On Unity (1950-1974)

"Data have an ephemeralness, a rhapsodic spontaneity, a nakedness so utterly at variance with the orderly instincts that pervade our being and with the given unity of our own experience as to be unfit for use in the building of reality. The constructs, on the other hand, are foot-loose, subjective, and altogether too fertile with logical implication to serve in their indiscriminate totality as material for the real world. They do, however, contain the solid logical substance which a stable reality must contain." (Henry Margenau ,"The Nature of Physical Reality: A Philosophy of Modern Physics", 1950)

"We cannot define truth in science until we move from fact to law. And within the body of laws in turn, what impresses us as truth is the orderly coherence of the pieces. They fit together like the characters of a great novel, or like the words of a poem. Indeed, we should keep that last analogy by us always, for science is a language, and like a language it defines its parts by the way they make up a meaning. Every word in a sentence has some uncertainty of definition, and yet the sentence defines its own meaning and that of its words conclusively. It is the internal unity and coherence of science which gives it truth, and which makes it a better system of prediction than any less orderly language." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Common Sense of Science", 1953)

"This continuity of effort is particularly important in mathematics. It is needed to realize the promise of unity which modern mathematics holds. In no science does it appear truer than- in mathematics that the relatively unexplained universe of known facts can be unified by theories of a general character, built of the bricks of current techniques, if only there could rise enough men of talent with a sense of values that would hold them to their task to the very end." (Marston Morse, "Science in the Modern World", Mathematics Magazine Vol. 28 (4), 1955)

"The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike." (Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", 1956)

"We can never achieve absolute truth but we can live hopefully by a system of calculated probabilities. The law of probability gives to natural and human sciences - to human experience as a whole - the unity of life we seek." (Agnes E Meyer, "Education for a New Morality", 1957)

"There is beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All illiterate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan, and the musician." (Glenn T Seaborg, 1958)

"Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefor objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language." (Niels Bohr, "The Unity of Human Knowledge", 1960)

"For Science in its totality, the ultimate goal is the creation of a monistic system in which - on the symbolic level and in terms of the inferred components of invisibility and intangibly fine structure — the world’s enormous multiplicity is reduced to something like unity, and the endless successions of unique events of a great many different kinds get tidied and simplified into a single rational order. Whether this goal will ever be reached remains to be seen. Meanwhile we have the various sciences, each with its own system coordinating concepts, its own criterion of explanation." (Aldous Huxley, "Literature and Science", 1963)

"The 'underlying unity' might mean that everything is made out of the same stuff, and therefore obeys the same equations. That sounds like a good explanation, but let us think. The electrostatic potential, the diffusion of neutrons, heat flow - are we really dealing with the same stuff? Can we really imagine that the electrostatic potential is physically identical to the temperature, or to the density of particles? [...] The displacement of a membrane is certainly not like a temperature. Why, then, is there 'an underlying unity'? [...] Is it possible that this is the clue? That the thing which is common to all the phenomena is the space, the framework into which the physics is put? As long as things are reasonably smooth in space, then the important things that will be involved will be the rates of change of quantities with position in space. That is why we always get an equation with a gradient. [...] What is common to all our problems is that they involve space. "  (Richard Feynman, "Lecture Notes on Physics" Vol. 3, 1964)

"Why are the equations from different phenomena so similar? We might say: ‘It is the underlying unity of nature.’ But what does that mean? What could such a statement mean? It could mean simply that the equations are similar for different phenomena; but then, of course, we have given no explanation. The underlying unity might mean that everything is made out of the same stuff, and therefore obeys the same equations." (Richard P Feynman,"Lecture Notes on Physics", Vol. III, 1964)