温伯格《解释世界》第四部分 科学革命

历史学家过去认为十六世纪和十七世纪发生的物理和天文革命是理所当然，在这之后这些科学具有了现代形式，为以后所有科学的发展提供了示范。这个革命的重要性显而易见。历史学家赫伯特·巴特菲尔德（注：巴特菲尔德提出“辉格史观”一词来批评那些依据对现代实践的贡献来评价过去的历史学家。但是对于科学革命，巴特菲尔德完全是辉格主义，我也一样。）宣称科学革命“完全超越基督教兴起之后的一切，与之相比，文艺复兴和宗教改革不过是中世纪基督教世界中的一个小插曲，一点微调。” 这种共识时常引起后世历史学家的怀疑。前几十年一些历史学家表达了对科学革命重要性的质疑，甚至否定科学革命的存在。比如史蒂文·沙宾的一部作品以这样一句很有名的话开头“根本不存在科学革命，这就是本书要讲的。” 对科学革命的批评有两种相反的意见。一方面有些历史学家认为十六世纪和十七世纪的发现不过是过去欧洲或伊斯兰（或两者都有）在中世纪科学进展的自然延续。皮埃尔·迪昂是此观点的代表。另一些历史学家指出所谓的科学革命仍然遗留了前科学时代的思维，比如哥白尼和开普勒有时候听起来像柏拉图，伽利略即使没人付钱也从事占星术，牛顿将太阳系和圣经都作为上帝意志的线索。 这两种批评意见都有道理。不过我确信科学革命标志着智识历史上的一个分界。我是从一名现代科学工作者的角度做出这种判断。在我看来十六世纪之前的科学除了个别杰出希腊学者例外，与我现在的科学工作或与我看到的我的同事的工作非常不同。科学革命之前的科学充斥着宗教和我们现在所说的哲学，没有建立与数学的工作。十七世纪之后的物理学和天文学我觉得很熟悉。我能识别出它们与我现在的科学非常想像之处：寻求用数学方法表达客观定律，这些定律可以对广泛现象做出精确预测，通过对比预测结果与观察和实验的差别来验证这些定律。这是一场科学革命，这就是后面要讲的。

Historians used to take it for granted that physics and astronomy underwent revolutionary changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after which these sciences took something like their modern form, providing a paradigm for the future development of all science. The importance of this revolution seemed obvious. Thus the historian Herbert Butterfield* declared that the scientific revolution “outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.”1

There is something about this sort of consensus that always attracts the skeptical attention of the next generation of historians. In the past few decades some historians have expressed doubt about the importance or even the existence of the scientific revolution.2 For instance, Steven Shapin famously began a book with the sentence “There was no such thing as the scientific revolution, and this is a book about it.”3

Criticisms of the notion of a scientific revolution take two opposing forms. On one hand, some historians argue that the discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were no more than a natural continuation of scientific progress that had already been made in Europe or in the lands of Islam (or both) during the Middle Ages. This in particular was the view of Pierre Duhem.4

Other historians point to the vestiges of prescientific thinking that continued into the supposed scientific revolution—for instance, that Copernicus and Kepler in places sound like Plato, that Galileo cast horoscopes even when no one was paying for them, and that Newton treated both the solar system and the Bible as clues to the mind of God.

There are elements of truth in both criticisms. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the scientific revolution marked a real discontinuity in intellectual history. I judge this from the perspective of a contemporary working scientist. With a few bright Greek exceptions, science before the sixteenth century seems to me very different from what I experience in my own work, or what I see in the work of my colleagues. Before the scientific revolution science was suffused with religion and what we now call philosophy, and had not yet worked out its relation to mathematics. In physics and astronomy after the seventeenth century I feel at home. I recognize something very like the science of my own times: the search for mathematically expressed impersonal laws that allow precise predictions of a wide range of phenomena, laws validated by the comparison of these predictions with observation and experiment. There was a scientific revolution, and the rest of this book is about it.