1218 CENTENNIAL: FOURTH SCIENTIFIC SESSION PROC. N. A. S.

should distract us from setting goals for human use of such quality as to absorb
constructively and beneficially any and all of the scientific findings to come.
On the other hand, we see the culture of science itself gaining from this endeavor,

because the way of seeking these goals will demand an ever-increasing combination
and even a fusion of scientific skills, from what have been called, up to now, "dif-
ferent" sciences. While the endless variety of approach to science must be zealously
preserved, these differences between sciences will grow less and less. Many of us
believe that this change itself will aid emergence of great unifying principles.
(Think, for instance, of information theory, of the coding of electrical signals, of
the coding of nerve impulses, of the coding of bases in nucleic acids and of their
influence on protein configuration.) For those in science and engineering who seek
to solve a worthy problem, and to reach an end which is important, broad, meaning-
ful, are finding ways more and more to bring all kinds of minds and skills to work
together.

SCIENCE AND THE SATISFACTION OF HUMAN ASPIRATIONS

BY I. I. RABI
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Ladies and gentlemen, here we are at the end of a long day after almost a week
of much talk. Our next appointment is not till 7:30 this evening. I therefore
have plenty of time to devote to my topic; however, my audience would decay
exponentially. I hope not to detain you for long, for it is well known that only
very few souls can be saved after half past three in the afternoon.

In this conference we have heard from some of the most eminent men of science
in the land. Day after day the mysteries of life were laid bare, and antecedent
to life the structure of matter and, indeed, of the universe were presented in dra-
matic and fascinating clarity. Although no attempt was made to make a real
interdisciplinary connection between the various disciplines, nevertheless, the
juxtaposition of topics did a very great deal to show us the essential unity of the
scientific disciplines, however different their techniques. The very first day we went
in progressive steps from the origin of the elements to the origins of life. In the
second day we went from the almost philosophical consideration of the organization
of the laws of nature to the organization of living matter. This afternoon, turning to
less immediate questions, we have had a general overview of science from the aspects
of communication and application both to industry and to public policy and welfare.
We listened to great wisdom.

It is now my turn. The task assigned to me was to address myself to science in
its more intimate relation to the individual: science and the satisfaction of human
aspirations. The drives which cause men to become interested in science are almost
as various as human personality. Science could not happen without a range of
personalities and cultures. We see the interplay now of cultures in the successive
contributions of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Alexandria, Rome, Arabian-Italian
Renaissance, and in the modern era Japan, America, and China, which should

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VOL. 50, 1963 CENTENNIAL: FOURTH SCIENTIFIC SESSION 1219

perhaps be all by itself. There is the collector and classifier who may interest him-
self in stamps, books, pictures, or, on the other hand, in phases of botany, geology,
astronomy, or even in parts of physics such as spectroscopy. We should not use the
term "mere" with respect to these activities. High talents of intellect and insight
can be devoted to these aspects of sciences. The hunt for a new species of plant
or animal, a new spectral sequence, a new collection or system of galaxies can be
both exciting and demanding. Ingenuity, persistence, and what may be called
luck are necessary for success in these endeavors. The born hunter and alert ob-
server will find success and satisfaction in this phase of science. We would be no-
where without this type of individual.

Basically, this element of science satisfies more immediately the desire to discover
and to know the facts of nature. Nature with tremendous variety and charm
captures the fancy and the spirit. To one person a fact is just a fact and of no
further interest. Such a person may become a mathematician or a logician, but
he will never be a true poet or scientist. The scientist, the experimental scientist
at least, shares with the poet and artist a feeling for the value for the immediate and
the empirical face of nature. The geologist loves his bright and shiny stone, his
curious fossils, just as the physicist can never cease to be charmed by a spectro-
gram or the delightful paradoxes of the motion of a spinning top.

This aspect of the pursuit of science satisfies a basic desire or aspiration just to
know, to find out, or perhaps make order out of the otherwise chaotic jumble of
immediate experience. It is an aspiration shared with all mankind but more with
youth and childhood than with adults. In this sense scientists are just children who
never grew up, who never lost the nagging urge to ask how, why, and what. Like
children, who in all innocence and high excitement bring a dangerous spider into the
house and frighten the wits out of their elders, the scientist emerges with a smallpox
vaccine or an atomic bomb.

There is another facet of human aspiration which contributes to the various faces
of science. This is man in his aspect of the maker or doer. Again this aspect is
strongest in childhood but persists longer into adulthood since its immediate use is
obvious. The use of tools, the arts and crafts, are the hallmarks by which we
rank prehistoric and primitive civilizations. Of course, arts and crafts are not yet
science, but share with science the manipulation of nature. The one is to satisfy the
desire for material needs of food, shelter, decoration, and of course armament. This
is the usual, the normal-the sort of thing which is immediately understood by men
of maturity and judgment such as we find in Congress. The other, the less practical
but in the end more powerful, is to manipulate nature not for immediate or material
ends but for the purpose of providing new knowledge or the tools which could pro-
vide new knowledge. This is the method of science.

It is rare that this aspiration for discovery is sufficiently understood by any
community to the degree of actually providing funds for this purpose. Either the
curiosity of childhood is soon lost (perhaps this change may have an actual survival
value for the race) or somehow those who possess the gift lack the ability to com-
municate the deep meaning, the excitement, and the satisfactions of scientific dis-
covery.

This question should be of the greatest concern to our scientific community.
Unless the public shares in our aspirations and our satisfactions in the scientific

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1220 CENTENNIAL: FOURTH SCIENTIFIC SESSION PROC. N. A. S.

enterprise, the pure scientific impulse will always have to be diluted and even dis-
torted with immediate ends, which in the last two decades have been primarily
military.

I see nothing ignoble or degrading in the application of science to the defense of
one's country-quite the contrary.
On the other hand, when the support of science is tied both administratively

and by public interest directly to military and other purely practical uses, one
begins to feel that somehow we as scientists have failed to arouse either interest or
understanding in the public mind. We have failed to satisfy the aspirations
which they share with the scientist by taking them with us as we go further along
the road of scientific accomplishment. This community of interest which we have
with the youth of the country in considerable measure does not extend to the adult
population. Surely, science is not only for children young and old.

I will not infringe further on what I have hoped would be Dr. Oppenheimer's
domain of science and communication, but go on to still another facet, perhaps
the most significant of the scientific adventure, or scientific movement, or, as I
prefer to call it, the scientific culture. In this, we share with the poet and artist the
delight in immediate empirical experience with its aesthetic, emotional, and intel-
lectual values, but we go further, not to express this experience in the language of
the heart, but in the prose of the catalogue, finding similarities in differences and
presenting the results as an intellectual structure which can inspire pleasure and
interest. We share with the practical world the manipulation of nature but not
principally directed to useful ends or ends which are said to be useful. Our ends go
further, but we do share with the artisan and the engineer the pleasure of invention
of novel combinations to achieve what had hitherto been difficult or impossible.
Our goal is a sort of bootstrap operation to utilize the tools of present knowledge

to gain new knowledge, knowledge which we could hardly have foreseen or imagined.
In these two illustrations I hoped to show that in our interaction with the world
outside ourselves the scientific aspirations and satisfactions are basically aspira-
tions which are shared by all. The scientists' satisfactions come in a special form
which expresses itself in the desire to broaden and deepen our knowledge and under-
standing of all phenomena, but whereas the rest of mankind concentrates on man,
his feelings and desires, the scientist tries to see the world as it really is or might be
shorn of man's perhaps excessive preoccupation with himself. Clearly this is a
quest which can never come to an end. Scientific curiosity will never be satisfied
because it will never reach its goal to know all and understand all.
Such a goal and such an adventure will hardly satisfy the more prosaic and

limited aspects of our human nature, but it nevertheless has a nobility of a kind which
in other fields has called forth some of the greatest manifestations of the human
spirit.
The third aspect of science which I wish to explore with you, and which may be as

I suggested the most significant, is one which we share with the humanities and with
religion. Except for some periods of uneasy truce, science and religion have always
been in conflict. Since the time of Galileo this conflict has sharpened. Mlany able
men, both from the side of science and of religion, have assured us that there is no
conflict between the two. On closer examination, it is apparent that the synthesis

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VOL. 50, 1963 CENTENNIAL: FOURTH SCIENTIFIC SESSION 1221

or bridge which they try to establish results only in a devaluation of both aspects of
a powerful urge of the human spirit.
The urge to comprehend the visible and invisible universe and to find man's

place within it is common to both science and religion. The conflict between science
and religion is, therefore, more in the nature of a civil war between two parties with
the same ultimate aims of comprehension and of submission to a higher order
of knowledge and of insight.

In these matters religion has always taken the lead. Questions about man's
place in the universe and his origins had to be given answers in each generation.
The ancient Hebrews could not wait for the discovery of the neutron and the de-

velopment of the theory of stellar evolution, or for Darwin, Morgan, Crick, and
Watson to explain the variety of life and the origins of man and of the universe.
The noble opening lines of Genesis cannot fail to move the most prosaic scientist

even today. By means of dramatic imagery and lofty poetic insight, religions have
provided world systems more or less complete which gave immediate satisfaction to
the yearnings of man for order in the world and guidance in his life. They gave a
release from certain fears, although they sometimes substituted others for those
displaced. The great human quality of faith was always a basic prop to these
religious structures. Religion and religious systems to be fully effective had to
become established in law and custom, and in a certain sense their statements had
to come to be regarded as self-evident.
Compared to the eagle flight of religious thought, science is more like the humdrum

earthbound bulldozer. Where it has passed anyone can follow. Whereas religion
is aristocratic and hierarchical, science is democratic and leveling. After the bull-
dozer has passed, a tangled jungle or many beautiful gardens and buildings enshrined
in history and sentiment may be destroyed, but the ground is ready for newer and
perhaps even more beautiful interesting cultivation, or perhaps not. In any event,
a newer generation gets a new start.

It has often been said that science gives man knowledge but does not tell him
what to do with it. These prescriptions and values he is supposed to get from
religion or from the so-called humanities. To borrow a phrase from a great scien-
tist, Enrico Fermi, "This is not very true." The great writings of the humanist
and holy religious writ can do much to incite men to noble and charitable action as
well as to acts of folly and cruelty.

Science can make no such claim. What science seeks to do in its limited way is
to delineate the results of action through psychology on the individual himself,
through the behavioral sciences on the others, and, above all, to present a choice
of means, leaving the decision to an informed act of "free will" insofar as the term
still has a meaning. Only those who do not care to make their actions their own
will say that science does not contribute to values.
The conflict between science and religion, between science and the humanities,

therefore remains. The latter must always claim more than it knows and, there-
fore, must always retreat and qualify as science advances. "Don't insult me with
facts" is the hurt expression of punctured pretensions. The true humanist and
religionist welcomes scientific advance because it also allows him to advance his
cause with deeper understanding. The Holy Fathers of the Roman Catholic
Church have made this point very clear.

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1222 CENTENNIAL: FOURTH SCIENTIFIC SESSION PROC. N. A. S.

In contrasting science with the humanities and religion, the more pedestrian
elements of the relentless march of scientific discovery have been emphasized.
Actually science does not march in battle order toward a predetermined goal. This
would be a contradiction in terms.

Scientists traditionally are free, untrammeled, and individualistic. Each sets
his own goals following his interests. Such co-ordination as there is comes out of
the nature of the subject matter and out of the tradition of the discipline; attempts
to interfere, direct, or guide this freedom, as in some countries with overplanned
societies, result in inefficiency and frustration of the creative urge. Scientists
are well aware that they are prone to error. The observer in his laboratory knows
full well that he can easily misinterpret his observation or miss the essential fact.
The bold speculator can become so enamored of the beauty and sweep of his hy-
pothesis that he may take it as an end in itself. It must be true, he feels, because
it is so elegant. However, the court of highest appeal, which is nature itself, is
relentless, and error cannot long survive.

Therein lies one of the greatest appeals of science, an appeal which makes it
capable of satisfying one of the greatest of human aspirations-to be a member of
a community which is free but not anarchical. Science possesses an infinite variety
of limited goals but in the end marches toward a limitless horizon. It consolidates
its gains but does not rest on its laurels. Members of this community possess an
inner solidity which comes from a sense of achievement and an inner conviction
that the advance of science is important and worthy of their greatest effort. This
solidity comes in a context of fierce competition, strongly held conviction, and dif-
fering assessments as to the value of one achievement or another. Over and above
all this too-human confusion is the assurance that with further study will come order
and beauty and a deeper understanding.
One cannot close a discussion like this without bringing out one of the greatest

rewards of the pursuit of scientific discovery. It comes accidentally and is often
a matter of luck rather than the result of planning. It may come in an illuminating
flash of insight or in the course of an experiment such as Rutherford's when he saw
his alpha particles scattered through large angles, or Anderson's when he saw an
electron track moving the wrong way and realized he had a positive electron, or
Yukawa's when he saw that a supposed particle could account for nuclear forces.
Although scientists don't write about these moments of exultation and ecstasy so
different from the everyday routine of research, these fleeting visions can in one
flash reward one for years of patient and exhausting work. At these times the
scientist is filled with profound awe and humility that such wonders should be
revealed through him. There is a quality about science, or rather about nature,
which is always miraculous in its originality. To obtain a glimpse of this wonder
can be the reward of a lifetime. This itself can be the sufficient satisfaction of
the aspiration which makes scientists scientists.
At this point, at the end of my presentation and the end of this program, I

can only wish the Academy and all mankind a century of achievement as great as
the century which has passed in the life of our beloved Academy.

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