Oppenheimer Stresses The Unity of Science

J. Robert Oppenheimer '26 affirmed yesterday that although the unity of science and the world is very complex, there are "no insuperable elements of disunity." Speaking again to a capacity audience in Sanders Theatre and to hundreds more wired in at New Lecture Hall, Oppenheimer explained the character of the unities of science which led him to this optimism.

Seemingly unrelated coincidences in various branches of knowledge, not only physical science, may lead men to new knowledge, and hence, a greater awareness of the order of the world, he said. The lecture was the second of a series of eight entitled "The Hope of Order," given this spring as the William James Lectures on Philosophy and Psychology.

Drawing examples from widely different branches of science, Oppenheimer showed how the use of analogy hinted at an underlying order of nature which the vast differences in the sciences themselves might hide. He warned, however, that there was great danger in "carrying analogy too far."

Early in the lecture, Oppenheimer said that his idea of the unity of science was not at all like that of Laplace, who thought that an observer knowing exactly the present state of the entire universe could predict exactly the future. This notion, he said, was inconsistent in a "deep, profound sense" with the nature of the world and man's knowledge of it.

As his first example of the character of the unity of science, Oppenheimer told of some observations by Chinese astronomers 900 years ago that the "life-time" of a particular nebula they discovered was about 52 days. This also turned out to be the "lifetime" of one of the products of a nuclear explosion, Californium.

From this seemingly odd coincidence, scientists have developed a theory not only about the formation of the nebulae, but of the formation of the elements as well. Oppenheimer used this as a case in which analogy led to the discovery of "a code of identity" between seemingly unrelated phenomena.

Cites Language Study

As an example of an abstract number relationship owing to the mathematical structure of nature, he cited the mathematical study of languages which revealed that the equation relating the frequency with which certain words are used is of the same form as the equation for the distribution of the bodies in a system that has come to equilibrium. He used a blackboard to write equations, much to the pleasure of the Sanders audience, but to the consternation of those in the New Lecture Hall.

The notion of right-and left-handedness which occurs both in biology and, as was recently discovered, in physics, is a case in which analogy probably will not be partiularly fruitful in furthering man's knowledge of why the world was formed the way it was.

The case of the verbal analogy called "complimentarity" was used to draw an analogy between certain findings in the psychology of how people go about solving problems and why light acts as both a wave and a particle.

At the end of the lecture, Oppenheimer discussed the possibility of explaining the origin of life in purely chemical and physical terms, and asserted that advances in this field suggest, not so much that there is a unity in science, as that all of nature will ultimately be accessible to man's knowledge.

Although the lectures will follow the Monday-Friday pattern set this week, Oppenheimer, who is director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, will not lecture next week. His next talk will, be on Monday, April 22