16 SCIENTIST 



ting them in his mouth to see how they taste, and so on. 

 Slowly the child begins to have expectations about the 

 objects he handles. Things that are clear and easy to see 

 through are likely to break when they fall on the floor. 

 Things that make one feel warm as we approach them are 

 likely to feel painful when actually touched. Very hard 

 things don't have much taste, whereas most soft warm things 

 do. None of these ideas or generalizations is completely 

 satisfactory because each is likely to have a number of 

 exceptions. About the only one that works out every time 

 is the statement that all objects which are pushed off 

 tables fall to the floor. In order to develop more accurate 

 expectations about the world of objects, the child keeps 

 on exploring and refining his description of objects and 

 their relationships to one another until he finally emerges 

 with a satisfactory working picture of the world around 

 him. 



There is really no difference in what the scientist and 

 the child do. The only difference is in the skill with which 

 they do it. The scientist is just as interested in looking at 

 the world, listening to it, feeling it, and tasting it as the 

 child is. And he does these things for just the same reason 

 — to improve his expectation as to what objects will be 

 like and how they will behave when he encounters them 

 again. He differs from the child in having learned to doubt 

 the accuracy of his own senses and by wanting to see, feel, 

 and hear more than his unaided senses can supply. He 

 therefore spends a lot of time devising instruments with 

 which to observe the world and to reduce the qualitative 

 impressions of his senses to numbers on a scale. He has 

 found, for example, that people disagree rather easily 

 about how red an object is but have much less difficulty 

 if the redness is described as a certain wavelength and is 

 measured by a pointer on a dial. Another advantage in 



