Scientific Food #5

    Excerpt from:  Advice to a Young Scientist, P.B. Medawar h&r c.1979
    author preface includes; young equals old, him equals her.

CH.6  ~Aspects~of~Scientific~Life~and~Manners

~The~Truth

      "..oversimplified, of course, it assumes

       -- as all scientists tend to assume --

       that there is a clear and easily recognizable distinction between
       fact and theory, between the information delivered by the senses
       and the construction that is put upon it.

       No modern psychologist would take such a view, nor did William
       Whewell when he pointed out that even that which seems to be the
       simplest sensory apprehension depends upon an act of mind
       for its interpretation:

       "There is a mask of theory over the whole face of Nature."  ^1, 38


       ^1  William Whewell, ~The~Philosophy~of~The~Inductive~Sciences,
           2nd ed. (London, 1847), pp. 37-42

~Mistakes

          "Though faulty hypotheses are excusable on the grounds that
           they will be superseded in due course by acceptable ones,
           they do grave harm to those who hold them because scientists
           who fall deeply in love with their hypotheses are proportionately
           unwilling to take no as an experimental answer.

           Sometimes instead of exposing a hypothesis to a cruelly critical
           test (~to~il~cimento, see Chapter 9), they caper around it,
           testing only subsidiary implications, or follow up sidelines
           that have an indirect bearing on the hypothesis without exposing
           it to the risk of refutation.

          ~    I cannot give any scientist of any age any better advice
          ~ than this:  the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis
          ~ is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.

            The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to
            provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the
            hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation.

            Poets and musicians may easily think this sadly cautionary
            advice and characteristic of the spiritless fact-finding that
            they suppose scientific inquiry to be.  For them, I guess, what
            is done in a blaze of inspiration has a special authenticity.
            I guess this is true only where there is talent bordering on
            genius.

            A scientist who habitually deceives himself is well on the way
            to deceiving others.  Polonius foresaw it clearly ("This above
            all...")."  39

            <someideas need demolition, rehab, retrofit, new construction>