Scientific discovery is a humble, intimate communion with nature

Evidence

A great American chemist, Robert S. Mulliken, who received a Nobel Prize in 1966, once wrote something that has deeply affected my thinking about the world of natural beauties: “The scientist must develop enormous tolerance in seeking for ideas which may please nature , and enormous patience, self-restraint and humility when his ideas over and over again are rejected by nature before he arrives at one to please her. When the scientist does finally find such an idea, there is something very intimate in his feeling of communion with nature” (the italics are mine). … When the nonscientist understands what Mulliken meant when he talked of “pleasing nature,” he will be on his way to understanding the scientific mind. He will realize what the pure scientist means when he talks of a “beautiful equation”—the statement of an idea in artistic form with an economy of means. — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 636

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘beautiful equation’ and ‘pleasing nature’ reframe science as aesthetic relationship — material for a piece on scientific humility as against the marketplace/image of certainty.
• XREF: Connects directly to listening-to-land as method in Eco-Justice and disturbance reading — scientist as listener whose hypotheses keep getting rejected by the land itself.