THE ART OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 



Frederic Bartlett, Professor of Psychology at Cambridge, suggests 

 that the best single measure of mental skill may lie in the speed 

 with which errors are detected and thrown out/^ Lister once 

 remarked : 



" Next to the promulgation of the truth, the best thing I can 

 conceive that a man can do is the public recantation of an error." 



W. H. George points out that even with men of genius, with 

 whom the birth rate of hypotheses is very high, it only just 

 manages to exceed the death rate. 



Max Planck, whose quantum theory is considered by many 

 to be an even more important contribution to science than 

 Einstein's theory of relativity, said when he was awarded the 

 Nobel Prize : 



" Looking back . . . over the long and labyrinthine path 

 which finally led to the discovery [of the quantum theory], I 

 am vividly reminded of Goethe's saying that men will always be 

 making mistakes as long as they are striving after something."^" 



Einstein in speaking of the origin of his general theory of 

 relativity said : 



" These were errors in thinking which caused me two years 

 of hard work before at last, in 1915, I recognised them as such. 

 . . . The final results appear almost simple; any intelligent under- 

 graduate can understand them without much trouble. But the 

 years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but 

 cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confi- 

 dence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and 

 understanding, are only known to him who has himself experi- 

 enced them."^^ 



Perhaps the most interesting and revealing anecdote on these 

 matters was written by Hermann von Helmholtz^^ : 



"In 1 89 1 I have been able to solve a few problems in mathe- 

 matics and physics including some that the great mathematicians 

 had puzzled over in vain from Euler onwards. . . . But any pride 

 I might have felt in my conclusions was perceptibly lessened by 

 the fact that I knew that the solution of these problems had 

 almost always come to me as the gradual generalisation of favour- 

 able examples, by a series of fortunate conjectures, after many 

 errors. I am fain to compare myself with a wanderer on the 

 mountains who, not knowing the path, climbs slowly and pain- 

 fully upwards and often has to retrace his steps because he can 



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