科學究竟有什麼用？

經濟學人

Conundrums of science
科學謎題

What is it for?
科學究竟有什麼用？

How the 20th century influenced the evolution of science
二十世紀對科學的演變有何影響？

SCIENCE works with problems by making them into manageable, manipulable abstractions. Jon Agar’s ambitious new book sets out to synthesise the insights of many recent historians of science. These might be anything from a field biologist’s notes of lemming populations on Spitzbergen to a physicist’s creation of muon tracks in a cloud chamber, or from a set of equations in the mathematical imagination to a vast computer model of the world’s climate.
用科學的方法處理問題就是將這些問題轉化成易管理且可操作的抽像概念。喬·艾格將近代眾多科學史家的見解都融入在他的新作當中，真可謂是大膽的創作。在這本書中你將會看到野外生物學家對於斯匹茨卑根群島上的旅鼠種群的闡述，物理學家在雲室裡創建的μ介子軌跡，利用數學概念思考出的一組方程式，以及巨型計算機模型中的全球氣候。

Doing science is making these abstractions. The history of science is understanding how particular abstractions come to be accepted as the right way of producing solutions—and how problems get chosen in the first place. Sometimes the problems are those of the people paying for the science; sometimes they are posed by developments the scientists are interested in; sometimes they are problems that grow out of science itself.
科學研究就是這麼抽像。科學史就是在逐步認知如何以適當的方式解決某些特殊的抽像事物，使它們被大眾接受，以及如何在第一時間發現所面臨的問題。有些時候是獻身科學事業的人們遺留了許多問題，有時候是科學家們針對他們所感興趣的發展領域而提出了某些問題，而有時是科學本身產生了問題。

As Mr Agar shows, the great problem-posing processes of the 20th century were its wars. The two world wars and the cold war ratcheted up the spending on science, changing its organisational basis, its political setting and its subject matter. The less obvious aspects of war and science—for example, the introduction of psychoanalysis into British medicine courtesy of shellshock—are given their due, as well as the central Faustian tragedy of the development of the atom bomb.
正如艾格先生所說，許多重大問題都是在二十世紀的戰爭期間被提出的。二戰和冷戰都加大了花費在科學上面的時間和精力，改變了其組織基礎、政治環境和作戰目的。而戰爭和科學較不明顯的方面也受到了一定的關注，例如，由於彈震症的出現將精神分析學引入英國醫學中，又如原子彈的研發（雖然是個浮士德式的悲劇）也受到了某種認可。

The bomb that graces the cover of the book has come to stand for the power of science. But Mr Agar’s history is more illuminating on the less obvious story of science’s role in problems of control. Throughout the book, the reader is struck by how much people have seen a lack of control over others as a problem, and science as a source of solutions.
一朵核爆蘑菇雲出現在本書精美的封面上，引申出強大的科學力量。但是艾格先生更傾向於闡述科學在控制問題上所起到的作用，即使這個作用並非顯而易見。通讀全書，讀者會震驚於因為缺乏控制而在諸多方面所引起的問題，而科學便是解決這一問題的唯一途徑。

Lewis Terman, developer of intelligence tests, for example, dreamed of psychology as “a science of human engineering” in the 1920s. Eugenicists sought, by combining, in the words of J.B.S. Haldane, the offices of “the policeman, the priest and the procurer”, to control both the actions of their social inferiors and the course of evolution. Devotees and fellow travellers, such as Julian Huxley and H.G. Wells, saw in the biological sciences “the ultimate collective control of human destinies”. The Rockefeller Foundation dreamed of bringing the dangerous “psychobiology of sex” under “rational control” as part of its “Science of Man” programme. And Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, sought to combine the human and the machine into a system—initially, but not only, an anti-aircraft system—that was defined by the way in which it controlled itself.
舉例來說，智力測驗的開發者路易斯·推曼在1920年代將心理學設想為人體工程學。優生學家根據遺傳學家霍爾丹的學說，並與警方、牧師和拉皮條者通力合作，力圖控制弱勢群體的行為和人類的進化過程。像朱利安·赫胥黎這樣的生物學家和與其志同道合的赫伯特·喬治·威爾斯認為生物科學可“最終控制的人類的整體命運”。作為“人類科學”計劃的一部分，洛克菲勒基金會希望對危險的“性心理生物學”進行“理性控制”。控制論的創立者諾伯特·維納力圖將人類和機器結合在一個系統中，即防空系統，這是最初的形式，但並非單一形式，該系統的性質是自控。

At first blush these look like futures that simply failed. But the story is more complex. The Rockefeller Foundation’s vision of a “Science of Man” led it to foster a new “molecular biology” at CalTech and other institutions. Today’s control of crops through their genes and children through their pharmaceuticals can both be traced back, in part, to that intervention. And then there is the remarkable story of Song Jian. A Chinese engineer who had been schooled in control theory in Moscow just after Stalin’s death (at which point cybernetics, previously bourgeois and reactionary, became acceptable), he rose to pre-eminence in China’s military-industrial complex. Attending a meeting on control theory in Helsinki in the 1970s, he became convinced of the power of crude computer models like those of the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”. Importing such modelling to his power base at the Chinese missile and space-flight ministry he became crucial in the enactment of the one-child policy in the 1980s.
乍看下，這些內容毫無希望可言，但其實並非如此。洛克菲勒基金會對於“人類科學”的願景促使其在加州理工學院和其他院校發展了“分子生物學”這個新學科。如今，通過基因可以對農作物進行控制，並且通過藥物能對兒童進行控制，在某種程度上都能對事物進行一定的干預。接下來看一看宋健的非凡故事。他是一名中國工程師，就在斯大林病逝後不久（此時控制論、曾經的資產階級和反動分子開始為人們所接受），他前往莫斯科學習控制理論，隨後在中國的共軍聯合體中成為一名出類拔萃的人物。1970年代，宋健在赫爾辛基參加了一場有關控制理論的會議，他開始認識到原始計算機模型的力量，正如羅馬俱樂部發表的《增長的極限》依據的計算機模型一樣，隨後他便將這類模型引入他在中國導彈與航天部門的動能基地加以研究。他也是1980年代獨生子女政策的主要制定者。

Mr Agar’s book is somewhat biased towards the physical sciences and it has some odd gaps. Seeing the molecular biology of the 1960s as an information science, Mr Agar overlooks Peter Mitchell, whose breakthrough in understanding that cells store energy, not in molecules, but in potential differences revealed an aspect of life hitherto undreamed of. There is nothing on the fluoridation of water, and too little on nutrition.
艾格先生在書中對自然科學的存有一些偏見，但該書在某些領域的也有空白。他不僅將1960年代的分子生物學視為信息科學，還忽視了彼得·米切爾的觀點，這位生物化學家的一項突破性研究是細胞能夠通過電位差而不是分子儲存能量，這個理論體現在生活中的方方面面，至今為止都讓人類難以想像。書中也沒有對飲水加氟法進行闡述，在營養學方面也較少被提及。

Some of the later material on trends too close to the present might well have been omitted. Given the central role of war, a book limited to what Eric Hobsbawm has called the short 20th century—1914 to 1991—might have served better. But overall, Mr Agar has abstracted and made manageable a range of rich and informed analysis. Anyone who thinks seriously about science, and about how it is used, will find it a very useful source of new ways to appreciate both problems and solutions.
後期對科學趨勢的一些研究由於很接近當今的研究而被省略了。鑒於埃裡克·霍布斯鮑姆稱二十世紀（1914年至1991年）乃是個“短暫的世紀”，以及戰爭在本書起到的核心作用，這樣的安排比較妥當。但總體來說，艾格先生在本書中做出了一系列充分且通透的分析，雖然抽像，但易於掌握。認真研究並運用科學的人都會發現書中許多有用的科學方法會幫助他們解決問題並發現對策。