The Common Sense of Science
AFTER THE WAR he did not return to academia, but worked in the early application of what has since become called operations research, initially being seconded to UNESCO applying statistics to the economics of industry from 1947 to 1950. Although he seems to have preferred to refuse administration jobs, in many ways he was more successful in these than in pure science, and he eventually became director of the National Coal Board research establishment, where he presided over the introduction of what was known as 'Bronowski's Bricks' - an early type of smokeless fuel.
Throughout this period he maintained links with the arts through lectures on poetry and the relationship of the sciences and the arts as creative experiences. Some of these issues emerged through his book The Commonsense of Science (1951). He was Carnegie visiting professor of History at MIT in 1953 and subsequently produced a series of books and articles for the American press, on which he based his book Science and Human Values. Here, he argued the position of science as a central part of culture and enlarged the view he had held for some time that both science and cultural life were impoverished if they were isolated from each other [Ref. 6].
"For me science is an expression of the human mind, which seeks for unity under the chaos of nature as the writer seeks for it in the variety of human nature."This point was also explored by C.P. Snow in his more famous lecture where he described there being 'two cultures', but Bronowski was disparaging of Snow's suggestions that this division could be repaired in any simple way, by having, for example, all artists learn the second law of Thermodynamics.
RECOLLECTIONS:
Gwyn Thomas
the Welsh teacher and writer, and
A.J. Ayer
the philosopher,
both recall their time as fellow-panellists on
the Brains Trust.
Bruce Mazlish recalls his collaboration with Bronowski at the time of the publication of Science and Human Values
The Taung Child
Some details of this episode are presented here.
It was also in the early fifties that an event took place which he saw as pivotal to the rest of his life: he was presented with a problem in palaeontology. Raymond Dart had unearthed a fossil skull of a child long before, in 1924, at Taung in Eastern Africa. It had features which suggested it as a possible ancestor to human beings, although this idea could not be substantiated. Nonetheless, the name Australopithicus was used to describe what appeared to be a distinct new species. More examples of the species were found from 1937 onward and by 1950 statistical methods were being used to evaluate the evidence. Bronowski collaborated with W.M. Long and the British palaeontologist William Le Gros Clark to try to establish the likelihood that the Taung child was a candidate for human ancestry [Ref. 7].
"In 1950, when [the Taung child's] humanity was by no means accepted, I was asked to do a piece of mathematics. Could I combine a measure of the size of the Taung child's teeth with their shape, so as to discriminate them from the teeth of apes?"The impact of this for Bronowski was the formative effect it had on his life: his private research programme turned to the study of the unique biology of human beings and the unique intellectual products of that biology - to what he called 'human specificity'.
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Copyright © 1997-2001 by Stephen Moss. All rights reserved.
6. Wakeman, J.,1975, World Authors (New York: H.W. Wilson) p 221 - 223.
7. Bronowski, J., 1973, The Ascent of Man (London: BBC), p.30.