Should Science Survive Its Success?

Abstract

If we could project ourselves briefly back to the year 1600, and take a look at the shape of the world and those things which we might identify as the proto-sciences of the day, and if we were to attempt to predict from them the shape that science would take, I suspect that we would be hard pressed to know which elements to include and which to exclude. Would science look like the world that Giordano Bruno had created, the world that Paracelsus had created, or the world that the alchemists and hermetic philosophers had created? Would the believers in magic, miracle, and ritual continue to deal with natural phenomena and the natural world? For in the year 1600 these outlooks stood side by side with an emergent rationalism linked to emergent empiricism. It would be very hard to say in 1600 that the die was cast and that a way of knowing and dealing with nature was clear. It certainly was not at all clear what the scientific way of knowing and acting would be, and what limits on knowledge would be imposed and which would be forgotten.

Note

This paper, in an earlier version, was presented at the Technology of Culture Seminar at M.I.T., December, 1972, and published in part in the undergraduate Tech. Engineering News, October, 1973.