Odkrycie naukowe

Hypotheses should be used as tools to uncover new facts rather than as ends in themselves.

More serious is the fact that false hypotheses or concepts sometimes survive which, far from being productive, are actually responsible for holding up the advance of science.

Probably the main characteristic of the trained thinker is that he does not jump to conclusions on insufficient evidence as the untrained man is inclined to do.

Asking "why" is a useful stimulus towards imagining what the cause or purpose may be. "How" is also a useful question in provoking thought about the mechanism of a process.

There is an interesting saying that no one believes an hypothesis except its originator but everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter. Most people are ready to believe something based on experiment but the experimenter knows the many little things that could have gone wrong in the experiment. For this reason the discoverer of a new fact seldom feels quite so confident of it as do others. On the other hand other people are usually critical of an hypothesis, whereas the originator identifies himself with it and is liable to become devoted to it. It is as well to remember this when criticising someone's suggestion, because you may offend and discourage him if you scorn the idea. A corollary to this observation that an hypothesis is a very personal matter, is that a scientist usually works much better when pursuing his own than that of someone else. It is the originator who gets both the personal satisfaction and most of the credit if his idea is proved correct, even if he does not do the work himself A man working on an hypothesis which is not his own often abandons it after one or two unsuccessful attempts because he lacks the strong desire to confirm it which is necessary to drive him to give it a thorough trial and think out all possible ways of varying the conditions of the experiment. Knowing this, the tactful director of research tries to lead the worker himself to suggest the line of work and then lets him feel the idea was his.

More serious is the fact that false hypotheses or concepts sometimes survive which, far from being productive, are actually responsible for holding up the advance of science. Two examples are the old notion that every metal contains mercury, and the phlogiston doctrine. According to the latter, every combustible substance contains a constituent which is given up on burning, called phlogiston. This notion for long held up the advance of chemistry, and stood in the way of an understanding of combustion, oxidation, reduction, and other processes. It was finally exposed as a fallacy by Lavoisier in 1778, but the great English scientists, Priestley, Watt and Cavendish, clung to the belief for some time afterwards and Priestley had not been converted to the new outlook when he died in 1804.

As dr. E. L. Taylor says: "New associations and fresh ideas are more likely to come out of a varied store of memories and experience than out of a collection that is all of one kind". Scientists who have made important original contributions have often had wide interests or have taken up the study of a subject different from the one in which they were originally trained. Originahty often consists in finding connections or analogies between two or more objects or ideas not previously shown to have any bearing on each other.

" It is not too much to say that the more deference men of science have paid to logic, the worse it has been for the scientific value of their reasoning. . . . Fortunately for the world, however, the great men of science have usually been kept in salutary ignorance of the logical tradition."

"The slowness and difficulty with which the human race makes discoveries and its blindness to the most obvious facts, if it happens to be unprepared or unwilling to see them, should suffice to show that there is something gravely wrong about the logician's account of discovery."