each.The experimental side of science has become more technological (the sealing-wax-and-string era of laboratory work ended when World War II technology was declassified), and engineering depends increasingly on a scientific base.Indeed, the laboratory experiments that confirmed the theory of unification of the electro-weak force depended chiefly on products of modern electronic engineering.Conversely, the design of industrial products of biotechnology follows by only a few years or even months the latest results of basic research in genetics and molecular biology.Since Thomas Hobbes, to whom the essence of such rights was merely the freedom to eat and be eaten, moral and legal rights have increased greatly.Scientific findings in biology, anthropology, psy chology, and other branches are largely responsible for making us certain, as Jefferson's time was not, of the essential homogeneity of the human race?a fact from which springs the entitlement to protection against discrimination.Biom?dical advances have made it possible to respond to the clamor for access to medical care, and to support the right of women to assert choice in family planning.Such examples can be greatly extended.
D.D. Raphael has observed that the various twentieth-century declarations of human rights incorporate as necessities what, in previous centuries, would have been luxuries, and that material advance stimulated the continuous expansion of the definition of human needs.J.E.S. Fawcett, surveying the whole issue of protecting human rights, concluded that "fundamental to all effective methods of implementation of human rights" is the development of scientific rationality itself?"independent and objective fact-finding"?as well as the modern technology of rapid communication and publicity.
One fact the discussions on modern theories of rights agree on is, in the words of C.B. Macpherson, that the "theory [of human rights] finds itself in need of development to meet changed conditions," and these changed conditions are to a large extent due to the influence of science and technology on the operations and values of modern society.
Increases in productivity, for example, have quite undermined old assumptions of permanent contentiousness and possessive individu alism that were based on the notion of the inevitability of severe scarcities of resources.(One of the early, unexpected results of the spread of railways was that local famine became avoidable, and therefore intolerable.)The very increase in the number of charters and debates on human rights in our time may reflect the recognition that central portions of the Hobbes-Lockean "liberal-individualist" tradition, as well as the Rousseau-Marx "anti-bourgeois" traditions, are no longer relevant or sufficient, leaving us with the task of redefining, in the modern context of a technologically driven society, a workable framework for human rights that extends those derived from the Declaration of Independence.The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 93 more elevated, the chains between the axioms at the top and the empirical base at the bottom had to extend further.The logical structure reaching down from the axioms became more formal and parsimonious; the bridge to ordinary intuitions and to the rationality of every-day thinking was first stretched, and then was lost or became an actual handicap.While in Jefferson's day it was possible for those in his circle to value and comprehend much of the science not only of Newton's time but of their own, this ceased to be the case for interested onlookers a century or so ago.By now, the instructive metaphor is essentially unavailable, and the barriers of communica tion are virtually insurmountable even for the interested nonscien tist?despite Einstein's warning: "I can think of nothing more objectionable than the idea of science [only] for scientists.It is almost as bad as art for the artists, and religion for the priests." As the plane of experience expands through the use of specialized or high-technology observational devices, the public progressively loses access to the phenomena of nature.The connection between phenomena and theory, the theory itself, and the way it is con structed, confirmed, and elaborated are, and have to be, fully controlled by the scientific community, and understanding them comes only with long immersion.We can see more clearly one of the chief causes of Trilling's perception.Precisely as science progresses toward its declared goal, and as the rate of its new triumphs increases, the larger yawns the unnegotiated intellectual separation from those standing on the sidelines?allthose who feel the shame and sorrow of being excluded "from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age.The old (and sometimes blind) faith in the benign efficacy of technological progress has been waning, even yielding to its very opposite?thefear of an autonomous technology, and the rise of an ideology of limits.
The relative modernity of this concern can be illustrated by studying the outcome of the seemingly humble scientific discovery made over a century and a half ago, in October 1831.When Michael Faraday in London put his hand on a copper disk, and made it rotate between the poles of a magnet, a steady electric current was induced in the disk.He had discovered (or invented) the electric generator, or dynamo.The simple gadget was a by-product of Faraday's lifelong search for his true and quite "Newtonian" goal?to find through the study of diverse scientific phenomena the unity of all nature's forces.
Faraday's dynamo took the energy his hand gave to the disk, and made that mechanical energy reappear as electrical energy which could be drawn off in the wires connected to the disk.
It might have remained a scientific curiosity, and a mirror image of the motor effect Faraday had found eleven years earlier when pursuing Oersted's findings, but Faraday's new dynamo (and the version Joseph Henry invented at almost the same time) was a source of electricity more effective and cheaper than the battery that Volta had discovered in 1800; it was soon redesigned to use mechanical energy from any source?wind,water, steam, coal, wood, gas, or oil?and to issue forth electrical energy for immediate transmission to distant points, as far as cables could reach.There, motors reversed the process, yielding back mechanical energy to do work; or resistors could convert the electrical energy to heat and light.
The physics involved is not sophisticated, but the effect on society was.At last, the source of energy did not have to be in the same place as the ultimate user, a crucial difference from the steam engine, burdened down by its fire box, boiler, and fuel.The dynamo could be anywhere and produce its effect with high efficiency at a great distance; its action was almost instantaneous, its capacity in principle virtually limitless, the raw material used for the prime mover rela tively cheap, and the sanctions against disposing of the effluents practically absent.

The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 95
As a result, the total system was immensely potent, indeed irresist ible.The dynamo, in hundreds of forms and uses, became the keystone that completed the industrial revolution and the modern ization of day-to-day life.The modern city could not have risen without the development of the dynamo, for on it depends essential transportation such as elevators and subways, and all electrical lighting, signaling, communication, and control.Life in the factory, in the workshop, and eventually on the farm was transformed by the new generators, as were industrial processes; the electro-chemical industry, which had initially not been considered a beneficiary when the great Niagara Falls power plant was built, was by the turn of the century using more electrical power than lighting and motors to gether.
What interests us here is that the introduction of electric power into society and the landscape, while not without difficulties, was a remarkable success.One reason was simply that enough time had elapsed to allow a degree of intellectual and political accommoda tion.The design of commercially viable generators took nearly fifty years after Faraday's first model, and brought together a great variety of interests?scientific,technical, financial, managerial?in many countries.The various problems of "electrification" engaged citizens at every level, from Parliament and Congress to individual towns and villages.The system that finally evolved was a compromise between divergent interests and alternatives that had been widely debated and considered at length.Such public involvement is just what is becoming less and less possible as the rate increases at which science-based technology is injected into the life of the nation.Thus the rapid initial deployment in the United States of nuclear reactors for power generation turned out to be a disaster for that industry itself.Concern about the long-range consequences has also been raised by the rapid comput erization of the work place, by the introduction of the robotic factory, and by the vast new weapons systems now on the drawing board and in production.These and similar decisions no longer grow out of an organic adaptation among all the relevant interests, a process of evolution in which sufficient time can elapse to allow technical details to be learned and open debate to take place among an informed citizenry.According to a recent estimate, nearly half the Bills that come before the U.S. Congress have a substantial science/technology component.Yet few in Congress or on its staff have, or can have, the training and background to be really familiar with the problems.We are reminded of Lord Snow's well-known prediction that in such a climate the decision-making process may be usurped by the " scientific overlords," and of Eisenhower's Farewell Address (January 1961), warning not only of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence ... by the military-industrial complex," but also of the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." In a recent essay, "Coping with Technology through the Legal Process," David L. Bazelon, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, wrote that "some two-thirds of the D.C. Circuit's caseload now involves review of action by federal administrative agencies, and more and more of such cases relate to matters on the frontiers of technology."In discussing how "society can come to terms with science and learn to cope with technolog ical process," Judge Bazelon concentrates on the central issue that virtually every technological innovation introduced to solve a societal difficulty will also have unwanted consequences?hencewill require some painful value choices and difficult policy deci sions to be made.
Scientists and engineers do have a role to play, but it is a limited one; for as expert witnesses or advisers they are likely to disagree about some basic facts in the case, and to disagree all the more about value-laden inferences from these facts.These diverse opinions, together with all relevant information, must be put on the table?not in a courtroom, where the judge is unlikely to have even a "speaking familiarity" with the issues, but in a public setting: before the decision makers directly responsible to the citizenry; in forums that allow public input and participation; before regulatory agencies; and above all before elected legislatures, which, in a democracy, are precisely the bodies intended to make the value choices.Judge Bazelon concludes that this may be a far slower and more cumbersome process than the tempting alternative, where the decision is made by a very few outside the public arena; but that alternative is exactly what must be avoided.

He quotes John Stuart Mill:
Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 97 by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.

Finearts."
Not for Jefferson the image of the mind at the end of its tether!On the contrary, he confesses freely to believe, with Condorcet, that man's "mind is perfectible to a degree of which we cannot as yet form any conception."To think otherwise, to harbor the "cowardly idea" that the human mind is "incapable of further advances," was to embrace a doctrine that fitted well the purposes of the "present despots of the earth, and their friends."For in Jefferson's view, the main objective, "the freedom of the human mind," is secured only if the mind is educated or engaged in self-improvement.It is in this sense that (in a letter of 1795 to Fran?ois D'lvernois) he identified freedom as "the first-born daughter of science"; conversely, as he told Joseph Priestley in 1810, "ignorance puts everything into the hands of power and priestcraft."Thus the primary purpose of improving knowledge and under standing was, for Jefferson, not to produce a cadre of scientists and literati; not to design better "protection against foreign power"; not even its necessity "for our character as well as comfort," important as all these were.The foremost purpose, as he put it, lay in the importance of knowledge and informed debate "to the preservation of our republican government." We would do well to remind ourselves today of Jefferson's threefold preoccupation: that the highest good is the exercise by individuals of their natural rights; that the inevitable excesses of power, if unchecked, lead to oppressive regimes; and that the chief safeguard against this course of degeneracy is the wide dissemination of liberal education.He stated this credo most clearly in his coura geous "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" (1778).It begins with a manifesto that deserves to be inscribed over the doors of our schools: Experience has shown, that even under the best forms [of government], those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 99 and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes-Whence it becomes expedient for promoting the publick happiness that those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and to be able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens ....
One may quarrel about the details of a realistic education that could safeguard the mind's freedom and effectiveness, now that the nation has grown vastly from the three million inhabitants of Jefferson's predominantly rural, isolated America.Even allowing for the sophis tication of modern knowledge, the complexities of modern problems, and the potentially more calamitous results of bad decisions, one may consider his curriculum "worthy of the attention of every man" to be unreasonably demanding.However, national policy does respond to its leaders' expectations.
Yet, the evidence points to a catastrophic reduction of the normal expectation and preparation in the education of our future citizens.
The findings are chilling in every field, and those for the sciences merely typical.A carefully assembled study by the National Academy of Sciences for the President in 1980 concluded that the current trend is a tailspin "toward virtual scientific and technological illiteracy."Moreover, as if to thumb its nose at Fate, the next administration began in 1981 to phase out federal support for science education at the college and precollege level?theonly industrial country to do so.
The need for an informed and confident citizenry to assure that the processes of democracy continue to work has not diminished.The very opposite is the case.In addition to adopting the role of alert watchdog of national and local policy, we all bear the burden of making personal decisions whose soundness depends on our ability at least to ask questions about their technical context.Everyone is caught in this vortex: the engineer who discovers in mid-career that, while he knows how to design a new plant, as he was trained to, he now has to learn how to evaluate the ecological impacts; the administrator forced to deal with ambiguous scientific data or probabilistic risk-benefit analyses in some economic dispute; the board chairman as well as the greenest worker, when the old office is turned over to electronic machinery and the shop floor is automated; parents having to decide what processed food to feed their child; the doctor or clergyman when faced with ethical problems raised by new technologies that allow us to initiate, prevent, or end a life at will.

i o o Gerald Holton
If one has no base on which to formulate probing questions, can one actually give informed consent to planned surgery?How can jobs be designed for people who are not skilled or numerate?How is the issue of privacy affected when bank accounts are absorbed into the electronic fund transfer system?How does one react in an informed way?that is neither hysterical nor techno-enthusiastic?to a plan for siting a power plant nearby, whether nuclear or not?
There are a few inspiring examples of collaborations between scientists and the public, bringing enlightened solutions to complex technical problems that face the nation.One is the cessation in the early 1960s of nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, chiefly as the result of a major educational campaign mounted by scientists and others concerned about the health dangers of radioactive fallout.
(One congressman was reported to say: "When parents wrote me that Strontium-90 from fallout was getting into their children's teeth and bones, I knew I had to pay attention: they were spelling Strontium correctly.")A second, more recent example was the debate about the safety of laboratory experimentation with recombinant DNA, which was finally resolved in a manner satisfactory to practi cally all involved.Both these and a few other such instances had in common patient educational efforts and protracted debate among scientists and groups of laymen.
For just that reason, these are the exceptions.As a rule, there is not enough time or talent to build up successful communication between groups of concerned scientists and voters to help form a national decision agreeable to each.Technical details are (or at least seem) so complex to the layman, and their initial base of knowledge is so frail, that serious effort is discouraged.This is most evident today in the difficulty of conducting a meaningful debate on weapons policy.The arms race is full of absurdities, not the least being that it is a grotesque offspring of a perverse coupling, in each country, between inter national, unifying science and parochial, aggressive nationalism.The worst of these absurdities is that the arms race, with all its costs and dangers, has long since ceased to be reasonable on grounds of national security.Larger and more expensive systems are being designed and deployed that at best will have only marginal value in terms of security, and are far more likely to divert resources and destabilize the fragile geopolitical equilibrium.The Soviets, in a notable departure from past positions, were prepared to accept two or three annual inspections on their soil for monitoring suspected cheating.Technically, this was sufficient, for it provided a good probability of discovering really dangerous new developments (involving a long series of tests, rather than one or two that might escape notice).Moreover, better seismographic monitor ing at a distance without on-site inspection could be, and soon was, achieved to provide further deterrence against breaking the offered agreement.
Yet, Kennedy did not dare ask Congress for such a treaty.He felt, probably correctly, that despite all its advantages, the proposal would be rejected because it was based on concepts of probability?one of the notorious blanks in modern education.As the ensuing debate showed, a majority of citizens, unfamiliar with the rudiments of probability, required a higher (and, to the Soviets, unacceptable) number of on-site inspections, in order to feel that they knew "for certain"?eventhough the only certainty was that the lack of a comprehensive ban would assure the dangerous and costly continu i o 2 Gerald Holton ation of the nuclear menace, the inevitable increase in the size, variety, and proliferation of those weapons, and the introduction of additional systems.
The Academy report I quoted earlier warned that "important national decisions involving scientific knowledge will be made in creasingly on the basis of ignorance and misunderstanding."As the divergence widens between those who make policy and citizens who lack the knowledge to assess their proper interests, the threat increases: the nation is in danger of being torn in two.The wound already felt by sensitive humanists such as Trilling must sooner or later become a traumatic separation?the most ironic cost of the advance of the modern science/engineering complex.On one side of the gulf will be a relatively small, technically trained elite, consisting chiefly of scientists, engineers, technicians, and other highly skilled individuals, amounting to a few percent of the population.As an increasing proportion of major decisions have a scientific/technical component, they will supply the new potentials as well as advice on how to direct and use them.On the other side will be the huge majority of the people, without sufficient language, tools, or methods to reason or to argue with the experts, to check on the options they present, or to counter either their technical enthusiasms or their doomsday warnings.That majority will effectively place itself in the hands of the elite, perhaps sinking quietly into the comforts and amusements which technology has helped provide.Some cynics may even welcome such a state of affairs, for the ignorant tend to be easier to govern and to divert into militant philistinism.
These new illiterates will be slaves with respect to the key issue of self-governance, a possibility expressed by Cardinal Newman in the Idea of a University: "Not to know the relative disposition of things is the state of slaves."For them, in a grotesque reversal of the Enlightenment dream, the answer to the question, "Where is the modern advance of knowledge and power taking us?" will be, "Into a new slavery."I have chosen that word advisedly.The historian, John Hope Franklin, in his 1976 Jefferson Lecture, reminded his audience of the conditions that helped keep slavery intact in early America.One of these was the denial in the eighteenth century that slaves could reason.Jefferson himself once expressed the opinion, although "haz arded with great diffidence," that among the slaves "one could The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 103 scarcely be found capable of... comprehending the investigation of Euclid."That was his touchstone.For many eighteenth-century thinkers, slaves would not come under the Law of Nature, which, as John Locke had said, is Reason, and from that law Locke derived the natural rights.In Locke's Second Treatise on Government, which Jefferson claimed to know almost by heart as he drafted the Decla ration "without the help of books," Locke taught that man has not the liberty to renounce liberty, to renounce being a naturally free being, and to make himself a slave of others.To be a slave, in Locke's words, is to be "degraded from the common state of rational creatures," hence a species apart.
The slaves of the eighteenth century were not given the choice, were not responsible for their shackles.Our new slaves will be different in this respect; for drawing one's mind back from one's own freedom and powers amounts to a willful self-estrangement, a voluntary renunciation of self-government on the hard issues that determine the fate of a people.
One way to understand what I have called the Newtonian Program is to see what Newton did with this material.Observation of the phenomena at the left side of the plane led him to propose the existence of a universal force of gravity that diminishes with the square of the distance between bodies.To this postulated force The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 8 5 scientists seeking to train under skilled teachers.In short, the three who made it to the top of Everest were much helped by other mountaineers, by Sherpa porters, by supporting organizations near and far, and by a mandate for useful results.The mission-directed style of research usually leads to both in tended and unintended changes in current technology, engineering, This content downloaded from 140.247.137.37 on Thu, 06 Jun 2019 19:41:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsmedicine, or agriculture, and so affects the social matrix much faster than do the results of basic research.This penetration may be represented by a diffusion of effects from the realm of scientific Science, and Its Burdens 91    to a fairly coherent overview of nature and the design and production of powerful technical devices, while a cybernetic process of positive feedback allows the continued, simultaneous escalation of scientific as well as engineering advance.Another consequence of this process, insufficiently noted, would perhaps have appealed to Jefferson even more.It is not merely a question of the commonplace observation that our physical burdens have lightened, farm life has been trans formed, and medicine improved, but of the direct and indirect influence that the results and attitudes of scientific/technological advance have had in extending the very conceptions of human rights.
enlarges the scale of technological intervention in our lives at the same time as it inhibits our opportunity to evaluate and respond to the ethical and value impacts of these interventions.
The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens 101The purely technical facts, widely accepted among competent evaluators and accessible with some effort to any seriously interested citizen, point to the wisdom of calling a halt, especially to the accumulation of nuclear arms.Indeed, beyond one hundred or so weapons on each side, deterrence is saturated.What drives the race now, in both superpowers, are political and perceptual rather than technical factors, perceptions of power rather than physical realities.It would be a triumph if this fact could be made clear to the citizens of the nuclear powers.One of the main obstacles is surely the widespread inability or unwillingness to handle key concepts of a technical kind.Even political leaders with the right intentions and good scientific advice have been disabled by the fear of backlash.We now learn from those close to President Kennedy that in July 1963 he felt unable to follow the recommendation of his scientific-technical civilian advisers to sign an agreement on a complete nuclear weapons test ban with the Soviets, including an end to tests of significant size not only in the air, sea, and outer space, but also underground.Such a comprehensive agreement?whichEisenhower had also considered essential?couldhave changed world history by containing the nuclear weapons race at that point, and incidentally would have preserved the technological advantage the United States had then.
our republic; it must now be broadened to encompass not only Jefferson's person of "genius and virtue," but the whole population.In this way, the hope of the Enlightenment will not be dissipated, and the energies characterizing both the people and contemporary scholarly and scientific advance will be directed to the benefit of each.Your letter] carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties, we were fellow laborers ..., struggling for what is most valuable to man?his right of self-government_We rode through the storm with heart in hand, and made a happy port.Still we do not expect to be without rubs and difficulties; and we have had them ....And so we have gone on, and so we shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man.And I do believe we shall continue to grow, to multiply and prosper, until we exhibit an association, powerful, wise and happy, beyond what has yet been seen by man.