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科学与人文价值
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科学与人文价值
2008.01.15
科学和人文价值
科学是现代人文的重要部分。只有还生活在现代以前的人，才不明白这一点。最为可怕的是，仍然还生活在现代之前的那些野蛮人，又接受了一堆自己无法消化的后现代思想，硬要把科学和人文割裂开来，还自诩为高举人文大旗反对科学主义的斗士，试图成为阻碍社会发展的螳螂。
其实理解科学并不一定需要理解科学中的那些繁琐的细节，只需要了解日常生活中最基本的事实和具有基本的常识，以及科学的基本精神。Jacob Bronowski的《Science and human values》正是帮助人们了解科学的精神的一本具有重要价值的小书。我在元旦期间又将它读了一遍。
Amazon上《Science and human values》一书的信息和链接：http://www.amazon.com/Science-Human-Values-Jacob-Bronowski/dp/0060972815
这本书是2002年在Seattle开国际光学工程师协会年会（SPIE）年会时在Crossroads Mall里的一个旧书店买的。同时买的书还包括以下几本：
1. Jacob Bronowski的《A Sense of the Future》
2. Keith J. Leidler的《To Light Such a Candle－Chapters in the History of Science and Technology》
3. Ed Regis的《Who Got Einstein's Office-Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study》
这几本书我都非常喜欢，不然也不会不远万里地从太平洋那边背将回来。
第一本收集了Bronowski写的关于科学人文方面的19篇文章。第二本是关于过去200多年中重要的现代科学和技术发展和对社会回的影响的历史的回顾，文笔优美，史料丰富。第三本研究了普林斯顿高等研究院的历史和相关的问题。
什么科学和什么人文价值
Jacob Bronowski（1908-1974）是大数学家Hardy的学生，剑桥大学的数学博士。他还是著名的数学家、诗人、历史学家，和当代科学人文主义运动的创始人。Jacob Bronowski是真正的科学文化人，关于他，我在以前的一篇名为《方舟子的打假人生以及科学和人类价值》博文中也有一些介绍。
《方舟子的打假人生以及科学和人类价值》博文链接：http://www.sciencenet.cn/blog/user_content.aspx?id=2535
Jacob Bronowski Archive链接：http://www.drbronowski.com/
《Science and human values》这本小书是非常优美的散文，源自Bronowski于1953年在麻省理工学院（MIT）做Carnegie Professor时候的几个演讲。它包括三个部分：
1. The creative mind （创造性的头脑）
2. The habit of truth （真理的习惯）
3. The sense of human dignity （人类尊严的意义）
后来Bronowski在这几个演讲的内容之外，又加上了下面的一篇文章：
The abacus and the rose-A new dialogue on two world systems （算盘和玫瑰－关于两个世界体系的新对话）
光看这些题目就很有意思。Bronowski在这些文章中讨论了科学作为人类文化的基本特征。他的这本书中的思想值得所有愿意思考的人了解。
可惜本书只有在台湾有中文版，中国科学院自然科学史研究所图书馆有收藏。英文版中国科学院图书馆也有收藏。我在网上下载了发表在杂志上的英文原文，因为版权关系不能贴在这里，如果有哪位有兴趣，可以发email给我（hongfei@iccas.ac.cn）。
《Science and human values》摘录
下面是从书中摘录的一些句子。
1. Science is as integral a part of the culture of our age as the arts are.
2. I define science as the organization of our knowledge in such a way that it commands more of the hidden potential in nature.
3. Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.
4. All science is the search for unity in hidden likeness.
5. When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty, he said, is 'unity in variety'. Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature-or more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety.
6. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again.
7. Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
8. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.
9. This element of poetry, the delight in exploring the medium for its own sake, is an essential ingredient in the creative process.
10. It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies.
11. I found the act of creation to lie in the discovery of a hidden likeness. The scientist or the artist takes two facts or experiences which are separate; he finds in them a likeness which had not been seen before; and he creates a unity by showing the likeness.
12. The act of appreciation re-enacts the act of creation, and we are (each of us) actors, we are interpreters of it.
13. It took its greatest strength later from Renaissance men like Leonardo, in whom truth to fact became a passion.
14. The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
15. In the field of science, four hundred years of adventure have taught us that the rational method is more subtle than this, and that concepts are its most subtle creation.
16. So St. Thomas Aquinas holds that faith is a higher guide to truth than knowledge is; the master of medieval science puts science firmly into second place.
17. The problem of values arises only when men try to fit together their need to be social animals with their need to be free men.
18. All this knowledge, all our knowledge, has been built up communally; there would be no astrophysics, there would be no history, there would not even be language, if man were a solitary animal.
19. The dizzy progress of science, theoretical and practical, has depended on the existence of a fellowship of scientists which is free, uninhibited and communicative.
20. A recent study has indeed shown that, as a profession, science attracts men whose temperament is grave, awkward and absorbed. But this is in the main the scholar's temperament, which is shared by historians and literary critics and painters in miniature.
21. In science, there is no substitute for independence.
22. Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last ten years.
23. Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
24. But if in addition science is to become effective as a public practice, it must go further; it must protect independence.
25. Tolerance among scientists cannot be based on indifference, it must be based on respect.
26. Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but the search for them.
27. Science at last respects the scientist more than his theories; for by its nature it must prize the search above the discovery, and the thinking (and with it the thinker) voer the thought.
28. A true society is sustained by the sense of human dignity.
29. This is the scientist's moral: that there is no distinction between ends and means.
30. It must encourage the single scientist to be independent, and the body of scientists to be tolerant. From these basic conditions, which form the prime values, there follows step by step a range of values: dissent, freedom of thought and speech, justice, honor, human dignity and self-respect.
31. Yet the values they seldom spoke of shone out of their work and entered their ages, and slowly re-made the minds of men.
32. On the contrary, like the other creative activities which grew from the Renaissance, science has humanized our values. Men have asked for freedom, justice and respect precisely as the scientific spirit has spread among them. The dilemma of today is not that the human values cannot control a mechanical science. It is the other way about: the scientific spirit is more human than the machinery of governments.
33. It is not the scientist who can govern society; his duty is to teach it the implications and the values in his work.
34. This is why, at bottom, the society of scientists is more important than their discoveries. What science has to teach us here is not its techniques but its spirit: the irresistible need to explore.
35. What is true of poetry is true of all creative thought. And what I said then of one value is true of all human values. The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.
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