The contrast between the scientific contribution of today with that of the ancient Greeks is a striking one. The Greek writers, as Singer1 has recently pointed out in a scholarly essay, set down only their conclusions. Their methods of work, and even their verificatory observations, are not published. But consider the contributions to modern scientific literature. “The author begins,” says Singer, “by pointing out a gap in knowledge … Having stated his problem, he reviews the efforts made by others to illumine this dark place in knowledge. He points out some of their errors or decides to accept their work and base his own upon it. Perhaps he distrusts their experiments or would like to reinterpret their results. Having summarized their labors, he details his own experiments and observations. But he is not able to tell us all of these. … Space will not permit him to tell us how he embarked on many different lines of work and abandoned them as unprofitable or too difficult, nor anything of the months or years spent in merely repeating the experience of others. He says no word of how he acquired and improved his experimental skill and technical experience. He tells merely of those developments of his work that have yielded him results. … When by gradual steps he had at last reached, or perhaps with the instinct of genius had more quickly discerned, a profitable direction for his investigations, he reached after a time those conclusions which his final line of work has verified and rendered more exact. It is this final process of verification that he mainly describes in his article, and it is the details of this that occupy the bulk, perhaps nineteen twentieths or more, of all that he has to say. Then, having described these verificatory experiments, he summarizes his conclusions in a short paragraph of a few lines.” Read more...
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