Deborah R Coen writes:

In the 1930s, as Jewish and dissident scientists were forced from their posts in Nazi Germany, many found refuge at universities in the United States. At the time, American scientists were trying to shield themselves from the winds of politics by honing arguments for the value of ‘pure’ science. It was in this spirit that Abraham Flexner had founded the hermetic Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey in 1930, expressly to pursue research for its own sake. He applauded those who, ‘in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilisation itself … detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge’.

At a time when science once again seems to be under siege, it’s tempting to believe that ringfencing it from the public could protect its integrity. We laypeople, after all, seem poorly positioned to judge which so-called experts deserve our trust, and are all too easily swayed by reports that square with our pre-existing beliefs. Safer, surely, to try to detach science from popular opinion entirely. This was the view of the American sociologist Robert Merton, who believed that science functioned best when left to its own devices. Writing on the eve of the Second World War, he argued that democratic values, such as disinterestedness and communalism, were innate to scientific communities. As evidence, he pointed to the reputations of scientists as upstanding individuals and the ‘virtual absence of fraud’. Merton was confident that scientists would regulate themselves in a democratic fashion, if only they were insulated from public meddling.

On the frontlines of the Nazi assault in Europe, however, a handful of scientists dared to disagree. As they saw it, the way to ensure the integrity of science was to enrich and deepen its connection to the public, not to sever it. The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for his contributions to the mind-bending new theory of the atom, was embarking on a second career as a popular science writer. A scientist didn’t truly understand a concept, Schrödinger argued, until he could explain it to a non-expert. Schrödinger stressed not the autonomy of science but the way it depended on something beyond empiricism – a faith in the essential universality of human perception. And he insisted that scientific discoveries gained in meaning by being shared as widely as possible, thereby multiplying the subjective experience of ‘discovery’. [Continue reading…]