THE PORTAL OF THE SALVADORAN ACADEMY OF THE LANGUAGE
By Eduardo Badía Serra,
Member of the Salvadoran Academy of Language.
If the door to errors is closed,
Nor will the truth be able to enter.
Rabindranath Tagore.
Those who believe that scientists, at least those of the 20th and 21st centuries, were strange and extravagant people or beings, very unique and particular, are probably wrong. The enormous progress in physics achieved through the work done in the remembered institutes of Cavendish, Copenhagen, Manchester, Munich, Göttingen, Tübingen, Berlin and McGill, and then reproduced and magnified in the United States of America, especially at the dawn of The Second World War, when Americans finally came to understand the economic and political power of science, were nothing more than the result of the normal and natural daily life of handfuls of young people with extraordinary mental abilities and with great respect for admiration. , doubt and astonishment.
The scientific method, for example, is something alien to the rigidity with which it is usually identified, and in the same way, also not completely alien to that identification with experimentation, observation and the laboratory with which it is also identified. , a product of the positivist, empiricist and inductive spirit that reigned at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. Everything changes in 1905, the “miraculous year”, definitively.
How did the great physicists, chemists and mathematicians on whom the great current edifice of science rests? What were his methods? Did they hate politics? Did they distinguish themselves from their peers and their neighbors? Probably, those great men were more normal than the most normal of mortals, and more human than the most human of mortals. They were rare, yes.
With the aim of offering some visions of their methods and the life that these great fighters of science led, some anecdotes are presented, real of course, that are said about them, which I take from the beautiful book by Barbara Lovett Cline, (Bárbara Lovett Cline, The creators of the new physics, Breviaries, Fondo de Cultura Económica, fifth reprint, Mexico, 1994):
~ As a physicist, Planck worked alone, and other than as raw material for his theory, he was not interested in experiment. It is rumored that he never made one in his life, and as much as this story is surely false, it is not that far from the truth.
~ Planck arrived at his first radiation formula by cheating a bit.
~ In the discovery of the nucleus by bombarding α particles on a gold plate, which caused the “scintillation”, which gave rise to Rutherford’s atomic model, Mansden and Geiger measured more than one million “scintillations”.
~ Robert Oppenheimer said that the scientific method of theoretical physicists consists of explaining to each other what is unknown.
~ Some sayings and some little-known, although proven “laws”, enunciated in the famous Copenhagen Institute, the so-called Bohr Institute, back in the years 1920 to 1930, and in which Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisemberg, Casimir, Rosenfeld wandered , Kalckar, Geoge Gamow and Bohr himself:
As soon as someone has a good idea, you have to eat.
Girls’ Bicycle Law: When girls ride bicycles, they look more
per second.
Why in cowboy movies (which they were very fond of, as well as ping-pong), does the hero always take out the gun before the villain? George Gamow wondered.
Bohr’s April Fool’s Law: In a place where everyone has guns, they will survive
the inocents.
Copenhagen Institute Classification of Girls and Movies:
1) The ones that one cannot stop looking at;
2) The ones that one can stop looking at, but it hurts;
3) The ones that don’t matter if you look at them or not;
4) The ones that hurt to look at;
5) Those that one cannot look at, even if one wants to.
Barbara Lovett Cline relates in her aforementioned book that: “Today, the young people who studied with Niels Bohr for the year 20 or 30 are physics professors and research directors in Europe and the United States. Many are scientific advisors to their governments and armies, in multiple countries. They like to talk about the old Copenhagen days. Sometimes they laugh when remembering the days of their extreme youth…they miss the old days, even though they were – they themselves admit it – a little crazy and also a little more than poor. Nobody had a car; few could travel on the first class train. A scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation, which in the United States was barely considered adequate to support an individual, had the effect of a fortune in Europe.”
That’s how physicists, chemists, biologists, mathematicians were; The great logicians have also been like this. Normal people, rather natural, human, simple, simple probably better. The great initiators of modern physics were like this: They laughed, they enjoyed, they suffered, above all, the attacks of wars, which separated them spatially but not mentally. His method, it is true, is rigorous, but it is nevertheless adaptable, modifiable, and sometimes, as in the case of the great speculator who was Max Planck, adaptable to his visions, always full of great imagination and incredible capacity. of reading the unknown and not yet explained.
Roger Penrose rightly says that the scientific method no longer includes only induction and deduction; intuition, abstraction, and even, says the great British mathematician and physicist author of The Emperor’s New Mind, elegance and miracles are also part of it.
#SCIENTIFIC #METHOD #LITTLEKNOWN #SCIENTIFIC #FACTS
