Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery

John Waller , Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery
Oxford University Press | ISBN 0192804049 | 2002 | PDF | 2 Mb | 321 Pages


With respect to Pasteur, Millikan, and Eddington, at this stage I should like to make one further observation. The twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl Popper made a useful distinction between discovery and verification in the development of scientific knowledge. A committed and eloquent believer in the ability of scientists to make sense of the world, he nonetheless saw that the discovery stage may be much less rigorous and disciplined than the point at which other scientists become involved and begin the process of verification by trying to ‘falsify’ the original researcher’s ideas. ‘The question how it happens that a new idea occurs to a man—whether it is a musical theme, or a dramatic conflict, or a scientific theory—may be of great interest to empirical psychology; but it is irrelevant to the logical analysis of scientific knowledge’ is how Popper put it in 1959. Science only becomes reliable knowledge, he argued, after its validity has been extensively tested over the course of many years. Indeed, he was ‘inclined to think that scientific discovery is impossible without faith in ideas which are of a purely speculative kind, and sometimes even quite hazy’.

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