The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science Science and Method Part 30

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

1. _Does the Scientist create Science?_--Professor Rados of Budapest in his report to the Hungarian Academy of Science on the award to Poincare of the Bolyai prize of ten thousand crowns, speaking of him as unquestionably the most powerful investigator in the domain of mathematics and mathematical physics, characterized him as the intuitive genius drawing the inspiration for his wide-reaching researches from the exhaustless fountain of geometric and physical intuition, yet working this inspiration out in detail with marvelous logical keenness. With his brilliant creative genius was combined the capacity for sharp and successful generalization, pus.h.i.+ng far out the boundaries of thought in the most widely different domains, so that his works must be ranked with the greatest mathematical achievements of all time. "Finally," says Rados, "permit me to make especial mention of his intensely interesting book, 'The Value of Science,' in which he in a way has laid down the scientist's creed." Now what is this creed?

Sense may act as stimulus, as suggestive, yet not to awaken a dormant depiction, or to educe the conception of an archetypal form, but rather to strike the hour for creation, to summon to work a sculptor capable of smoothing a Venus of Milo out of the formless clay. Knowledge is not a gift of bare experience, nor even made solely out of experience. The creative activity of mind is in mathematics particularly clear. The axioms of geometry are conventions, disguised definitions or unprovable hypotheses precreated by auto-active animal and human minds. Bertrand Russell says of projective geometry: "It takes nothing from experience, and has, like arithmetic, a creature of the pure intellect for its object. It deals with an object whose properties are logically deduced from its definition, not empirically discovered from data." Then does the scientist create science? This is a question Poincare here dissects with a master hand.

The physiologic-psychologic investigation of the s.p.a.ce problem must give the meaning of the words _geometric fact_, _geometric reality_.

Poincare here subjects to the most successful a.n.a.lysis ever made the tridimensionality of our s.p.a.ce.

2. _The Mind Dispelling Optical Illusions._--Actual perception of spatial properties is accompanied by movements corresponding to its character. In the case of optical illusions, with the so-called false perceptions eye-movements are closely related. But though the perceived object and its environment remain constant, the sufficiently powerful mind can, as we say, dispel these illusions, the perception itself being creatively changed. Photo-graphs taken at intervals during the presence of these optical illusions, during the change, perhaps gradual and unconscious, in the perception, and after these illusions have, as the phrase is, finally disappeared, show quite clearly that changes in eye-movements corresponding to those internally created in perception itself successively occur. What is called accuracy of movement is created by what is called correctness of perception. The higher creation in the perception is the determining cause of an improvement, a precision in the motion. Thus we see correct perception in the individual helping to make that cerebral organization and accurate motor adjustment on which its possibility and permanence seem in so far to depend. So-called correct perception is connected with a long-continued process of perceptual education motived and initiated from within. How this may take place is here ill.u.s.trated at length by our author.

3. _Euclid not Necessary._--Geometry is a construction of the intellect, in application not certain but convenient. As Schiller says, when we see these facts as clearly as the development of metageometry has compelled us to see them, we must surely confess that the Kantian account of s.p.a.ce is hopelessly and demonstrably antiquated. As Royce says in 'Kant's Doctrine of the Basis of Mathematics,' "That very use of intuition which Kant regarded as geometrically ideal, the modern geometer regards as scientifically defective, because surrept.i.tious. No mathematical exactness without explicit proof from a.s.sumed principles--such is the motto of the modern geometer. But suppose the reasoning of Euclid purified of this comparatively surrept.i.tious appeal to intuition.

Suppose that the principles of geometry are made quite explicit at the outset of the treatise, as Pieri and Hilbert or Professor Halsted or Dr.

Veblen makes his principles explicit in his recent treatment of geometry. Then, indeed, geometry becomes for the modern mathematician a purely rational science. But very few students of the logic of mathematics at the present time can see any warrant in the a.n.a.lysis of geometrical truth for regarding just the Euclidean system of principles as possessing any discoverable necessity." Yet the environmental and perhaps hereditary premiums on Euclid still make even the scientist think Euclid most convenient.

4. _Without Hypotheses, no Science._--n.o.body ever observed an equidistantial, but also n.o.body ever observed a straight line.

Emerson's Uriel

"Gave his sentiment divine Against the being of a line.

Line in Nature is not found."

Clearly not, being an eject from man's mind. What is called 'a knowledge of facts' is usually merely a subjective realization that the old hypotheses are still sufficiently elastic to serve in some domain; that is, with a sufficiency of conscious or unconscious omissions and doctorings and fudgings more or less wilful. In the present book we see the very foundation rocks of science, the conservation of energy and the indestructibility of matter, beating against the bars of their cages, seemingly anxious to take wing away into the empyrean, to chase the once divine parallel postulate broken loose from Euclid and Kant.

5. _What Outcome?_--What now is the definite, the permanent outcome?

What new islets raise their fronded palms in air within thought's musical domain? Over what age-gray barriers rise the fragrant floods of this new spring-tide, redolent of the wolf-haunted forest of Transylvania, of far Erdely's plunging river, Maros the bitter, or broad mother Volga at Kazan? What victory heralded the great rocket for which young Lobachevski, the widow's son, was cast into prison? What severing of age-old mental fetters symbolized young Bolyai's cutting-off with his Damascus blade the spikes driven into his door-post, and strewing over the sod the thirteen Austrian cavalry officers? This book by the greatest mathematician of our time gives weightiest and most charming answer.

GEORGE BRUCE HALSTED.

INTRODUCTION

The search for truth should be the goal of our activities; it is the sole end worthy of them. Doubtless we should first bend our efforts to a.s.suage human suffering, but why? Not to suffer is a negative ideal more surely attained by the annihilation of the world. If we wish more and more to free man from material cares, it is that he may be able to employ the liberty obtained in the study and contemplation of truth.

But sometimes truth frightens us. And in fact we know that it is sometimes deceptive, that it is a phantom never showing itself for a moment except to ceaselessly flee, that it must be pursued further and ever further without ever being attained. Yet to work one must stop, as some Greek, Aristotle or another, has said. We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling, yea, even more bracing, for illusion it is which gives confidence. When it shall have vanished, will hope remain and shall we have the courage to achieve? Thus would not the horse harnessed to his treadmill refuse to go, were his eyes not bandaged? And then to seek truth it is necessary to be independent, wholly independent. If, on the contrary, we wish to act, to be strong, we should be united. This is why many of us fear truth; we consider it a cause of weakness. Yet truth should not be feared, for it alone is beautiful.

When I speak here of truth, a.s.suredly I refer first to scientific truth; but I also mean moral truth, of which what we call justice is only one aspect. It may seem that I am misusing words, that I combine thus under the same name two things having nothing in common; that scientific truth, which is demonstrated, can in no way be likened to moral truth, which is felt. And yet I can not separate them, and whosoever loves the one can not help loving the other. To find the one, as well as to find the other, it is necessary to free the soul completely from prejudice and from pa.s.sion; it is necessary to attain absolute sincerity. These two sorts of truth when discovered give the same joy; each when perceived beams with the same splendor, so that we must see it or close our eyes. Lastly, both attract us and flee from us; they are never fixed: when we think to have reached them, we find that we have still to advance, and he who pursues them is condemned never to know repose. It must be added that those who fear the one will also fear the other; for they are the ones who in everything are concerned above all with consequences. In a word, I liken the two truths, because the same reasons make us love them and because the same reasons make us fear them.

If we ought not to fear moral truth, still less should we dread scientific truth. In the first place it can not conflict with ethics.

Ethics and science have their own domains, which touch but do not interpenetrate. The one shows us to what goal we should aspire, the other, given the goal, teaches us how to attain it. So they can never conflict since they can never meet. There can no more be immoral science than there can be scientific morals.

But if science is feared, it is above all because it can not give us happiness. Of course it can not. We may even ask whether the beast does not suffer less than man. But can we regret that earthly paradise where man brute-like was really immortal in knowing not that he must die? When we have tasted the apple, no suffering can make us forget its savor. We always come back to it. Could it be otherwise? As well ask if one who has seen and is blind will not long for the light. Man, then, can not be happy through science, but to-day he can much less be happy without it.

But if truth be the sole aim worth pursuing, may we hope to attain it?

It may well be doubted. Readers of my little book 'Science and Hypothesis' already know what I think about the question. The truth we are permitted to glimpse is not altogether what most men call by that name. Does this mean that our most legitimate, most imperative aspiration is at the same time the most vain? Or can we, despite all, approach truth on some side? This it is which must be investigated.

In the first place, what instrument have we at our disposal for this conquest? Is not human intelligence, more specifically the intelligence of the scientist, susceptible of infinite variation? Volumes could be written without exhausting this subject; I, in a few brief pages, have only touched it lightly. That the geometer's mind is not like the physicist's or the naturalist's, all the world would agree; but mathematicians themselves do not resemble each other; some recognize only implacable logic, others appeal to intuition and see in it the only source of discovery. And this would be a reason for distrust. To minds so unlike can the mathematical theorems themselves appear in the same light? Truth which is not the same for all, is it truth? But looking at things more closely, we see how these very different workers collaborate in a common task which could not be achieved without their cooperation.

And that already rea.s.sures us.

Next must be examined the frames in which nature seems enclosed and which are called time and s.p.a.ce. In 'Science and Hypothesis' I have already shown how relative their value is; it is not nature which imposes them upon us, it is we who impose them upon nature because we find them convenient. But I have spoken of scarcely more than s.p.a.ce, and particularly quant.i.tative s.p.a.ce, so to say, that is of the mathematical relations whose aggregate const.i.tutes geometry. I should have shown that it is the same with time as with s.p.a.ce and still the same with 'qualitative s.p.a.ce'; in particular, I should have investigated why we attribute three dimensions to s.p.a.ce. I may be pardoned then for taking up again these important questions.

Is mathematical a.n.a.lysis, then, whose princ.i.p.al object is the study of these empty frames, only a vain play of the mind? It can give to the physicist only a convenient language; is this not a mediocre service, which, strictly speaking, could be done without; and even is it not to be feared that this artificial language may be a veil interposed between reality and the eye of the physicist? Far from it; without this language most of the intimate a.n.a.logies of things would have remained forever unknown to us; and we should forever have been ignorant of the internal harmony of the world, which is, we shall see, the only true objective reality.

The best expression of this harmony is law. Law is one of the most recent conquests of the human mind; there still are people who live in the presence of a perpetual miracle and are not astonished at it. On the contrary, we it is who should be astonished at nature's regularity. Men demand of their G.o.ds to prove their existence by miracles; but the eternal marvel is that there are not miracles without cease. The world is divine because it is a harmony. If it were ruled by caprice, what could prove to us it was not ruled by chance?

This conquest of law we owe to astronomy, and just this makes the grandeur of the science rather than the material grandeur of the objects it considers. It was altogether natural, then, that celestial mechanics should be the first model of mathematical physics; but since then this science has developed; it is still developing, even rapidly developing.

And it is already necessary to modify in certain points the scheme from which I drew two chapters of 'Science and Hypothesis.' In an address at the St. Louis exposition, I sought to survey the road traveled; the result of this investigation the reader shall see farther on.

The progress of science has seemed to imperil the best established principles, those even which were regarded as fundamental. Yet nothing shows they will not be saved; and if this comes about only imperfectly, they will still subsist even though they are modified. The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognizable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the centuries past. One must not think then that the old-fas.h.i.+oned theories have been sterile and vain.

Were we to stop there, we should find in these pages some reasons for confidence in the value of science, but many more for distrusting it; an impression of doubt would remain; it is needful now to set things to rights.

Some people have exaggerated the role of convention in science; they have even gone so far as to say that law, that scientific fact itself, was created by the scientist. This is going much too far in the direction of nominalism. No, scientific laws are not artificial creations; we have no reason to regard them as accidental, though it be impossible to prove they are not.

Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility. A world as exterior as that, even if it existed, would for us be forever inaccessible. But what we call objective reality is, in the last a.n.a.lysis, what is common to many thinking beings, and could be common to all; this common part, we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed by mathematical laws. It is this harmony then which is the sole objective reality, the only truth we can attain; and when I add that the universal harmony of the world is the source of all beauty, it will be understood what price we should attach to the slow and difficult progress which little by little enables us to know it better.

PART I

THE MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES

CHAPTER I

INTUITION AND LOGIC IN MATHEMATICS

I

It is impossible to study the works of the great mathematicians, or even those of the lesser, without noticing and distinguis.h.i.+ng two opposite tendencies, or rather two entirely different kinds of minds. The one sort are above all preoccupied with logic; to read their works, one is tempted to believe they have advanced only step by step, after the manner of a Vauban who pushes on his trenches against the place besieged, leaving nothing to chance. The other sort are guided by intuition and at the first stroke make quick but sometimes precarious conquests, like bold cavalrymen of the advance guard.

The method is not imposed by the matter treated. Though one often says of the first that they are _a.n.a.lysts_ and calls the others _geometers_, that does not prevent the one sort from remaining a.n.a.lysts even when they work at geometry, while the others are still geometers even when they occupy themselves with pure a.n.a.lysis. It is the very nature of their mind which makes them logicians or intuitionalists, and they can not lay it aside when they approach a new subject.

Nor is it education which has developed in them one of the two tendencies and stifled the other. The mathematician is born, not made, and it seems he is born a geometer or an a.n.a.lyst. I should like to cite examples and there are surely plenty; but to accentuate the contrast I shall begin with an extreme example, taking the liberty of seeking it in two living mathematicians.

M. Meray wants to prove that a binomial equation always has a root, or, in ordinary words, that an angle may always be subdivided. If there is any truth that we think we know by direct intuition, it is this. Who could doubt that an angle may always be divided into any number of equal parts? M. Meray does not look at it that way; in his eyes this proposition is not at all evident and to prove it he needs several pages.

On the other hand, look at Professor Klein: he is studying one of the most abstract questions of the theory of functions: to determine whether on a given Riemann surface there always exists a function admitting of given singularities. What does the celebrated German geometer do? He replaces his Riemann surface by a metallic surface whose electric conductivity varies according to certain laws. He connects two of its points with the two poles of a battery. The current, says he, must pa.s.s, and the distribution of this current on the surface will define a function whose singularities will be precisely those called for by the enunciation.

Doubtless Professor Klein well knows he has given here only a sketch; nevertheless he has not hesitated to publish it; and he would probably believe he finds in it, if not a rigorous demonstration, at least a kind of moral certainty. A logician would have rejected with horror such a conception, or rather he would not have had to reject it, because in his mind it would never have originated.

Again, permit me to compare two men, the honor of French science, who have recently been taken from us, but who both entered long ago into immortality. I speak of M. Bertrand and M. Hermite. They were scholars of the same school at the same time; they had the same education, were under the same influences; and yet what a difference! Not only does it blaze forth in their writings; it is in their teaching, in their way of speaking, in their very look. In the memory of all their pupils these two faces are stamped in deathless lines; for all who have had the pleasure of following their teaching, this remembrance is still fresh; it is easy for us to evoke it.