Conant Explains New Methods of Science Teaching

Taking the curricular lecture platform for the first time since he became President of the University in 1933, James Bryant Conant delivered the first of two lectures on "The Strategy and Tactics of Science" to a capacity audience in New Lecture Hall last night.

Dividing the whole field of secular learning into the three fields of accumulative knowledge, philosophy, and literature and the fine arts, President Conant went on to distinguish between "invention" and "scientific discovery" as separate phases of the area of "accumulative knowledge. Science," he emphasized, "emerges from the other progressive activities of man to the extent that new concepts arise from experiments and observations, and the new concepts in turn lead to further experiments and observations."

Traces Emergence of Science

To illustrate the emergence of modern concepts through revised experimental methods, President Conant traced for his audience, by means of lantern slides, the seventeenth-century development of the air pump by Torricelli, von Guericke, and Boyle. The perfection of this simple mechanism resulted in a complete revision of the traditional concepts of atmosphere as a vacuum to the modern one of a weighable and elastic entity.