Science in the 20th century
In Our Time: Science
BBC
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 1998
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how perceptions of science and the power of science have changed in the 20th century. Does scientific endeavour increasingly concern itself with doubt rather than certainty, and is it coming any closer to integrating with other disciplines - philosophy or the social sciences? How much does the scientific explanation of the world owe to a wish for coherent understanding we all have, rather than objective observation, and why are we alternately disapproving of, then obsessively over-enthusiastic about new scientific theories? How far has specialisation in the sciences obscured our view of the world in its entirety, and if scientists want to operate within a social framework, can they do so and still claim to be objective and value-free in their findings?With John Gribbin, Visiting Fellow in Astronomy, University of Sussex and consultant to New Scientist; Mary Midgley, moral philosopher and former Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Newcastle.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for down learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:09.0 | I hope you enjoy the program. |
| 0:12.0 | Hello, science appears so triumphant now that increasingly it seems the supreme unchallenged |
| 0:17.3 | source of truth, knowledge and wisdom about life, its origins, its processes, |
| 0:21.2 | even its purposes or lack of purpose. |
| 0:24.0 | Mary Midgley challenges this in her books and essay. |
| 0:26.5 | She's a moral philosopher until her retirement in 1980, the senior lecturer in philosophy at |
| 0:31.6 | the University of Newcastle. Her books include evolution as |
| 0:34.6 | religion and science of salvation. I'm also joined by John Gibbon, visiting fellow of |
| 0:39.0 | astronomy at the University of Sussex and a prolific writer of popular books on serious science. |
| 0:44.0 | His latest, a must in my opinion, is called almost everyone's guide to science. |
| 0:48.6 | John Gribbin, you say pretty much all of science can be understood by the average man on the street and yet |
| 0:56.5 | Richard Feinman said nobody understands quantum mechanics. |
| 0:59.6 | So where do we go from there? |
| 1:00.6 | Depends what you mean by understand. In the sense that people can and |
| 1:05.8 | ought to have some knowledge of something that's so profound and important in |
| 1:09.1 | everyday life, there's no reason why everybody can't get a grasp of what the important parts of science are and what it's all about. |
| 1:16.0 | Of course to do research you need the advanced mathematics and so on and perhaps when you start talking about the very deep issues then there is a level at which |
| 1:25.8 | understanding fails because science is an ongoing process. |
| 1:29.4 | We don't know everything and probably we never will. |
| 1:32.8 | So I'm really in this book I'm trying to address an audience that doesn't normally have |
| 1:38.0 | contact with science and tell them look it's not as scary as you might think at another |
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