LỜi giới thiệU

This optimism had much more than a temperamental basis it was a conviction rooted deep in thought.

His scientific studies had taught Pere Teilhard that the universe has its own history: it has a past and it must be diercted towards some final goal. "From the smallest individual deltail to the vastest aggregations, our living universe (in commun with our inorganic universe) has a structure, and this structure can owe its nature only to a phenomenon of growth." The would with all its riches, life with its astounding achievements, man with th constant prodigy of his inventive power, all are organically integrated in one single growth and one historical process, and all share the same upward progress towards an era of fufillment.

(Cf.PIERRE LEROY S.J., Teilhard de Chardin: The Man, Lời tựa viết cho tác phẩm Le Milieu Divin)

SELECTION 2

For recent researches, primarily by Dr. N. Goodman, have shown that, when strictly, examined.

"...the ability of induction to deal with a future case collapses; and since this is the only useful aspect of induction, we are faced by total collapse. Thus I must report to you that discouraging news has leaked out of the citadel of logic. The external walls appear as formidable as ever; but at the very center of the supposedly solid fortress of logical thinking, all is confusion. As practical tools, no one doubts the continuing value of the armaments. But in term of ultimate and inner strength, the revelations are as tounding indeed. The ultimate baisi of both types of logical thinking is infected, at the very core, with imperfection."

Thus, one ends up by recalling Dr, Charles F. Kettering's characteristic warning "Beware of logic. It ai an organized way of going wrong with confidence."

It is widely recognized that any natual event has a number of possible explanations. It has been dimonstrated that if a certain body of experience can be usefully interpreted through one particular theory, then there is always, in fact, an infinite number of other theories each of which will equally accommodate the same body of experience. There may be very important aesthetic reasons for preferring certain of the theories. Often, there is a tendency to accept, of the alternative explanations, the one which seems in some feneral sense to be "the most credible", and the "ultimate in criteria of credibility", says a recent writer, is scientific objectivity".

Careful thinkers have for long been skeptical about the supposed objectivity of so called scientific facts. In the translator's preface to one of the master works. In the translator's preface to one of the master works of Poincare, George Bruce Halsted said a half century ago.

"What is called" a knowledge of the facts "is usually merely a subjective realization that the old hypotheses are still sufficiently elastic to serve in some domain; that is, with a sufficiency of conscious or unconscious omissions and doctorings and fudgings more or less wilful.

(Cf. WARREN WEAVER, The Imperfections of Science)

 

SELECTION 3

The first, precise, and unconditial character of the laws of Newtonian dynamics or celestial mechanics with its suggestion that "reason applies to nature" the consequent rationalism of Kant and others, lost support insome quarters when physics turned its attehtion to the subjects of heat and themodynamics. Here was a field in which dynamic regularity was not the norm, its laws resulted, strictly speaking, as rare anomalies from the chaotic interplay of large numbers of molecules. The chief are of these discoveries began in the late 18th and extended through the first half of the 19th century, and the names associated with them are Lavoisier, Black, Counts Rumfood, Davy, Meyer, Joule, Carnot, and Clausius.

Thermodynamics is the most empirical of the physical science. Its thorems are relations between an excssive number of exrimental variables, it thrives in a situation spurned by other branches of physics, namely, one in which more variables are used than are actually needed. Because its measured quantities are not logically independent, the rmodynamics formulas exhibit that well - know disfigurement by subscripts added to partical derivatives , an out - ward indication of its earthy stature, of its factbound significance. There are no neat and elegant second order differential equations with solutions representing the unique history of a thermodynamic system; the connection between formular and measurement is always em phasized. Nor are the basic laws very simple. The most embracing "law" is the quation of state; it is different for every substance and his extremely complicated forms for all real bodies. The contrast with Newton's law of universal gravitation is romarkable and is philosophically suggestive.

Furthermore, even the greatest genaralizations encountered in this branch of science, the so - alled laws of thermodynamics, entere the scene as inductive in deductive conscquences of some simple and pervasive conjecture. Much ingenuity has been lavished on the question whether they are as true as the laws of machanics, or whether they permit exceptions, and even now textbooks sometimes say that water can freeze on the store if you wait long enough.