A Tale of Seven Scientists and a New Philosophy of Science

by Eric Scerri

In his latest book, Eric Scerri presents a completely original account of the nature of scientific progress. It consists of a holistic and unified approach in which science is seen as a living and evolving single organism. Instead of scientific revolutions featuring exceptionally gifted individuals, Scerri argues that the "little people" contribute as much as the "heroes" of science. To do this he examines seven case studies of virtually unknown chemists and physicists in the early 20th century quest to discover the structure of the atom. They include the amateur scientist Anton van den Broek who pioneered the notion of atomic number as well as Edmund Stoner a then physics graduate student who provided the seed for Pauli's Exclusion Principle. Another case is the physicist John Nicholson who is virtually unknown and yet was the first to propose the notion of quantization of angular momentum that was soon put to good use by Niels Bohr.

Instead of focusing on the logic and rationality of science, Scerri elevates the role of trial and error and multiple discovery and moves beyond the notion of scientific developments being right or wrong. While criticizing Thomas Kuhn's notion of scientific revolutions he agrees with Kuhn that science is not drawn towards an external truth but is rather driven from within. The book will enliven the long-standing debate on the nature of science, which has increasingly shied away from the big question of "what is science?"

Genres: Science, Philosophy

264 pages, Hardcover

Published November 7, 2016

About the author

Eric Scerri is a chemist, writer and philosopher of science, of Maltese origin. He is a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles; and the founder and editor-in-chief of Foundations of Chemistry, an international peer reviewed journal covering the history and philosophy of chemistry, and chemical education.

He is a world authority on the history and philosophy of the periodic table and is the author and editor of several books in this and related fields.

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three Tales And Seven Scientists

I haven't studied science since my first two years of college long ago, but the books of Eric Scerri have helped rekindle my interest as a lay reader and as a student of philosophy. Scerri holds a PhD from the University of London in the unusual subject of the philosophy of chemistry. He has published many highly-regarded technical papers on the periodic table and on the relationship between chemistry and physics, and he has taught chemistry at UCLA for over 15 years. Scerri also has a gift of writing clearly and simply and of sharing his love for his subject with non-specialist readers. I enjoyed and learned a great deal from two of Scerri's earlier books, "The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction" and "A Tale of Seven Elements". Both books combine an enthusiastic, accessible presentation of important parts of chemistry with provocative philosophical reflection. I had been thinking again about Scerri's work and my lack of knowledge of science, and this led to Scerri and his publisher kindly sending me a review copy of Scerri's latest book, "A Tale Of Seven Scientists and a New Philosophy of Science" (2016) .

Scerri's latest book is relatively short, engagingly written, and reasonably well integrated. Still, I found the book told three tales, rather than "a" tale which were worth parsing out separately. The first tale is autobiographical and is emphasized in a section of the book titled "Autobiographical Background." Scerri tells of his early life and the shift in his interests as an adolescent from history and geography to science. His undergraduate career showed a certain tension between scientific research and work in the history and philosophy of science, and Scerri took some time to decide upon the path of earning his PhD in the philosophy of chemistry. Scerri later founded and edited a scholarly journal dedicated to this subject. I was also interested in learning of Scerri's interest from his undergraduate years in Eastern philosophy and in Spinoza, which unlike chemistry, intersect with my own interests. From Eastern philosophy and Spinoza, Scerri says he learned what is known as philosophical monism, the "appeal to the essential unity of everything in the universe" that is seldom found in the West. I found this short autobiographical section the most fascinating in the book. Although Scerri does not press the point, the autobiographical, philosophical, and historical elements of this introduction echo throughout the rest of the text.

Scerri's second and broadest tale is about the nature of scientific inquiry and about the philosophy of science. He emphasizes this tale in the "Introduction" or chapter 1, in the concluding chapter, "Bringing Things Together" and alludes to it frequently throughout the book. Scerri's view has several components. He argues that science is a collective enterprise resulting from the efforts of many unsung individuals rather than the work of a few extraordinary figures, say, Bohr, or Einstein. He argues that the scope of reason in scientific development is overestimated and that scientific theories develop and advance as a result of trial and error, luck, and through hunches which subsequent work finds erroneous. Scerri draws analogies to the development of species set forth in the theory of evolution and to considering the collectivity of scientists holistically as an organism. Perhaps analogies would be to a football team which includes players of varying skills but which must function as a unit to succeed or to the community of online reviewers on a site such as this which present varying perspectives on a book and which, for a reader, may muddle through to a consensus. Another related component of Scerri's approach is its emphasis of fallibility and trial and error. He argues that scientists do not search for "the truth" but move internally towards better or worse explanations. I was reminded of some of my readings in American pragmatism. Scerri's approach seems to me to have some similarities to the philosophy of John Dewey which was heavily rooted in evolutionary theory. But other approaches to the nature of "truth" in science might also be possible, suggested by the work of another pragmatist, Charles Peirce. Scerri does not discuss the American pragmatists but he engages with many other philosophers of science, including Popper and Kuhn, pointing out similarities and differences between them and his own approach.

The third tale takes up most of the rest of the book in terms of space. Scerri discusses the lives and works of seven individuals who made pivotal contributions to the development of the periodic table and atomic theory early in the 20th Century but who are little remembered today, even by those well-versed in the history of science. In successive chapters, Scerri offers brief biographies of his figures, the scientific issues they addressed, the errors they made, and the important contributions they made to the work of their better known contemporaries. Scerri's forgotten but important scientists are John Nicholson, Anton Van den Broek, Richard Abegg, Charles Bury, John D. Main Smith, Edmund Stoner, and Charles Janet. Scerri's discussion of the accomplishments of these individuals moves forward by the inherent interest of their stories and by the flair and simplicity of Scerri's writing. Understanding precisely what these individuals did in the context of the science of their time requires a knowledge of the science of the day that I, and other readers of this book, may not have. Scerri's presentation includes mathematical formulas and explanations that beyond a certain level quickly got beyond me. Still the thrust of his presentation is clear; Scerri helps the reader along by showing how the different scientists interacted with and commented upon the work of one another. His discussion shows the continuity of scientific research, how good results sometimes follow from mistaken assumptions, and how important contributions frequently are made by individuals who sometimes get passed over by history.

The three tales, seven scientists, and a number of philosophers (I counted at least ten philosophers of science in the final chapter whose work is discussed) result in a certain diffuseness. In addition, portions of the book will appeal to different audiences, including interested lay readers, readers with a basic knowledge of atomic theory, and readers with an interest in the history and philosophy of science. The tales in the book overlap but do not fully coalesce. The tale of the seven scientists advance the themes of the communitarian character of science, the importance of trial and error, and of the continuity of scientific development, as opposed to the revolutionary or paradigm shift approach often attributed to Kuhn. The story of these seven unsung scientists still has a great deal of scientific and human interest irrespective of its connection to a philosophical project. So too, I learned a great deal from Scerri's discussions of the philosophy of science. Some of this discussion, I thought, went well beyond any conclusion that could be drawn with confidence from the tale of the seven scientists. I thought it would be worthwhile for Scerri to develop his thinking at greater length and more systematically.

I found this book thoughtful and entertaining and I learned a great deal. It does have threads that would bear further development and that could be better tied together.

Robin Friedman

[Brian Clegg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scientists sometimes tell us we're in a post-philosophy world. For example, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in The Grand Design bluntly say that that philosophy is 'dead' - no longer required, as science can do its job far better. However, other scientists recognise the benefits of philosophy, particularly when it is applied to their own discipline. One such is Eric Scerri, probably the world's greatest expert on the periodic table, who in this challenging book sets out to modify the philosophical models of scientific progress.

I ought to say straight away that A Tale of Seven Scientists sits somewhere on the cusp between popular science and a heavy duty academic title. For reasons that will become clear, I could only give it three stars if rating it as popular science, but it deserves more if we don't worry too much about it being widely accessible.

One minor problem with accessibility is that I've never read a book that took so long to get started. First there's a foreword. Then there's another foreword. Then there's a background preamble. Then there's an introduction. And then, finally, we get to the content. But once you've run this gauntlet, we discover the seven obscure scientists referred to in the title, each of whom arguably made a contribution to our understanding of atomic structure and its implications for chemical behaviour, but all of whom are pretty much forgotten.

Specifically, we are talking about John Nicholson, Anton Van de Broek (no, not that bloke off Strictly Come Dancing), Richard Abegg, Charles Bury, John D. Main Smith, Edmund Stoner and Charles Janet, only one of whom I'd heard of, and that was for his main body of work, not this. Although A Tale is only a slim book, we find out a lot about the theories each of these developed. Almost all of these theories could be described as 'wrong' - and yet each contributed with incremental changes to thinking on the subject, influencing the big names such as Bohr (whose own theories were also arguably 'wrong' for much of the time).

That's a book in its own right (if a very specialist one with limited appeal), but far more interesting is Scerri's motive for introducing these characters - not to suggest that we ought to add them to the familiar names, but rather to illustrate that our model of the nature of scientific discovery and theory building is wrong. Of course, one of the differences between science and philosophy is that in science it is less common to have several theories in constant contention - there's more of a tendency to settle for a 'best supported current theory'. And so we don't have a single widely accepted theory of scientific discovery - but Scerri is pushing here for a new one, or at least one that is less supported - specifically that scientific discovery is like biological evolution - a gradual development based on lots of small changes, where it isn't meaningful to identify a single owner of a theory.

In a sense, like biological evolution, there's an element of this that is so obvious it's a surprise anyone argues about it. Clearly no scientist works in isolation but is constantly influenced by what he or she learns of the work of others. Newton famously made his 'shoulders of giants' remark, and though it was probably intended as an insult to Robert Hooke, Newton nonetheless at least once had to admit that Hooke introduced a concept to him (the nature of orbits). However, since Thomas Kuhn's work on the philosophy of science about 50 years ago, there has been the idea of sudden revolutionary changes in science - so-called paradigm shifts - which Scerri suggests don't exist.

Part of the problem Scerri identifies is our tendency to label a theory 'right' or 'wrong' where this is rarely possible to do. This sounds like woffly philosophising of the 'What is truth?' variety - but it's not, because theories are very rarely about finding the truth. They are more about developing the best model to fit observation. All theories are probably 'wrong' in a sense - because they are just models. But some fit beautifully and so we hang onto them until something better comes along.

I understand why Scerri includes his seven scientists, but there is far too much detail on their work, which for me gets in the way of the far more important thinking on the nature of scientific discoveries. While I'm not sure Scerri is right in entirely dismissing revolutions - it's hard not to see, for example, the shift to the general theory of relativity as anything other than revolutionary - he surely has an important point in the evolutionary model, which could have been more interestingly developed at greater depth in the book. And that would also have given a chance to explore his plea to dismiss scientific heroes further.

There's no doubt that popular science in particular, in simplifying the picture, tends to pick out a handful of individuals as the greats of science. But I'm not sure this is a bad thing. Just as the Apollo missions couldn't have happened without a vast number of individuals we know nothing about - but it's still worth celebrating what the astronauts did. This doesn't mean we should ignore the others. Their stories can be interesting in their own right, as Margot Lee Shetterley shows in Hidden Figures - but we still need the scientific equivalent of the astronauts in figures like Bohr or Einstein or Newton to keep a narrative interesting. We just need to bear in mind that superstars, whether in movies or in science, aren't the whole story.

In A Tale of Seven Scientists, Eric Scerri has a genuinely interesting story to tell, but he also demonstrates why, on the whole, we focus on certain figures in popular history of science, because the work of his seven scientists is sufficiently incremental that only an expert could love them. I hope he considers writing another book for a general audience that concentrates on the evolutionary nature of scientific discovery more - and develops it further, as here the same assertions are repeated rather frequently. As it is, the current book is something of chimera, but rewards the effort of reading it with some real topics for thought, if you are interested in what science does and what it is.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thesis is that all scientific work, even stuff that’s wrong, matters. It’s a great wya to look at it—most of the content is showing how many lesser known scientists, some of whom had wrong ideas, all contributed to important ideas in physics, specifically on Neils Bohr. It’s easy to read and get the main point, even if the chemistry and physics aren’t specifically your thing. It’s so important to think about how knowledge is produced. This is a great meld of history and philosophy of science.

[Tonstant Weader · Rating 3 out of 5]

★★★
http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpres...

A Tale of Seven Scientists is not the most accessible book I have ever read. It took quite a bit of effort, to be honest, to get into the weeds of atomic structures with seven scientists whose contributions to our understanding of the atom, the periodic table, and chemistry are often forgotten. The forgotten scientists are John Nicholson, Anton Van den Broek, Richard Abegg, Charles Bury, John Main Smith, Edmund Stoner and Charles Janet. In an odd coincidence, Nicholson is not that forgotten. I was describing this book to my best friend and she mentioned that her husband was currently reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb and that it discussed Nicholson and Niels Bohr. I suppose I need to add that book to my list, now.

The purpose of Scerri’s book is to argue against the current widely-accepted view of science as a series of revolutionary discoveries by the superstars of science, Darwin, Bohr, Einstein and the rest of the constellation of the greats, ignoring the lesser luminaries whose contributions contribute to and enable the breakthroughs that rise to historical recognition. He argues that science is more like a natural organism, constantly evolving. Some discoveries are like adaptations that don’t work out, but even if individually maladaptive, they lead to better discoveries that do survive.

This seems a reprise of Social History versus the Great Man Theory. This makes sense to me since history was my major and first great intellectual passion. In grassroots organizing, too, there is this frustration with the media narrative of social movements as the products of great men, rather than great men arising from the social movements. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not create the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement created the space for King to rise to the occasion.

This makes sense to me. It’s not like any of the stars of science came up with their ideas in a vacuum. Their working world has never been void of influence and information from other scientists who for one reason or another have been forgotten. However, a history of science that includes every contributory, but ultimately replaced, discovery would be overwhelming, confusing, and tedious. A history of scientific discovery where the people are erased and only their ideas are taught would lose the human interest angle and you know, that stuff is what sometimes helps draw people to the subject and then open their minds to the actual science.

I struggled with A Tale of Seven Scientists for a few reasons. First, my understanding of chemistry is weaker than any other science. I thought there was “THE” Periodic Table that just had new elements getting added every few years. I had no idea there were all sorts of periodic tables. That was fascinating, but a pretty stark reminder that chemistry is not my strong suit. To be honest, though, studying these theories and discoveries that turned out to be not quite right made me feel a bit nervous. My shelf of chemistry knowledge is pretty bare and here I am stocking it with all this stuff past the sell-by date. I have this idea that if I don’t know much about a discipline, it’s not the best idea to start stocking up my knowledge with displaced knowledge.

The other struggle I had with A Tale of Seven Scientists is that I don’t think his metaphor with biological evolution is the best one. Evolution is so random, when mutating, there’s not awareness that that Nicholson beak adaptation was close but no cigar, so let’s try this Bohr beak adaptation. Our genes are not self-aware in that way. Now, memetics, the theory of evolving cultural knowledge, that relies on awareness. That makes sense to me.

Scerri refers to his scientists as “missing links”, but in evolution there are no missing links. There are a lot of myths in popular understanding of evolution and missing links are one of them, a misunderstanding that ties to other misunderstandings of evolution that also argue against evolution as a metaphor for science. For one, evolution is not about progress. Evolution’s purpose is not and never was the creation of humanity or any one particular species. In fact, it’s off base to even speak of evolution having a purpose. It simply is. It’s purely random and we see it as purpose and progress because we think our existence is proof of progress but that’s just because we think we are the be-all and end-all. Silly us. The other bad idea about evolution is that only the strong survive. I would ask so where are the dinosaurs, but then…humans outwit, outplay, and outlast lions and tigers and bears, too. These myths of evolution seem to be fundamental to analogizing scientific discovery to evolution, but they are not really how evolution works.

The thing is, Scerri kind of has it both ways. He points out that evolution is random and that in some ways scientific discovery is random, but then he points to it as a form of progress as though evolution is about progress.

However, there are ways the Scerri’s metaphor works. For example, when scientists have contemporaneous discoveries, that’s sort of like convergent evolution where different critters have similar adaptations at the same time. It’s not some evolutionary flash mob, they are simply all responding to the same environment. In science, scientists have multiple discoveries, a form of convergent evolution and for the same reason. They are in the same environment, more or less, with the same salient issues and in the same zeitgeist. I think the zeitgeist has a lot of influence on human activity, what we are interested in, what we study, what we think about…and that brings us back to memetics, a much stronger metaphor than biological evolution.

Back to A Tale of Seven Scientists, obviously I am fascinated by his argument about how we should conceptualize scientific discovery. I am challenged by his suggestion that we should not even think in terms of right or wrong discoveries and concepts. This is exciting and fascinating stuff. The thing is, I really did not have to slog through all that science that has been displaced by more widely accepted science. I spent far too much effort on stuff that was simply not needed to make his argument. Scerri has enough authority to tell us that a bunch of scientists contributed to our ultimate understanding of atomic structures and the periodic table even through they work has been supplanted without having to get quite so detailed. It would make the book friendlier and less intimidating to lay readers like me.

Scerri also relies heavily on extensive quotes to explain and argue some of his points, enough so my freshman seminar professor’s advice to always read my paper without any of the quotations before submitting it. He said if it does not makes sense without the quotes, rework it until it does. Quotes are to underscore, illuminate, and certify the argument, not to make the argument. I realized how important this is when reading Scerri’s book because by the end of the book, I was accustomed to his voice as a writer and could understand what he was saying, but then boom, there’s this long quote in another voice, often less clear and easy to understand. It was disruptive, breaking the momentum.

I realize that someone whose only science classes in college were Astronomy and Physical Science for NonScience Majors has a lot of nerve contradicting a science professor whose book is published by the sine qua non of authority, Oxford University Press, but since Scerri made the argument that nonscientists have contributed to scientific discovery, I hope he won’t mind too much.

I was provided a copy of A Tale of Seven Scientists by the author through his publisher.

[Ben McFarland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like I'm coming late into a discussion already well underway by reading this book, and it's a fascinating subject. How does science work? Here Eric Scerri asks that question in the context of how the periodic table was built (one of his specialties). In freshman chemistry, this is taught through the Great Thoughts of a few Great Thinkers: Planck, Bohr, Fermi, etc. But Scerri tells the story of seven other thinkers who thought other thoughts. The Great Thinkers cobbled their own thoughts together from these other seven scientists, who in some cases were wrong in everything but one creative thought, and in other cases weren't even really scientists. In all cases, the seven scientists of the title were more or less forgotten, to the extent that Scerri had trouble even tracking down a photograph of one of them.



Scerri makes a convincing cases for the unique value of the small contributors, and of the creative potential of being wrong. I want to teach the periodic table this way, but it would only be appropriate for advanced students or an in-depth, focused course at the lower division, because you need more bandwidth to be able to follow the wrong turns and almost-there-but-not-quite theories. If there's a way to do it with students in general, I'd like to figure it out, because it's the way it happened.



The larger implications are what's particularly interesting here. Since the discovery of the periodic table worked this way -- smeared out over decades and dozens of thinkers -- what does that say about how science in general works? One thing's for sure, it's not through abrupt Kuhnian paradigm shifts. Scerri points out early that not even Kuhn proposed the absolute kind of paradigm shifts that are given his name in current discussions. Rather, Scerri enlists Kuhn himself to promote science as a more gradual, evolutionary process. Priority conflicts are manifestations of a convergent evolution of ideas. Since convergent evolution is one of my own personal fascinations, I'm only too happy to apply it to scientific knowledge as well (yes, yes, observer bias, I know!).



This is where I start to feel like I'm missing part of the conversation, having not participated in the "Science Wars" that have apparently raged over the past few decades. I'm with Scerri up to the point that he starts talking about truth:



"Similarly, I suggest, scientific theories evolve in order to adapt to the particular times that they exist in, rather than in order to conform to some objective or 'out there' criteria of eternal truth. To the extent that one can speak of theories describing the 'truth' it would have to be that theories provide the best description of the world as it happens to exist at a particular point in time." (p.191)



This gave me cognitive dissonance because it sounds so much like the ending of C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image, which is the part that gave me the most trouble in that book. Both authors sound awfully close to saying we get the truth we ask for, which is very close to saying truth doesn't matter as much as what we ask for. I'm not able to go there.



"Scientific knowledge is never right or wrong, because it is not proceeding toward an external truth. It is driven from within, essentially by evolutionary forces, which look back to past science." (p.196)



I object. Just because we don't know the future doesn't mean we don't hypothesize about what will happen. Such projection into the future is part of what makes us human. I realize that this hardly ever happens in a pure form, but overall results on science are not completely determined by the past + random walks. Some projection and expectation must be taking place, and isn't that expectation more likely to be fulfilled if it is "right"? Some extrapolation must occur, and that implies that something true is "out there" that is being dis-covered by experiment. Of course, on the next page Scerri states "This is not to say that the world does not constrain our theorizing. ... But ... the scope of our theories is not determined by nature in advance of our inquiring about them." (p.197-8)



This is where is starts to sound like the constraints on evolution, like I talk about at length in A World from Dust and which also overlaps with Terrence Deacon's absential knowledge. The question seems to be whether the constraints are to be identified with the truth, and whether they are loose or tight. (I think "yes they are" and "pretty tight", by the way, both for evolution in biology and of scientific knowledge.)



In the end, this book presents a view of science that I like, and that is engaging to talk about and teach. It feels like some arguments go all the way back to the ancient stoics. Science works in some ways like a living thing. We make a lot of mistakes and think a lot of wrong thoughts on the way to getting to the right ones. We do a disservice to history when we turn a few men (and it's usually men) into the Great Thinkers while ignoring the smaller ideas they built from. Not shoulders of giants, but the shoulders of humanity.



I think the crucial difference may be whether the reality inside our heads corresponds exactly to the reality of outside our heads. I think it does, and so I'm comfortable with a lot of truth claims in a way that Scerri is not. I also have a higher view of language than Scerri does, and wonder if our "pre-linguistic" ideas (p. 210) aren't truly ideas until they are codified and communalized with words, if words play a part in the origins of thought and consciousness.



But I don't know if my beliefs in these two areas had a particular negative role to play in the Science Wars. That wasn't my war. Maybe I'm unknowingly wading in where angels fear to tread even now. Whatever, this is fascinating history and fun to think about, let's ask these questions.




The bottom line is that Scerri says that we should study how science works not through analytic philosophy but through the empirical investigation of how particular scientific theories were made. I am fully behind this bottom-up mode of investigation. It's not just more accurate and less prone to observer bias, it's also more interesting to study real people rather than abstract ideas. In general, this is the way forward, and more studies like this will help us figure out these big philosophical questions that we haven't yet figured out. One's reach must exceed one's grasp, after all.

[Vincenzo Politi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good historical part, but it is the philosophical part, condensed in the last chapter, which a bit too weak.