SCIENCE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION

·         It is not sufficient to understand the discoveries that scientists have made about the world, we must also learn to see scientific research as an integral part of modern way of life.

·         Scientific knowledge, in its purest and most sublime form, is so much a product of the mind that we tend to ignore the body within which that mind must live.

·         Scientific research should be observed as a daily task of particular people with a place in society; it should be seen as the organized labour of groups of people banded together in social institutions such as universities and research laboratories, managing one another, paying one another salaries, and using expensive technical equipment.  

·          The history of science, over many centuries, is represented as a continuous expansion at the expense of religion, philosophy and the humanities, which are left to scratch a meagre living in a few barren corners.

·         In a general way science is taken to mean `The Art of Knowing', it is almost the same thing as research, which means the accumulation of knowledge by systematic observation, deliberate experiment and rational theory; however, there are no sharp divisions between these different aspects of the human condition; each activity overlaps and merges with  its  neighbours.

·         We all know the practical difficulty of drawing a line between science and technology--the `Art of Knowing How' applied to an actual technique such as mechanical engineering or agriculture.  

·         Science and religion are shown merging in an area that is also occupied by philosophy, which draws especially heavily on theory - the special art of `Knowing Why'.  In all human affairs, however, there is a single dominant variable time: to make sense of the present state of science, we need to know how it got like that.

·         In the languages of physics, to extrapolate  into  the future  we must look backwards a little into the past, so  as  to estimate the time derivatives of our functions; whereas, in the languages of  biology, there must be an embryology of  science,  explaining form through growth  and growth through form.

·         But the detailed history of science is very subtle - and often very misleading, because the deeper pry, the less we see of pattern or principle, and the further back we go, the more uncertain the facts, and the more ingenious their interpretation.

·          It is a subject for the academic mind, giving more pleasure to the writer or lecturer than to the reader or student.