Bronowski, Jacob

Bronowski, Jacob. The ascent of man. London British Broadcasting Corporation, 1973. 448p. 

Bronowski, Jacob. Magic, science and civilization. New York Columbia Univ. 

Brock, William H., O. T. Benfey, and S. Stark. Hofmann s Benzene Tree at the Kekuie Festivities." Journal of Chemical Education 68 (1991) 887-88. Bronowski, Jacob. The Visionary Eye Essays in the Arts, Literature, and Science. Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 1978. 

As I have written elsewhere, I think an essential part of the moral ideal of science can be found in Jacob Bronowski s book, Science and Human Values, the habit of truth (1956). Science is the dispassionate search for deep knowledge of the natural world, what Einstein called, the secrets of the Old One (French 1979,275). The best scientific research is driven by an insatiable curiosity about the way the world works. And because scientific knowledge is severely constrained by experiment, scientists are bound by what Richard Feynman called a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards (1985, P-341). 

In his 1596 hook Mysterium Cosmographicum, Kepler proposed a solar system that placed the orbits of the six known planets on concentric spheres inscribed within and circumscribed on these five polyhedra arranged concentrically. In the words of Jacob Bronowski All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. He states further To us, the analogies by which Kepler listened for the movement of the planets in the music of the spheres are farfetched. Yet are they more so than the wild leap by which Rutherford and Bohr in our own century found a model for the atom in, of all places, the planetary system ... 

Chemistry textbooks inform us that John Dalton formulated Atomic Theory in 1803 and imply that atoms were accepted from then on. Actually, such acceptance was far from universal and late-nineteenth-century books such as Brodie s The Calculus of Chemical Operations (London, 1866,1877) and Hunt s A New Basis for Chemistry A Chemical Philosophy (Boston, 1887), although antiatomic In nature, were not written by cranks or nutters. The eminent physicist Ernst Mach and the famous chemist Wilhelm Ostwald resisted the reality of atoms Into the beginning of the twentieth century. Jacob Bronowski strongly implies that the suicide in 1906 of Ludwig Boltzmann, who successfully explained heat as atomic and molecular motion, stemmed in part from his failure to totally convince the scientific community that atoms are real. ... 

Jacob Bronowski, the renowned mathematician and philosopher of science, cited Bohr s theory as an example of human creativity in developing scientific theories. If there is, in reality, no "planetary structure" of the atom, how did Bohr derive his "picture" Bronowski speculated that, much as an artist or an author composes metaphors based upon life experiences and world views, perhaps Bohr s innate desire to imagine a unified pattern in nature led him to postulate a structure for the smallest chemically significant bits of matter reflecting one of the largest structures, the solar system. Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922. 

While electrons are now commonly said to be both particles and waves or neither people live in a macroscopic, slow-moving world and lack the ability to truly imagine a particle-wave. This difficulty was nicely stated by Jacob Bronowski On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the electron would behave like a particle on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays it would behave as a wave. ... 

This brings us in an unprecedented way to the circumstance envisioned by Jacob Bronowski in his 1973 book. Ascent of Man, where he stated, In effect, the modem problem is no longer to design a structure from the materials (available) but to design materials for a structure. We are now in the position to design protein-based polymers for each specific appli-... 

A wonderful little book was written in 1956, entitled Science and Human Values, in which the physicist Jacob Bronowski looks back over the course of human history to examine the effect of science on human societies [1]. His conclusion continues to ring in my ears, and it seems even more critical today than it was 50 years ago ... 

This idea is extraordinarily profound—and troubling. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle (which states that the product of the uncertainty in position times the uncertainty in momentum is a constant) seems to limit fundamentally our access to knowledge. For an exquisite exposition of the human consequences of the uncertainty principle, see Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, Chapter 11 (Little Brown, New York, 1973). 

Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) was a mathematician, poet, and playwright. He was the author and compelling narrator of the brilliant television series. The Ascent of Man. Don t miss it if it is replayed. 

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. That is why science has succeeded where magic failed because it has looked for no spell to cast. —Jacob Bronowski... 

Jacob Bronowski One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement... has been to prove that this aim is unattainable. What are the implications of this claim for the aspirations of natural sciences in particular and for knowledge in general ... 

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