A Scientist's Choice
By J. BRONOWSKI The Spectator has asked Dr. Brbnowski the question—If you were beginning your career now what branch of science or what field of research would you choose ? This article is his reply. It is the first of a short series, to which other scientists, including Professor E. N. da C. Andrade and Sir Robert Watson-Watt, will contribute.
I IWAS brought up, at school and at Cambridge, as a mathematician. Mathematicians are of two kinds : those whose minds play naturally with numbers and other sym- bols, and those who, by contrast, think always of patterns. I belong to the second kind : the geometers. From childhood things have spoken to me by their shapes, and to this day the recognition of a new structure or relation, however abstract, comes to me with a shock of sensuous pleasure.
I did not begin to take an interest in applied science until the war tossed me into it, head over heels. Suddenly I had to ask myself what makes one bomber raid succeed and another fail; what makes an industry vulnerable; what is the strategy of dislocation. I learnt with chagrin that the scientific content of these questions is not trivial. And they cannot be solved in a chain of deductions like Euclid; they have to be stalked inductively like a detective story, and at the end the answer has only a statistical reliability. This, I found, was a study more taxing and deeper than I had been taught.
I have not gone back to university life since, except as a visiting professor. This is not because I liked my war work : I had for it then the grief I have now, or when I walked the ruins of Nagasaki. No, what the war did was to make me ashamed of my ignorance, and alarmed by it. $uch subjects as engineering and nutrition and coat chemistry and the design of automatic controls had always been treated by us at the universities as second-rate subjects; or (if we put it less bluntly) as subjects at a remove, to which one could at best transfer the solutions found in more fundamental sciences. Now I saw that all good thinking is fundamental thinking, and that every technical field, if it is boldly conceived, sets problems as radical as those of nuclear physics and the virus diseases.
From the time that I understood this I have practised it, because I think that it can be taught only by example. My • This book will be the subject of an article by Hugh Carleton Greene in next week's Spectator. aim has been to build teams of young men fresh from the universities who can be in§pired to attack the materials and the, processes of industry as deep research subjects. Good' work is only done by good men, and they in turn must feel that the work is worthy of them. I have therefore seen my task in new industrial research as the founding, not merely of a laboratory, but of a school.
II I have been writing very personally, because I know no other way 'to make the enterprise of science vivid to those who have been used to think it humdrum. The progress of a research worker is like that of a painter or a poet, in whom a technique slowly unfolds and ripens into character. To the world, each piece of research is a finished work, as a picture is or a poem. But to the lively man who did the research, who made the picture or the poem, it becomes at once the occasion for the next step : the trigger to set him off in a slightly different direction in order to solve the problems which his last work has itself raised in his mind.
By such steps every creative scientist at forty-five has moved far front his interests at twenty-five. My own change was made more abrupt and wider than most by the war, but it is not otherwise exceptional. We all change our aims in the process of reaching them. I am therefore perplexed when I am asked, particularly by those who are • about to begin their own research, whether I would set myself the same aims again tomorrow. 1 wrote my doctorate thesis on a figure in a space of five dimensions, and I now direct research in the physics and chemistry of coal. Which would I commend to others? Which would I commend to myself?
I will be downright and answer: both. For the important task which is to be done today, I think, is neither to glorify pure science nor applied science. It is to heal the breach between them; it is to make each enthusiastic for the other. I should not make myself, with the imagination of a geometer, begin at anything but geometry. And I should not make someone else, with his hands itching to do tricks with a gyro, do anything but his tricks. But I should not again wait for a war to bring us together.
My advice to myself, therefore, twenty years younger, is to do exactly the research in pure mathematics with which I began; but to do it in a compact institute which the applied sciences share on equal terms. And 1 do not choose this setting in order graciously to benefit the applied sciences. Where such an institute exists, I have found it quite as stimulating to the theoretical thinkers in it. First-class men throw off sparks wherever they are touched, and it does them good to be touched roughly by practical hands.
III No university institute of this kind exists in Britain' which links pure and applied science as 1 should like to have them linked. I am therefore free to speculate what I should like to have going on there, in order to make the most of the second youth which I am giving to myself and others. I take it for granted that people will be working on aeronautics and the theory of the nucleus, on metals below and cosmic rays above, on hard economics and speculative philosophies. But there is one group of subjects which is usually ignored in such plans, on which I want to insist. They are the subjects which together are called biology. My own education, like that of most scientists, neglected biology. Yet more and more has come to suggest to me the models by which the world is to be understood. I have learnt statistics by way of biology. I have learnt to explore the world not as a machine but as a structure, which fits with the tolerances and moves with the uncertainties of life.
Plainly, all applied science has much to learn from biological thinking, today as in Leonardo's drawings. But 1 am once again thinking also of the pure scientist; indeed, I am thinking of my own interests. If today I were beginning my mathe- matical research in such a mixed institute, where should I hope that it would lead me? Not to applied but to living ettArice: to biology. My ambition would be no less than to ;'"Srosp the pattern of evolution. This is an odd confession for a man who now divides his e between industrial research and philosophy, and thinks bly of both vocations. Yet it intrigues .and nettles me, of evolution seems to me a secret on the tip of the tongue Of our generation, which we have alinost but not quite uttered. Ne have the main clues. Darwin gave us the mechanism of natural selection. Mendel gave us the pool of genetical varia- tions on which selection goes to work. So much is accepted the world over—for even the Russians seem now to be repent- ing of their flirtation with the old-fashioned theory of pur- poseful adaptation which Lysenko took from the eighteenth century.
But so much, alas, is to me too simple. A pool of arbitrary variations, an association of any character with any other, is not lifelike. Plants and animals run too true to set patterns, here and in the Antipodes; and the life cycle of the odder pests is really too outrageous to be computed by the fall of dice. There is same internal organisation of plant and animal processes, some unity in the structure of each, which fixes the steps of evolution; and somehow we have missed it. I should like to be young enough, with my head full of modern geometry, to spend ten years among biologists and, practical scientists, to look for the secret of evolution.
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