32 SCIENTIST 



one rejected. Some scientists become convinced rather 

 early and others will hold out for a long time. Much 

 excellent scientific work is, as a matter of fact, undertaken 

 primarily to convince the doubters that a proposed hy- 

 pothesis is the best available. 



Finally, a stage is reached when most scientists whose 

 views count for anything agree on the point at issue, and 

 attention moves to other problems. But in the back of 

 everyone's mind is the possibility that new evidence will 

 come up, sometimes by accident, which will throw the 

 agreed-upon hypothesis into uncertainty and perhaps sug- 

 gest a new one. 



No average time can be given either for the general 

 acceptance of a theory or the duration of its life once it 

 is accepted. These things vary enormously. For the most 

 part, however, agreement among all the people who mat- 

 ter occurs much more rapidly and completely in science 

 than it does in other fields. This tendency to agree stems in 

 large part from two factors: 1) Science confines itself al- 

 most entirely to the world as it is and not as it ought to be; 

 2) science has made tremendous efforts to reduce what it is 

 talking about to "pointer readings" which, as we mentioned 

 earlier, are much easier to agree about than are other types 

 of descriptive statements. 



Notes 



^Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, V. 17, No. 3, 29, 1962. 

 "Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1961, p. 802. 

 ' Statistics provided by the American Cancer Society. 

 * British MedicalJournal, V. 2, 1285, 1952. 



"Royal College of Physicians, Smoking and Health, New York, Pit- 

 man, p. 19, 1962. 



