Aspects of science

Chapter 2: PREFACE

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About This Book

A collection of essays examines scientific ideas from a humanistic and aesthetic standpoint, tracing how theories arise, satisfy curiosity, comprehension, and practice, and interact with culture. Subjects range from foundational assumptions, physics, and mathematics to biographies of scientific figures, popularization, amateur observation, and the relation between science and mystery. The author considers scientific method, education, personalities, and the social duties of scientists, arguing that science develops through historical context and serves intellectual, practical, and aesthetic needs while leaving room for unresolved questions.

PREFACE

The papers which make up this volume have been selected because, although they deal with different aspects of various scientific ideas, yet they do illustrate, more or less, one point of view. That point of view may be described, perhaps as æsthetic, but rather better as humanistic. Scientific ideas have a history; they arose to satisfy certain human needs; to see them in their context is to see them as part of the general intellectual and emotional life of man. What they exist to do they do better than does anything else, and the needs they satisfy are not peculiar to scientific specialists. These papers try to show one or two of the many reasons why, for people who are not specialists as well as for those who are, science may be interesting.

J. W. N. SULLIVAN.