White people often perceive black men to be bigger, taller, and more muscular and therefore more threatening than they really are. They seem more menacing, and we want to build walls around them.
You might recognize his name as half of the psychological phenomenon that bears his name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. Inexperience masquerades as expertise. An irony of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that so many people misinterpret it, are overconfident in their understanding of it, and get it wrong.
Human memory is extremely malleable, prone to small changes. In , psychologist Will Gervais scored an honor any PhD science student would covet: a co-authored paper in the journal Science , one of the top interdisciplinary scientific journals in the world. One of the experiments in the paper tried to see if getting people to think more rationally would make them less willing to report religious beliefs. They thought The Thinker would nudge people to think harder, more analytically.
It was catnip for science journalists: one small trick to change the way we think. But it was a tiny, small-sample study, the exact type that is prone to yielding false positives.
Several years later, another lab attempted to replicate the findings with a much larger sample size , and failed to find any evidence for the effect. But turns out this assumption is false. Sure, there might be some people who will troll you for your mistakes. There might be a mob on Twitter that converges in order to shame you.
Some moments of humility could be humiliating. But this fear must be vanquished if we are to become less intellectually arrogant and more intellectually humble. For some researchers, the reckoning has been personally unsettling. And that environment is hard to build. It involves things like having critics yell at you and telling you that you did things wrong and reanalyze your data.
Again: Even among scientists — people who ought to question everything — intellectual humility is hard. In some cases, researchers have refused to concede their original conclusions despite the unveiling of new evidence. Psychologists are human. When they reach a conclusion, it becomes hard to see things another way. Plus, the incentives for a successful career in science push researchers to publish as many positive findings as possible.
There are two solutions — among many — to make psychological science more humble, and I think we can learn from them. One is that humility needs to be built into the standard practices of the science. And that happens through transparency. It also makes sure all data is open and accessible to anyone who wants to conduct a reanalysis. And two, there needs to be more celebration of failure, and a culture that accepts it.
That includes building safe places for people to admit they were wrong, like the Loss of Confidence Project. I have just one small mind, a tiny, leaky boat upon which to go exploring knowledge in a vast and knotty sea of which I carry no clear map. Why is it that some people never seem to wrestle with those waters? Hence the exaggerated confidence of philosophy in the powers of the individual mind.
Whether it is dogmatic or critical, whether it admits the relativity of our knowledge or claims to be established within the absolute, a philosophy is generally the work of a philosopher, a single and unitary vision of the whole. It is to be taken or left. More modest, and also alone capable of being completed and perfected, is the philosophy we advocate. Human intelligence, as we represent it, is not at all what Plato taught in the allegory of the cave.
Its function is not to look at passing shadows nor yet to turn itself round and contemplate the glaring sun. It has something else to do. Harnessed, like yoked oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the plow and the resistance of the soil. To act and to know that we are acting, to come into touch with reality and even to live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns the work that is being accomplished and the furrow that is being plowed, such is the function of human intelligence.
Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence we draw the very force to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel that our being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has been formed therein by a kind of local concentration.
Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed into its principle, may thus live back again its own genesis. But the enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke; it is. It consists in an interchange of impressions which, correcting and adding to each other, will end by expanding the humanity in us and making us even transcend it.
But this method has against it the most inveterate habits of the mind. It at once suggests the idea of a vicious circle. In vain, we shall be told, you claim to go beyond intelligence: how can you do that except by intelligence?
All that is clear in your consciousness is intelligence. You are inside your own thought; you cannot get out of it. Say, if you like, that the intellect is capable of progress, that it will see more and more clearly into a greater and greater number of things; but do not speak of engendering it, for it is with your intellect itself that you would have to do the work.
The objection presents itself naturally to the mind. But the same reasoning would prove also the impossibility of acquiring any new habit. It is of the essence of reasoning to shut us up in the circle of the given. But action breaks the circle. If we had never seen a man swim, we might say that swimming is an impossible thing, inasmuch as, to learn to swim, we must begin by holding ourselves up in the water and, consequently, already know how to swim.
Reasoning, in fact, always nails us down to the solid ground. But if, quite simply, I throw myself into the water without fear, I may keep myself up well enough at first by merely struggling, and gradually adapt myself to the new environment: I shall thus have learnt to swim. So, in theory, there is a kind of absurdity in trying to know otherwise than by intelligence; but if the risk be frankly accepted, action will perhaps cut the knot that reasoning has tied and will not unloose.
Besides, the risk will appear to grow less, the more our point of view is adopted. We have shown that in-. And further we compared the intellect to a solid nucleus formed by means of condensation.
This nucleus does not differ radically from the fluid surrounding it. It can only be reabsorbed in it because it is made of the same substance. He who throws himself into the water, having known only the resistance of the solid earth, will immediately be drowned if he does not struggle against the fluidity of the new environment: he must perforce still cling to that solidity, so to speak, which even water presents.
Only on this condition can he get used to the fluid's fluidity. So of our thought, when it has decided to make the leap. But leap it must, that is, leave its own environment. Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in extending them, though the extension would not appear at all unreasonable once it were accomplished. Thousands and thousands of variations on the theme of walking will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the water, and when you know how to swim, you will understand how the mechanism of swimming is connected with that of walking.
Swimming is an extension of walking, but walking would never have pushed you on to swimming. So you may speculate as intelligently as you will on the mechanism of intelligence; you will never, by this method, succeed in going beyond it, You may get something more complex, but not something higher nor even something different,, You must take things by storm: you must thrust intelligence outside itself by an act of will.
So the vicious circle is only apparent. It is, on the contrary, real, we think, in every other method of philosophy. This we must try to show in a few words, if only. At first sight, it may seem prudent to leave the consideration of facts to positive science, to let physics and chemistry busy themselves with matter, the biological and psychological sciences with life. The task of the philosopher is then clearly defined. He takes facts and laws from the scientists' hand; and whether he tries to go beyond them in order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to go further and even proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for the facts and relations, handed over by science, the sort of respect that is due to a final verdict.
To this knowledge he adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks proper, a metaphysic; but the matter of knowledge he regards as the affair of science and not of philosophy. But how does he fail to see that the real result of this so-called division of labor is to mix up everything and confuse everything? The metaphysic or the critique that the philosopher has reserved for himself he has to receive, ready-made, from positive science, it being already contained in the descriptions and analyses, the whole care of which he left to the scientists.
For not having wished to intervene, at the beginning, in questions of fact, he finds himself reduced, in questions of principle, to formulating purely and simply in more precise terms the unconscious and consequently inconsistent, metaphysic and critique which the very attitude of science to reality marks out.
Let us not be deceived by an apparent analogy between natural things and human things. Here we are not in the judiciary domain, where the description of fact and the.
Here the laws are internal to the facts and relative to the lines that have been followed in cutting the real into distinct facts. We cannot describe the outward appearance of the object without prejudging its inner nature and its organization. Form is no longer entirely isolable from matter, and he who has begun by reserving to philosophy questions of principle, and who has thereby tried to put philosophy above the sciences, as a " court of cassation" is above the courts of assizes and of appeal, will gradually come to make no more of philosophy than a registration court, charged at most with wording more precisely the sentences that are brought to it, pronounced and irrevocable.
Positive science is, in fact, a work of pure intellect. Now, whether our conception of the intellect be accepted or rejected, there is one point on which everybody will agree with us, and that is that the intellect is at home in the presence of unorganized matter. This matter it makes use of more and more by mechanical inventions, and mechanical inventions become the easier to it the more it thinks matter as mechanism.
The intellect bears within itself, in the form of natural logic, a latent geometrism that is set free in the measure and proportion that the intellect penetrates into the inner nature of inert matter. Intelligence is in tune with this matter, and that is why the physics and metaphysics of inert matter are so near each other. Now, when the intellect undertakes the study of life, it necessarily treats the living like the inert, applying the same forms to this new object, carrying over into this new field the same habits that have succeeded so well in the old; and it is right to do so, for only on such.
But the truth we thus arrive at becomes altogether relative to our faculty of action. It is no more than a symbolic verity. It cannot have the same value as the physical verity, being only an extension of physics to an object which we are a priori agreed to look at only in its external aspect. The duty of philosophy should be to intervene here actively, to examine the living without any reservation as to practical utility, by freeing itself from forms and habits that are strictly intellectual.
Its own special object is to speculate, that is to say, to see; its attitude toward the living should not be that of science, which aims only at action, and which, being able to act only by means of inert matter, presents to itself the rest of reality in this single respect. What must the result be, if it leave biological and psychological facts to positive science alone, as it has left, and rightly left, physical facts?
It will accept a priori a mechanistic conception of all nature, a conception unreflected and even unconscious, the outcome of the material need. It will a priori accept the doctrine of the simple unity of knowledge and of the abstract unity of nature. The moment it does so, its fate is sealed. The philosopher has no longer any choice save between a metaphysical dogmatism and a metaphysical skepticism, both of which rest, at bottom, on the same postulate, and neither of which adds anything to positive science.
He may hypostasize the unity of nature, or, what comes to the same thing, the unity of science, in a being who is nothing since he does nothing, an ineffectual God who simply sums up in himself all the given; or in an eternal Matter from whose womb have been poured out the properties of things and the laws of nature; or, again, in a pure Form which endeavors to seize an unseizable multiplicity, and which is,.
All these philosophies tell us, in their different languages, that science is right to treat the living as the inert, and that there is no difference of value, no distinction to be made between the results which intellect arrives at in applying its categories, whether it rests on inert matter or attacks life.
In many cases, however, we feel the frame cracking. But as we did not begin by distinguishing between the inert and the living, the one adapted in advance to the frame in which we insert it , the other incapable of being held in the frame otherwise than by a convention which eliminates from it all that is essential, we find ourselves' in the end, reduced to regarding everything the frame contains with equal suspicion.
To a metaphysical dogmatism, which has erected into an absolute the factitious unity of science, there succeeds a skepticism or a relativism that universalizes and extends to all the results of science the artificial character of some among them. So philosophy swings to and fro between the doctrine that regards absolute reality as unknowable and that which, in the idea it gives us of this reality, says nothing more than science has said.
For having wished to prevent all conflict between science and philosophy, we have sacrificed philosophy without any appreciable gain to science. And for having tried to avoid the seeming vicious circle which consists in using the intellect to transcend the intellect, we find ourselves turning in a real circle, that which consists in laboriously rediscovering by metaphysics a unity that we began by positing a priori, a unity that we admitted blindly and unconsciously by the very act of abandoning the whole of experience to science and the whole of reality to the pure understanding.
We shall find that the inert enters naturally into the frames of the intellect, but that the living is adapted to these frames only artificially, so that we must adopt a special attitude towards it and examine it with other eyes than those of positive science. Philosophy, then, invades the domain of experience. She busies herself with many things which hitherto have not concerned her. Science, theory of knowledge, and metaphysics find themselves on the same ground. At first there may be a certain confusion.
All three may think they have lost something. But all three will profit from the meeting. Positive science, indeed, may pride itself on the uniform value attributed to its affirmations in the whole field of experience.
But, if they are all placed on the same footing, they are all tainted with the same relativity. It is not so, if we begin by making the distinction which, in our view, is forced upon us. The understanding is at home in the domain of unorganized matter. On this matter human action is naturally exercised; and action, as we said above, cannot be set in motion in the unreal.
Thus, of physics-so long as we are considering only its general form and not the particular cutting out of matter in which it is manifested-we may say that it touches the absolute. On the contrary, it is by accident-chance or convention, as you please--that science obtains a hold on the living analogous to the hold it has on matter. Here the use of conceptual frames is no longer natural. I do not wish to say that it is not legitimate, in the scientific meaning of the term.
If science is to extend our action on things, and if we can act only with inert matter for instrument, science can and must continue to treat the living as it has treated the inert. But, in doing so, it must be understood that the further it penetrates the. On this new ground philosophy ought then to follow science, in order to superpose on scientific truth a knowledge of another kind, which may be called metaphysical.
Thus combined, all our knowledge, both scientific and metaphysical, is heightened. In the absolute we live and move and have our being. The knowledge we possess of it is incomplete, no doubt, but not external or relative.
It is reality itself, in the profoundest meaning of the word, that we reach by the combined and progressive development of science and of philosophy. Thus, in renouncing the factitious unity which the understanding imposes on nature from outside, we shall perhaps find its true, inward and living unity. For the effort we make to transcend the pure understanding introduces us into that more 'vast something out of which our understanding is cut, and from which it has detached itself.
And, as matter is determined by intelligence, as there is between them an evident agreement, we cannot make the genesis of the one without making the genesis of the other. An identical process must have cut out matter and the intellect, at the same time, from a stuff that contained both. Into this reality we shall get back more and more completely, in proportion as we compel ourselves to transcend pure intelligence. Let us then concentrate attention on that which we have that is at the same time the most removed from externality and the least penetrated with intellectuality.
Let us seek, in the depths of our experience, the point where we feel ourselves most intimately within our own life. It is into pure duration that we then plunge back, a duration in which the past, always moving on, is swelling.
But, at the same time, we feel the spring of our will strained to its utmost limit. We must, by a strong recoil of our personality on itself, gather up our past which is slipping away, in order to thrust it, compact and undivided, into a present which it will create by entering.
Rare indeed are the moments when we are self-possessed to this extent: it is then that our actions are truly free. And even at these moments we do not completely possess ourselves. Our feeling of duration, I should say the actual coinciding of ourself with itself, admits of degrees.
But the more the feeling is deep and the coincidence complete, the more the life in which it replaces us absorbs intellectuality by transcending it.
For the natural function of the intellect is to bind like to like, and it is only facts that can be repeated that are entirely adaptable to intellectual conceptions. Now, our intellect does undoubtedly grasp the real moments of real duration after they are past; we do so by reconstituting the new state of consciousness out of a series of views taken of it from the outside, each of which resembles as much as possible something already known; in this sense we may say that the state of consciousness contains intellectuality implicitly.
Yet the state of consciousness overflows the intellect; it is indeed incommensurable with the intellect, being itself indivisible and new. Now let us relax the strain, let us interrupt the effort to crowd as much as possible of the past into the present. If the relaxation were complete, there would no longer be either memory or will-which amounts to saying that, in fact, we never do fall into this absolute passivity, any more than we can make ourselves absolutely free.
But, in the Emit, we get a glimpse of an existence made of a present which recommences unceasingly -- devoid of real. Is the existence of matter of this nature? Not altogether, for analysis resolves it into elementary vibrations, the shortest of which are of very slight duration, almost vanishing, but not nothing.
It may be presumed, nevertheless, that physical existence inclines in this second direction, as psychical existence in the first. Behind " spirituality" on the one hand, and " materiality" with intellectuality on the other, there are then two processes opposite in their direction, and we pass from the first to the second by way of inversion, or perhaps even by simple interruption, if it is true that inversion and interruption are two terms which in this case must be held to be synonymous, as we shall show at more length later on.
This presumption is confirmed when we consider things from the point of view of extension, and no longer from that of duration alone. The more we succeed in making ourselves conscious of our progress in pure duration, the more we feel the different parts of our being enter into each other, and our whole personality concentrate itself in a point, or rather a sharp edge, pressed against the future and cutting into it unceasingly.
It is in this that life and action are free. But suppose we let ourselves go and, instead of acting, dream. At once the self is scattered; our past, which till then was gathered together into the indivisible impulsion it communicated to us, is broken up into a thousand recollections made external to one another. They give up interpenetrating in the degree that they become fixed.
Our personality thus descends in the direction of space. It coasts around it continually in sensation. We will not dwell here on a point we have studied elsewhere. Let us merely recall that extension. No doubt we make only the first steps in the direction of the extended, even when we let ourselves go as much as we can.
But suppose for a moment that matter consists in this very movement pushed further, and that physics is simply psychics inverted. We shall now understand why the mind feels at its ease, moves about naturally in space, when matter suggests the more distinct idea of it.
This space it already possessed as an implicit idea in its own eventual detension, that is to say, of its own possible extension. The mind finds space in things, but could have got it without them if it had had imagination strong enough to push the inversion of its own natural movement to the end. On the other hand, we are able to explain how matter accentuates still more its materiality, when viewed by the mind.
Matter, at first, aided mind to run down its own incline; it gave the impulsion. But, the impulsion once received, mind continues its course. The idea that it forms of pure space is only the schema of the limit at which this movement would end. Once in possession of the form of space, mind uses it like a net with meshes that can be made and unmade at will, which, thrown over matter, divides it as the needs of our action demand.
Thus, the space of our geometry and the spatiality of things are mutually engendered by the reciprocal action and reaction of two terms which are essentially the same, but which move each in the direction inverse of the other. Neither is space so foreign to our nature as we imagine, nor is matter as completely extended in space as our senses and intellect represent it. We have treated of the first point elsewhere. As to the second, we will limit ourselves to pointing out that perfect spatiality would consist in a perfect externality of parts in their relation to one another, that is to say, in a complete reciprocal independence.
Now, there is no material point that does not act on every other material point - When we observe that a thing really is there where it acts, we shall be led to say as Faraday[2] was that all the atoms interpenetrate and that each of them fills the world. On such a hypothesis, the atom or, more generally, the material point, becomes simply a view of the mind. Yet it is undeniable that matter lends itself to this subdivision, and that, in supposing it breakable into parts external to one another, we are constructing a science sufficiently representative of the real.
It is undeniable that if there be no entirely isolated system, yet science finds means of cutting up the universe into systems relatively independent of each other, and commits no appreciable error in doing so.
What else can this mean but that matter extends itself in space without being absolutely extended therein, and that in regarding matter as decomposable into isolated systems, in attributing to it quite distinct elements which change in relation to each other without changing in themselves which are "displaced," shall we say, without being "altered" , in short, in conferring on matter the properties of pure space, we are transporting ourselves to the terminal point of the movement of which matter simply indicates the direction?
We cannot reason indefinitely on the notions of heat, color, or weight: in order to know the modalities of weight or of heat, we must have recourse to experience. Not so of the notion of space. Supposing even that it is given empirically by sight and touch and Kant has not questioned the fact there is this about it that is remarkable that our mind, speculating on it with its own powers alone, cuts out in it, a priori, figures whose properties we determine a priori: experience, with which we have not kept in touch, yet follows us through the infinite complications of our reasonings and invariably justifies them.
That is the fact. Kant has set it in clear light. But the explanation of the fact, we believe, must be sought in a different direction to that which Kant followed.
Intelligence, as Kant represents it to us, is bathed in an atmosphere of spatiality to which it is as inseparably united as the living body to the air it breathes. Our perceptions reach us only after having passed through this atmosphere. They have been impregnated in advance by our geometry, so that our faculty of thinking only finds again in matter the mathematical properties which our faculty of perceiving has already deposed there. We are assured, therefore, of seeing matter yield itself with docility to our reasonings; but this matter, in all that it has that is intelligible, is our own work; of the reality " in itself" we know nothing and never shall know anything, since we only get its refraction through the forms of our faculty of perceiving.
So that if we claim to affirm something of it, at once there rises the contrary affirmation, equally demonstrable, equally plausible. The ideality of space is proved directly by the analysis of knowledge indirectly by the antinomies to which the opposite theory. Such is the governing idea of the Kantian criticism. It has inspired Kant with a peremptory refutation of "empiricist" theories of knowledge. But, in what it affirms, does it give us the solution of the problem? With Kant, space is given as a ready-made form of our perceptive faculty-- a veritable deus ex machina, of which we see neither how it arises, nor why it is what it is rather than anything else.
If the unknowable reality projects into our perceptive faculty a "sensuous manifold" capable of fitting into it exactly, is it not, by that very fact, in part known? And when we examine this exact fitting, shall we not be led, in one point at least, to suppose a pre-established harmony between things and our mind an idle hypothesis, which Kant was right in wishing to avoid?
At bottom, it is for not having distinguished degrees in spatiality that he has had to take space ready-made as given-whence the question how the "sensuous manifold" is adapted to it. It is for the same reason that he has supposed matter wholly developed into parts absolutely external to one another; -whence antinomies, of which we may plainly see that the thesis and antithesis suppose the perfect coincidence of matter with geometrical space, but which vanish the moment we cease to extend to matter what is true only of pure space.
Whence, finally, the conclusion that there are three alternatives, and three only, among which to choose a theory of knowledge: either the mind is determined by things, or things are determined by the mind, or between mind and things we must suppose a mysterious agreement. This alternative consists, first of all, in regarding the intellect as a special function of the mind, essentially turned toward inert matter; then in saying that neither does matter determine the form of the intellect, nor does the intellect impose its form on matter, nor have matter and intellect been regulated in regard to one another by we know not what pre-established harmony, but that intellect and matter have progressively adapted themselves one to the other in order to attain at last a common form.
This adaptation has, moreover, been brought about quite naturally, because it is the same inversion of the same movement which creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality of things. From this point of view the knowledge of matter that our perception on one hand and science on the other give to us appears, no doubt, as approximative, but not as relative.
Our perception, whose role it is to hold up a light to our actions, works a dividing up of matter that is always too sharply defined, always subordinated to practical needs, consequently always requiring revision. Our science, which aspires to the mathematical form, overaccentuates the spatiality of matter; its formulae are, in general, too precise, and ever need remaking.
For a scientific theory to be final, the mind would have to embrace the totality of things in block and place each thing in its exact relation to every other thing; but in reality we are obliged to consider problems one by one, in terms which are, for that 'very reason, provisional, so that the solution of each problem will have to be corrected indefi-.
It is in this meaning, and to this degree, that science must be regarded as conventional. But it is a conventionality of fact so to speak, and not of right. In principle, positive science bears on reality itself, provided it does not overstep the limits of its own domain, which is inert matter.
Scientific knowledge, thus regarded, rises to a higher plane. In return, the theory of knowledge becomes an infinitely difficult enterprise, and which passes the powers of the intellect alone. It is not enough to determine, by careful analysis, the categories of thought; we must engender them. As regards space, we must, by an effort of mind sui generis, follow the progression or rather the regression of the extra-spatial degrading itself into spatiality.
When we make ourselves self-conscious in the highest possible degree and then let ourselves fall back little by little, we get the feeling of extension: we have an extension of the self into recollections that are fixed and external to one another, in place of the tension it possessed as an indivisible active will.
But this is only a beginning. Our consciousness, sketching the movement, shows us its direction and reveals to us the possibility of continuing it to the end; but consciousness itself does not go so far. Now, on the other hand, if we consider matter, which seems to us at first coincident with space, we find that the more our attention is fixed on it, the more the parts which we qaid were, laid side by side enter into each other, each of them undergoing the action of the whole, which is consequently somehow present in it.
Thus, although matter stretches itself out in the direction of space, it does not completely attain it; whence. We hold, therefore, the two ends of the chain, though we do not succeed in seizing the intermediate links.
Will they always escape us? We must remember that philosophy, as we define it, has not yet become completely conscious of itself. Physics understands its role when it pushes matter in the direction of spatiality; but has metaphysics understood its role when it has simply trodden in the steps of physics, in the chimerical hope of going further in the same direction? Should not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that physics descends, to bring back matter to its origins, and to build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to speak, a reversed psychology?
All that which seems positive to the physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an interruption or inversion of the true positivity, which would have to be defined in psychological terms.
When we consider the admirable order of mathematics, the perfect agreement of the objects it deals with, the immanent logic in numbers and figures, our certainty of always getting the same conclusion, however diverse and complex our reasonings on the same subject, we hesitate to see in properties apparently so positive a system of negations, the absence rather than the presence of a true reality.
But we must not forget that our intellect, which finds this order and wonders at it, is directed in the same line of movement that loads to the materiality and spatiality of its object. The more complexity the intellect puts into its object by analyzing it, the more complex is the order it finds there.
And this order and this complexity necessarily appear to the intellect as a positive reality, since. When a poet reads me his verses, I can interest myself enough in him to enter into his thought, put myself into his feelings, live over again the simple state he has broken into phrases and words. I sympathize then with his inspiration, I follow it with a continuous movement which is, like the inspiration itself, an undivided act.
Now, I need only relax my attention, let go the tension that there is in me, for the sounds, hitherto swallowed up in the sense, to appear to me distinctly, one by one, in their materiality. For this I have not to do anything; it is enough to withdraw something. In proportion as I let myself go, the successive sounds will become the more individualized; as the phrases were broken into words, so the words will scan in syllables which I shall perceive one after another.
But subject them to high temperatures, or to mustard gas, or to cosmic rays, and an atom is easily knocked out of place so that a change is induced in the gene which results in production of a creature of slightly different characteristics.
Thus a mutation can result, giving nature an occasional new opportunity for improving by selection, with the resulting great sweep of organic evolution. These great assists to the Quantum Theory of light were only two of Einstein's early papers; the third, his greatest break-through of the boundaries of knowledge, was his paper on Special Relativity.
Only a few scientists paid much attention to it for a dozen years, and for a time fewer than a dozen, were able to understand its mathematics. By it had been extended, verified, and accepted, and with the Quantum Theory it now forms one of the great twin bastions of modern physics, and indeed of all science.
By Einstein's greatest work was done, though he was still to do enough of importance to bring an outstanding reputation to any run--of-the-mine theoretical physicist. His short paper on General Relativity made a great splash in the popular press when it appeared in , especially after it and his earlier theory were verified by measurements on such things as his prediction of a bending of light rays by the gravitational field of the sun and his explanation of the advance of the perihelion of the planet Mercury.
From this time onward Einstein's work, though occasionally sending a sharp shaft of light to illuminate a dark spot in physics, declined in importance. His work on the Brownian movement, that flea-like jumping of small flakes of mica or carbon that can be observed as they are pushed about by the molecules of a liquid in which they are suspended, published in , was merely an excellent theoretical investigation by a highly qualified physicist.
His contribution to the Bose-Einstein Statistics was even more important, but in the same category, and could have been made by any one of a dozen living physicists. In his later years, while a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Einstein occupied himself in the search for a unified field theory. Of the three basic forces of the universe, the electrical, magnetic, and gravitational forces which account for all physical phenomena, the first two are known to be related, and it seems probable to many physicists that all will ultimately be found to be expressions of a single basic force.
The papers that Einstein published on this subject seem not to have been directly fruitful, though his thoughts will surely serve as a basis on which others can build in the urge for seeking a unifying principle behind all life. Many experts believe that he was not even on the right track in this work. Some felt that he became increasingly traditional as he aged; others that he had struck such a high mark in his youth that he was unable to excel it except by attempting the almost impossible.
Thus the Quantum Theory and Relativity, both basic to our modern understanding of the universe, benefited by Einstein's thought. To the first was only one contributor of many, however, and the names of Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, de Broglie, Schrodinger, Pauli, and many others must be joined with his.
But Relativity is Einstein's alone, and it will stand as his enduring monument. The basic arguments of Relativity are not difficult to comprehend, though the detailed mathematical argument lies in a field so uncommon that it was familiar to only a few trained mathematicians when the theory first appeared. Einstein had a pleasant and full-fledged gift of humor, which he used to fob off laymen who wanted a simple explanation of Relativity, saying, "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it's only a minute.
But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it's two hours. That's relativity. Closer to the truth was the statement he approved: "There is no hitching post in the Universe—so far as we know. Such common sense when applied to light waves led to contradictory results, and his great genius lay in having both the willingness and the ability to see what had to be assumed to make things come out as they are observed.
By being so apparently foolish as to assume that light moves at a constant speed relative to all observers, no matter how they are moving relative to one another, Einstein picked up the thread of truth again and led the whole baying field of scientists, their tattered Aether in shreds, off in a new direction. The passing of Einstein gives us a chance to stop and think how it felt to have been alive while one of the authentic great minds of all history was doing its work.
All of his reputation is deserved, but on a basis rather different from that commonly supposed. The intelligent man in the street is likely to say that Einstein was the world's greatest mathematician. This is correct enough, but in truth it misses the mark. He was, to be sure, a natural lover of mathematics, and taught himself from books at an early age more mathematics than any person but one in a million ever learns.
However, there have been and are many greater mathematicians than he. Instead, he was that priceless rarity, an intuitive thinker who was able to assemble and grasp great generalities, and manipulate them into view for the world of men. He knew what he wanted to do, and when he did not have the mathematical tools himself, he knew where to turn for help. For mathematical help he turned to specialists. It is not the feat of working out a theory so difficult to understand as the basic tenets of Relativity that excites our admiration, so much as the ability of a man to dash in so radical a direction to pick up the vanished thread of truth.
0コメント