1. _Does the Scientist create Science?_--Professor Rados of Budapest in
his report to the Hungarian Academy of Science on the award to Poincaré
of the Bolyai prize of ten thousand crowns, speaking of him as
unquestionably the most powerful investigator in the domain of
mathematics and mathematical physics, characterized him as the intuitive
genius drawing the inspiration for his wide-reaching researches from the
exhaustless fountain of geometric and physical intuition, yet working
this inspiration out in detail with marvelous logical keenness. With his
brilliant creative genius was combined the capacity for sharp and
successful generalization, pushing far out the boundaries of thought in
the most widely different domains, so that his works must be ranked with
the greatest mathematical achievements of all time. "Finally," says
Rados, "permit me to make especial mention of his intensely interesting
book, 'The Value of Science,' in which he in a way has laid down the
scientist's creed." Now what is this creed?
Sense may act as stimulus, as suggestive, yet not to awaken a dormant
depiction, or to educe the conception of an archetypal form, but rather
to strike the hour for creation, to summon to work a sculptor capable of
smoothing a Venus of Milo out of the formless clay. Knowledge is not a
gift of bare experience, nor even made solely out of experience. The
creative activity of mind is in mathematics particularly clear. The
axioms of geometry are conventions, disguised definitions or unprovable
hypotheses precreated by auto-active animal and human minds. Bertrand
Russell says of projective geometry: "It takes nothing from experience,
and has, like arithmetic, a creature of the pure intellect for its
object. It deals with an object whose properties are logically deduced
from its definition, not empirically discovered from data." Then does
the scientist create science? This is a question Poincaré here dissects
with a master hand.
The physiologic-psychologic investigation of the space problem must
give the meaning of the words _geometric fact_, _geometric reality_.
Poincaré here subjects to the most successful analysis ever made the
tridimensionality of our space.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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