from "The Scientist as Rebel" by Freeman Dyson
Dyson, Freeman. 2006. The Scientist as Rebel. New York: New York Review of Books.
Chapter 1, "The Scientist as Rebel." Pages 3-18. 1995. Originally published 1995.
3 - [. ..] Science is a mosiac of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. The vision of science is not specifically Western. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of ancient science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white.
13 - [. . .] But it happens at least equally often in the history of science that the understanding of the component parts of a composite system is impossible without an understanding of the behavior of the system as a whole.
Chapter 2, "Can Science Be Ethical?" Pages 19-31. Originally published 1997.
20 - [. . .] The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do. But always, even for the most brilliantly successful technology, an ethical question lurks in the background: the question whether the job the technology is designed to do is actually worth doing.
The technologies that raise the fewst ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people. Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs. [. . .]
24 - [. . .] As a general rule, to which there are many exceptions, science works for evil when its effect is to provide toys for the rich, and works for good when its effect is to provide
25 - necessities for the poor. Cheapness is an essential virtue. [. . .] "Toys for the rich means not only toys in the literal sense but technological conveniences that are available to a minority of people and make it hardr for those excluded to take part in the economic and cultural life of the community. "Necessities for the poor" include not only food and shelter but adequate public health services, adequate public transportation, and access to decent education and jobs.
The scientific advances of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth were generally beneficial to society as a whole, spreading wealth to rich and poor alike with some degree of equity. The electric light, the telephone, the refrigerator, radio, television, synthetic fabrics, antibiotics, vitamins, and vaccines were social equalizers, making life easier and more comfortable for almost everybody, tending to narrow the gap between rich and poor rather thannto widen it. Only in the second half of our century has the balance of advantage shifted. During the last forty years, the strongest efforts in pure science have been concentrated in highly esoteric fields remote from contact with everyday problems. Particle physics, low-temperature physics, and extragalactic astronomy are examples [ . . .] The intensive pursuit of these sciences does not do much harm, or much good, to either the rich or the poor. The main social benefit provided by pure science in esoteric fields is to serve as a welfare program for scientists and engineers.
At the same time, the strongest efforts in applied science have been concentrated upon products that can be profitably sold. Since the rich can be expected to pay more than the poor for new products, market-driven applied science will usually result in the invention of toys for the rich. The laptop computer and the cellular telephone are the latest
26 - of the new toys. Now that a large fraction of high-paying jobs are advertised on the Internet, people excluded from the Internet are also excluded from access to jobs. The failure of science to produce benefits for the poor in recent decades is due to two factors working in combination: the pure scientists have become more detached from the mundane needs of humanity, and the applied scientists have become more attached to immediate profitability.
[ . . .] there is a single underlying cause that has affected them both. The casue is the power of committees in the administration and funding of science. In the case of pure science, the committees are composed of scientific experts performing the rituals of peer review. If a committee of scientific experts selects research projects by majority vote, projects in fashionable fields are supported while those in unfashionable fields are not. In recent decades, the fashionable fields have been moving further and further into specialized areas remote from contact with things that we can see and touch. In the case of applied science, the committees are composed of business executives and managers. Such people usually give support to products that affluent customers like themselves can buy.
[. . .] scientists and entrepeneurs must assert their freedom to promote new technologies that are more friendly than the old to poor people and poor countries. [. . .]
27 - [. . .] The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, drvien by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation. [. . .] They are likely to bypass the poor and reward the rich. [. . .]
The poorer half of humanity needs cheap housing, cheap health care, and cheap education, accessible to everybody, with high quality and high aesthetic standards. The fundamental problem for human society in the next century is the mismatch between the three new waves of technology and the three basic needs of poor people. The gap between technology and needs is wide and growing wider. If technology continues along its present course, ignoring the needs of the poor and showering benefits upon the rich, the poor will sooner or later rebel against the tyranny of technology and turn to irrational and violent remedies. In the future, as in the past, the revolt of the poor is likely to impoverish rich and poor together.
The widening gap between technology and human needs can only be filled by ethics.
31 -
Chapter 1, "The Scientist as Rebel." Pages 3-18. 1995. Originally published 1995.
3 - [. ..] Science is a mosiac of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. The vision of science is not specifically Western. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of ancient science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white.
13 - [. . .] But it happens at least equally often in the history of science that the understanding of the component parts of a composite system is impossible without an understanding of the behavior of the system as a whole.
Chapter 2, "Can Science Be Ethical?" Pages 19-31. Originally published 1997.
20 - [. . .] The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do. But always, even for the most brilliantly successful technology, an ethical question lurks in the background: the question whether the job the technology is designed to do is actually worth doing.
The technologies that raise the fewst ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people. Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs. [. . .]
24 - [. . .] As a general rule, to which there are many exceptions, science works for evil when its effect is to provide toys for the rich, and works for good when its effect is to provide
25 - necessities for the poor. Cheapness is an essential virtue. [. . .] "Toys for the rich means not only toys in the literal sense but technological conveniences that are available to a minority of people and make it hardr for those excluded to take part in the economic and cultural life of the community. "Necessities for the poor" include not only food and shelter but adequate public health services, adequate public transportation, and access to decent education and jobs.
The scientific advances of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth were generally beneficial to society as a whole, spreading wealth to rich and poor alike with some degree of equity. The electric light, the telephone, the refrigerator, radio, television, synthetic fabrics, antibiotics, vitamins, and vaccines were social equalizers, making life easier and more comfortable for almost everybody, tending to narrow the gap between rich and poor rather thannto widen it. Only in the second half of our century has the balance of advantage shifted. During the last forty years, the strongest efforts in pure science have been concentrated in highly esoteric fields remote from contact with everyday problems. Particle physics, low-temperature physics, and extragalactic astronomy are examples [ . . .] The intensive pursuit of these sciences does not do much harm, or much good, to either the rich or the poor. The main social benefit provided by pure science in esoteric fields is to serve as a welfare program for scientists and engineers.
At the same time, the strongest efforts in applied science have been concentrated upon products that can be profitably sold. Since the rich can be expected to pay more than the poor for new products, market-driven applied science will usually result in the invention of toys for the rich. The laptop computer and the cellular telephone are the latest
26 - of the new toys. Now that a large fraction of high-paying jobs are advertised on the Internet, people excluded from the Internet are also excluded from access to jobs. The failure of science to produce benefits for the poor in recent decades is due to two factors working in combination: the pure scientists have become more detached from the mundane needs of humanity, and the applied scientists have become more attached to immediate profitability.
[ . . .] there is a single underlying cause that has affected them both. The casue is the power of committees in the administration and funding of science. In the case of pure science, the committees are composed of scientific experts performing the rituals of peer review. If a committee of scientific experts selects research projects by majority vote, projects in fashionable fields are supported while those in unfashionable fields are not. In recent decades, the fashionable fields have been moving further and further into specialized areas remote from contact with things that we can see and touch. In the case of applied science, the committees are composed of business executives and managers. Such people usually give support to products that affluent customers like themselves can buy.
[. . .] scientists and entrepeneurs must assert their freedom to promote new technologies that are more friendly than the old to poor people and poor countries. [. . .]
27 - [. . .] The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, drvien by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation. [. . .] They are likely to bypass the poor and reward the rich. [. . .]
The poorer half of humanity needs cheap housing, cheap health care, and cheap education, accessible to everybody, with high quality and high aesthetic standards. The fundamental problem for human society in the next century is the mismatch between the three new waves of technology and the three basic needs of poor people. The gap between technology and needs is wide and growing wider. If technology continues along its present course, ignoring the needs of the poor and showering benefits upon the rich, the poor will sooner or later rebel against the tyranny of technology and turn to irrational and violent remedies. In the future, as in the past, the revolt of the poor is likely to impoverish rich and poor together.
The widening gap between technology and human needs can only be filled by ethics.
31 -
Postscript, 2006
[. . .] The cell phone is no longer a toy for the rich but is becoming ubiquitous.
Chapter 24, "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil." Pages 287-304. Originally published in 1972.
287 - The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Inquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul is the full title of Desmond Bernal's first book, which he published in 1929 [. . .]
288 - Bernal saw the future as a struggle of the rational side of man's nature against three enemies. The first enemy he called the World, meaning scarcity of material goods, inadequate land, harsh climate, desert, swamp, and other physical obstacles that condemn the majority of mankind to lives of poverty. The second enemy he called the Flesh, meaning the defects in man's physiology that expose him to disease, cloud the clarity of his mind, and finally destroy him by senile deterioration. The third enemy he called the Devil, meaning the irrational forces in man's psychological nature that distort his perceptions and lead him astray with crazy hopes and fears, overriding the feeble voice of reason. [. . .]
Briefly summarized, the radical measures which Bernal prescribed were the following. To defeat the World, the greater part of the human species will leave this planet and go to live in innumerable freely floating colonies scattered through outer space. To defeat the Flesh, humans will learn to replace failing organs with artificial substitutes until we become an intimate symbiosis of brain and machine. To defeat the Devil, we shall first reorganize society along scientific lines, and later learn to exercise conscious intellectual control over our moods and emotional drives, intervening directly in the affective functions of our brains with technical means yet to be discovered. This summary is a crude oversimplification of Bernal's discussion. He did not imagine that these remedies would provide a final solution to the problems of humanity. He well knew that every change in the human situation will create new problems and new enemies of the rational soul. [. . .]
289 - [. . .] The first and most obvious difference between 1929 and 1972 is that we now have a highly vocal and well-organized opposition to the further growth of the part that technology plays in human affairs. The social prophets of today look upon technology as a destructive rather than a liberating force. In 1972 it is highly unfashionable to believe as Bernal did that the colonization of space, the perfection of artificial organs, and the mastery of brain physiology are the key's to man's future. People in tune with the times regard space as irrelevant, and they consider ecology to be the only branch of science that is ethically respectable. However, it would be wrong to imagine that Bernal's ideas were more in line with popular views in 1929 than they are in 1972. Bernal was never a man to swim with the tide. Technology was unpopular in 1929 because it was associated with the gas warfare of the First World War [. . .] In 1929 the dislike of technology was less noisy than today but no less real. Bernal understood that his proposals for the remaking of man and society flew in the teeth of deeply entrenched human instincts. [. . .] He foresaw that mankind might split into two species, one following the technological path which he described, the other holding on as best it could to the ancient folkways of natural living. [. . .] The wider perspective which we have gained between 1929 and 1972 concerning the harmful effects of technology affects only the details and not the core of Bernal's argument.
"Is God in the Lab?" Pages 305-314. Originally published 1998.
306 - Polkinghorne compares two historic intellectual struggles, one from science and one from religion. From science he takes the discovery and development of quantum mechanics [. . .] From religion he takes the theological understanding of the nature of Jesus [. . .] He devides each of the two struggles into five periods, and shows how events in each of the five periods in the development of quantum mechanics correspond in detail to events in the matching period in the development of theology. In the first period, the breakdown of classical mechanics, the enigma of atomic spectra, and the discovery of the light-quantum by Max Planck and Albert Einstein correspond to the death of Jesus, the enigma of his ressurrection as experienced by his disciples in Jerusalem, and the new understanding of these events by Saint Paul.
In the second period, confusion reigns both in physics and in theology: classical and quantum pictures in conflict in physics, orthodoxies and heresies in conflict in theology. In the third period, there was the great triumph of quantum mechanics as it emerged in 1925 and solved most of the outstanding problems of physics, and the great triumph of Christology in the year 451, when the assembled theologians at the Council of Chalcedon promulgated the doctrine concerning the nature of Jesus that orthodox Christians were thereafter required to believe. In the fourth period, a continued wrestling with unresolved problems, the paradoxes of interpretation of quantum
307 - theory in physics and the paradoxes of the incarnation of Jesus in theology. In the fifth period, recognition in both physics and theology that the new insights have deep implications and that we are very far from any final truth.
[. . .] When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. Quantum mechanics works equally well in all countries and all cultures. [. . .] Theology works in one culture alone.
309 - It is a curious accident of history that the Christian religion became heavily involved with theology. No other religion finds it necessary to formulate elaborately precise statements about the abstract qualities and relationships of gods and humans. There is nothing analogous to theology in Judaism or in Islam. I do not know muchabout Hinduism and Buddhism, but my Asian friends tell me that these religions also have no theology. They have beliefs and stories and ceremonies and rules of behavior, but their literature is poetic rather than analytical. The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian.
The prominence of theology in the Christian world has had two important consequences for the history of science. On the one hand, Western science grew out of Christian theology. It is probably no an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena. On the other hand, the close historical relations between science and Christianity have cause conflicts between science and Christianity that do not exist between science and other religions. It is more difficult for a modern scientist to be a serious Christian, like Polkinghorne, than to be a serious Muslim, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Abdus Salam.
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