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made at the end of the ninteenth century that all that's left in physics is fill–
ing in the sixth decinlal place--just a few years before we had relativity,
quantum theory, and so on. At the end of the twentieth century there are
authors writing that history has come to an end, that science has come to an
end. All that is left is ironic science, whatever that is; that the kind of ques–
tions we deal with today can never be experimentally verified. From the point
of view of a working scientist nothing could be more absurd. We all think
that the questions we are working on can be verified, that we will verify them
and will solve the problems just as our predecessors solved theirs. In fact, I
remember when I was a mere youth at the Institute for Advanced Study, all
the young guys would sit around saying Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Einstein–
they solved all the easy problems and left us with the hard ones. In the last
twenty or thirty years most of the things that we considered hard problems
have been solved, in many cases by us. I'm sure young people sit around now
saying we solved all the easy problems, leaving them the hard ones. Of course,
once you know the solution, the problem looks a lot easier than it did before.
I tend to be optimistic. I think science plugs along, does its thing, and
gets results. Somehow, because scientists like me perhaps are down-to–
earth, cheerful, and optimistic, and believe, deep down, that there really are
no questions we can't answer, we have become the subject of intense
attacks. Perhaps it is science envy. Perhaps it's indigestion. But I find some
of the words I read hard to believe. As though they came from another
planet. Still, I find that people rarely say things face to face that are quite
as shocking as what they print. And often, there is a point to the criticism.
Turning Voltaire upside down, I tend to sometimes agree with what is said,
and disagree with the way it's being said. Let me address some of these
concerns about science.
You've all heard of the famous "scientific method," maybe have even
written about it. I've done science all of my life and don't have a totally
clear idea what this method is. A real scientist, I would say, could be com–
pared to Sherlock Holmes: he has a good nose for where to go, and
sufficient technique to get him there. I've known scientists with remark–
able technique who always seem to be pointed in the wrong direction,
others wi th rather minimal technique who always seem to be going in the
right way. We come in all varieties. Think of Sherlock Holmes again. He
refuses to speculate because he doesn't have enough data; but when he has
the data he produces the miracle--he ties everything together. To charac–
terize science in a few words, one could say that our job is to get the facts
(as problematic as they are) to distinguish the world that is, from all the
ways it might be--from the world of our fantasies, from all other logical
possibilities, to determine which world we are actually living in. Then, (and
of course we are aware that facts interact with theories) introduce a theo–
ry, a structure that ties everything together.
