96 COSMOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY 



has not since, produced so large and illustrious a group as Hevesy, 

 Polanyi, Szent-Gyorgi, Szilard, Teller, Von Bekesy, Von Karman, Von 

 Neumann, Wigner, and many others. Perhaps the situation is as 

 Duhem depicts it: 



Contemplation of a set of experimental laws does not, therefore, suf- 

 fice to suggest to the physicist what hypotheses he should choose in 

 order to give a theoretical representation of these laws; it is also nec- 

 essaiy that the thoughts habitual with those among whom he lives 

 and the tendencies impressed on his own mind by his previous studies 

 come and guide him, and restrict the excessively great latitude left to 

 his choice by the rules of logic. How many parts of physics retain to 

 this day a merely empirical form until circumstances prepare the 

 genius of a physicist to conceive the hypothesis which will organize 

 them into a theory! 



However this may be, even quite local variations in the cultural 

 environment may have spectacular eflFects. Consider what happened 

 at the University of Padua. Here flourished a literally radical culture. 

 Going back (by way of Averroes rather than Aquinas) to the tap- 

 root of scholastic thought, to Aristotle, it embraced also a Galenic 

 element of respect for observation and experiment. The University 

 had a strong secular orientation, buttressed by the dominion of the 

 strongest anticlerical state then extant (Venice), and oflFered a free- 

 dom of thought unparalleled in any learned institution of the time. 

 What a profusion of scientific genius is found among men whose 

 outlook this University had moulded: Cusanus, Copernicus, Fabri- 

 cius, Vesalius, Harvey, Galileo— all these and others, making up a 

 substantial proportion of that small company which made modern 

 science, had drunk the heady wine of Padua. 



We found in Chapters I and II that perceived "naked fact" is, if 

 not quite mythical, at least substantially hypothetical. We find now 

 that, in confrontation of "naked fact," scientific ideas are born of 

 human minds suflFused with extrascientific, metaphysical presupposi- 

 tions. Eddington indeed remarks that "because a man works in a 

 laboratory it does not follow that he is not an incorrigible metaphysi- 

 cian." Consider for example how much the design and conduct of 

 contemporary laboratory practice owes to a not-always-accredited 

 cosmologic con\dction that for every macroscopic physical effect ob- 

 served there should be a discoverable "natural" cause. And, outside 

 the laboratory, Eddington was himself a living demonstration of the 



