sci-entist has said: "1 cannot experiment on God—so in my laboratory I have got nothing to do with Him". Here comes the difference between a Muslim Scientist and an Atheist Sci-entist. While the atheist regards all the relationships discovered by him to be the outcome of an accidental combination of unintelligent forces of nature working under the impulse of contradiction as its chief motive force, a Muslim scientist regards them to be an insight into the "Habit of God" which does not change, and a working of an intelligence which does not falter. Call it by any name—Allah, God, Nature, Continuum, Space. On reaching this intellectual level polytheism has no leg on which to stand.
At this stage I feel tempted to quote verbatim what W. M. Smart has said about the scientific method in the intro-duction to his book "The Origin of Earth", p. 14, 1955 edition;
"Let us not then exalt the scientific method unduly as the close preserve of the scientist nor, which is much more important, as the only means by which we attempt to discover the secrets of Nature. It is easy for a scientist to be a materialist if he sees only in the Universe the apparently relentless unfolding of natural law, and forgets that there are domains
39
where the laws of Physics are irrelevant. But more and more scientists are realizing that they are exploring only one section of the great world of Nature in all its manifold complexity; beauty, moral conduct, spiritual values, religious experience, are all outside their domain, yet all come within man's scrutiny when he attempts to interpret the Universe as a whole and strives to discern purpose therein. A great work of pictorial art could be analysed by the scientist in terms of chemical constitution, atomic and molecular structure, the laws of physical optics, and all the rest; he might reduce Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to a collection of mathematical formulae in the theory of vibrations; in neither case would his interpretation be more than bare bones, incomplete and un- " satisfying."
This is what we should remember. We should under stand and use the Scientific Method wherever possible, but we should not be dazzled by the glare of its achievements.
We should use the results of scientific effort for subjugating Nature and for making full use of its resources intelligently, and nothing more.
G. SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN OPERATION
We have seen that in the modern scientific method we -start with empirical observations and their classifications, in physical and biological sciences we separate out our experiences of the same type into different groups and thus try to determine the correlations between them and with other groups by hypothesising and testing them by inductive reasoning and experimentation.
In Psychology and other social sciences- this cannot always be done. The personalities' involved in these are too complex to be capable of being broken up into simple elements as we always do. in physical sciences. The Determinist school in Psychology tried to adopt the method of the physical sciences, but could not succeed. In such sciences complex personalities can now be taken as units for analysis and study.
40
Methods are devised to separate out the contribution of different variables as far as possible, but this cannot always be done with complete success.
It would be very interesting indeed to discuss in some detail the procedures of observation and experimentation adopted in social sciences as distinct from those of the physical sciences, but in connection with the Philosophy of Science I am sure that it would suffice if we note that though the scientific method remains essentially similar up to a certain stage, it has to be modified according to the nature of the material dealt with. Simply this alteration from the traditional scientific method of physical sciences, however, does not make it unscientific. in tact, some historians claim that their method has as much claim to the descriptive adjective 'scientific' as that of atomic physicists. But there is much to be done before this claim can be accepted, because more often than not the personal prejudices of a historian distort the facts depended upon by him for coming to a conclusion and preparing an hypothesis.
H. EXPERIMENTATION
We have seen that experimentation is the distinctive feature of the modern scientific method. In fact, it is by far the hardest part of this procedure. But even. so an experiment does not guarantee that a conclusion supported by an experiment is the only and the final one under all kinds of stresses, strains and velocities.
You throw a stone; you fire a bullet; you release an earth satellite or a rocket for the Moon, Mars or Venus probe; you take their observations. They all satisfy Newton's law of gravitation. You calculate the position of the earth and other planets according to that law. The eclipses can be predicted long before, in full detail, because Newton's Law holds in that case also.
With all this long list of successes to its credit, Newton's Law failed to predict the movement of the perihelion of
Mer-41
cury—the point where Mercury in its elliptic orbit is nearest to the sun and where it moves forward by a small amount.
Now take another example. Al-Hazen had a hazy idea of the velocity of light; but in his time the nature of light was not known.
Still he found the laws of reflection and refraction of light. Newton postulated that a beam of light consisted of a shower of corpuscles of light The experimental results of reflection and refraction were fully explained on this hypothesis also. The observation that light travels in straight lines was also neatly explained. Later on Huyghens propounded the hypothesis that light was propagated by transverse waves. He also explained equally well the phenomena of reflection and refraction of light. But this wave-theory introduced two new difficulties. Firstly that waves travel in some elastic medium, but light travels in the interstellar space which was considered to be a void, a vacuum. A new name, "Ether", was introduced to solve this difficulty. It was assumed to be omnipotent, to be present everywhere.
Now the ether, to transmit waves of light at a speed of about 300,000 km ! sec at frequencies of about 700 billion vibrations per second, requires a tremendous elastic force. Herschel had calculated that this force must be about 1,148,000,000,000, times that of the ordinary air at the surface of the earth so that the pressure of ether on every square inch must be about seventeen billion pounds. By accepting the undulatory theory of light we were asked by physical philosophers to believe that the empty space and all else in the hea-vens and the earth must be filled with something more solid and elastic than steel and Young had remarked that "the lumi-niferous ether pervading all space, and penetrating almost all substances, is not only highly elastic but absolutely solid" !!! He made the strange suggestion that "there may be independent worlds, some possibly existing in different parts of space, but others pervading each other unseen and unknown in the same space."
42
For about a century scientists and mathematicians continued to explore the properties of Ether in symbols and words, but utimately all this led to its complete disappearance from the material world.
About waves we know that they bend round corners. A sound, which consists of waves in the air, can be heard behind a corner. If light was propagated by waves, it should also bend round corners and travelling in a straight line has no meaning. The believers in the wave-theory of light agreed to this, but new experiments had to be designed to show this effect. This was done by passing monochromatic light through two pin-holes by Young and later on by passing light through a fine diffraction grating, in which a thousand or more lines are etched in an inch on a glass plate. Light could pass through glass, but it is stopped by dark lines. Dark and bright bands are formed on the side away from the source of light due to the light waves bending at the line edges of dark lines in the grating. This phenomenon had been noticed by Al-Hazen several centuries before, during his keen observations of the passage of a light-beam through a mesh, like fine muslin cloth, but he could not explain it, because the problem had not been formulated up to that time. Anyhow, we know how that the formation of dark and bright bands by a diffraction grating is due to the bending of the waves of light round sharp corners and then by interference with the waves coming from the adjacent bright spaces in opposite phases. Where the waves are in the same phase they strengthen each other and produce bright lines. Where they are in opposite phases they cancel each others' effect and produce darkness.
Now on this discovery of interference, the theory of propagation of the light waves in Ether and determination of the velocity of light, posed a new problem in science. Earth was rotating from West to East round its axis and revolving round the sun in the same direction. It was presumed that all this rotation and revolution was taking place in Ether in which the waves of light travelled.
Morley and Michelson devised 43
an experiment tor measuring the relative velocities-between the Earth and Ether by a very sensitive interferometer. A part of a light-beam travelled in the North-South direction, and another part of (he same beam in the East-West direction. These two halves of the beam were brought back to travel together again. If there was the slightest difference in the relative velocities in these two directions, i.e. in the N-S and E-W directions, due to the rotation and revolution of the Earth, it would have been possible to detect the change in the velocity of light by the interference pattern. But the result showed no such thing. This only meant that either the Earth was not moving in the E-W direction at all, (as was assumed in the Geocentric Cosmology) or, if the Earth was moving, there was no relative motion between the Ether and the Earth. But this could not be, because Newton's Law, which required the Earth to rotate and revolve round the sun, had been tested and had always been found correct. The electromagnetic theory, which required relative motion between ether and the moving earth had also been tested experimentally and found correct.
This was a very embarrassing situation for science, and realty a very great setback, but Lorentz solved the difficulty. He postulated that when a body moves at a great velocity, compa.ab.e to the velocity of light, the length in the direction of motion decreases in such a way that it completely compensates the difference in relative velocity of Ether and Earth in that direction and in a direction at right angles to it.
This meant that the scales in the E-W direction on the earth contracted as compared to the scales placed in a N-S direction, and the difference in the relative velocities of Earth and Ether in N-S and E-W directions could never be measured.
In 1915 Einstein put forward the Special Theory of Relativity, which brought out that Space is really a four-dimensional continuum and Time is as much a real part of every thing in Space as its length, breadth and thickness. All the gravitational phenomena in Space were explained to be a consequence of its curvature and it was shown that when a body
44
moves with a velocity comparable to light, its length decreases, its mass increases and its time lengthens. This explained not only the result of the Morley-Micheison's experiment, but also the movement of the perihelion of Mercury, though not completely, yet much more satisfactorily than by Newton's law of gravitation. Another consequence of this was that a light photon when in motion should also acquire a mass different from that obtained by the earlier theory of electromagnetism. This meant that if the light of a star very close behind the sun passed close to the sun it will be bent differently from that demanded by the electromagnetic theory of light. Such an observation can be taken only during a total eclipse of the sun. For verification of the Special Theory of Relativity, science had to wait for three years up to the time of the solar eclipse of 1919. The result of these observations also, like those of the perihelion of Mercury were quite close to the values predicted according to the Theory of Relativity, but again not exactly as predicted.
We thus know that the Theory of Relativity is a nearer approximation to the True Law of Nature than Newton's Law of Gravitation, but it is not the final, real and absolutely correct Law of Nature.
This also shows that depending upon the strength of evidence derived from an experiment, one is able to regard the original hypothesis with a certain degree of confidence. But so far in science we have not reached anywhere near certainty. In fact, the only thing which we know with certainity is the principle of uncertainty.
It must also be remembered that the claim of a scientist cannot exceed the evidence and, therefore, the results of experiments are never better than the limits set by the degree of accuracy and discriminating power of the equipment employed. They cannot also be wider than the cover of the experiment itself. There is thus always a possibility of improving correlations by improving the quality of the data and observations on which they are based it must also be remembered
45
that an experiment does not really prove a fact. Ail it does is that it provides evidence in favour of certain assumptions but there is always room for improving the equipment and experimental technique and thus for collecting better evidence for changing the basic assumptions as a consequence. The process of changes in basic concepts of science is also very interesting. To explain the results of new experiments new words like Atom, Void, Field, Ether, Electron, Particle, Anti-particle are introduced. These words have to be defined precisely by words, symbols and mathematical functions. These call for new experiments and new names and bring out new complications. The procession of Science thus continues to grow.
46
CHAPTER IV