The Elegant Experiment

If "art for art's sake" is a desirable slogan, why not "science for science's sake"? Modern scientists, whose goals are apt to be shaped by armed forces' research grants or a corporation's search for bigger & better laboratory-tested mousetraps, are diffident about performing their experiments for pure research purposes. Sir Edward Appleton, principal of the University of Edinburgh and a Nobel Prizewinner in physics, believes that "science for its own sake" is a slogan to be proud of. His thesis, as quoted in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: "Science is illuminating as well as fruitful." Says Sir Edward:

"Perhaps the most striking fact about modern science, in its explorations ranging from the heart of the atom to the frontiers of the universe, is that, like poetry, like philosophy, it reveals depths and mysteries beyond, and . . . quite different from the ordinary, matter-of-fact world we are used to. Science has given back to the universe that quality of inexhaustible richness and unexpectedness and wonder which at one time it seemed to have taken away from it ...

"Even in experimental work, it is the primacy of an imaginative idea or intuition that starts it all off ... The important thing in experimenting is to ask nature the right question and in its most direct form ... It is as if knowledge were playing a game of chess with the mind, and one has to be constantly on the alert with fresh tactics or even a changed strategy . . .

"Asking nature the right question in the right way--or recognizing a theoretical pattern in a tangled skein of experimental data--often has the effect of introducing an element of beauty and elegance into the scientist's work. Do we not, on occasion, refer to a 'beautiful theory' and an 'elegant experiment'? A great experiment seems to us, somehow, something which could not have been done differently . . . Taking away something or adding something only detracts from it. In this respect, a beautiful experiment can surely be classed with a great work of art.

"As an exercise, we can claim [science] to be one of the most complex and far-ranging of our mental experiences ... At any one moment we may have only a precarious hold on a temporary truth, and our consciousness of this ever urges us to seek fresh truths and new under standings . . . The pursuit of science presents to the human mind an enduring challenge on an endless frontier, quite apart from the material enrichment of mankind to which it may incidentally give rise . . ."

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