Prefa 



ce 



For better or for worse this book has turned out 

 to be rather more personal in tone than I had expected or 

 the pubhshers may have intended. It is, in effect, a statement 

 of what I think is important about science and, therefore, 

 about being a scientist. I have written as a person with sci- 

 entific training and interests, though not always as a scien- 

 tist. There are, as the reader will see, many expressions of 

 opinion in the book. They are on the whole my own personal 

 opinions and not necessarily those of all scientists, although 

 I hope that most of the opinions would seem reasonably 

 sound to most scientists. 



The book has three major themes, and they are not al- 

 ways clearly separated from one another. They may be 

 stated as follows: (1) What science is; (2) What it is like 

 to be a scientist (and how one becomes one); (3) What 

 science has to do with Hfe in general. Generally speaking, 

 the first four chapters deal with the first topic, chapters 5 

 through 1 1 with the second, and the last three chapters with 

 the third, but there is a good deal of overlap among them. 



Because one of the good ways of indicating what some- 

 thing is is to differentiate it from what it is not, I have taken 

 a Httle time to describe other methods of knowledge in chap- 

 ters 1 to 3, and in Chapter 5 to dehneate certain differences 

 between the scientist and the professional man who appUes 



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