The late Francis Crick, one of Britain's most famous scientists, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He is best known for his discovery, jointly with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, of the double helix structure of DNA, though he also made important contributions in understanding the genetic code and was exploring the basis of consciousness in the years leading up to his death in 2004.
In point of view of science, there is no absolute truth. What you’re doing is trying to make models of the world and find which model of the world is- fits best. Why should something be true? You're ma- your brain is making a model of the world. There’s not necessarily truth out there. But surely it’s true that the structure of DNA is a double helix? You want to be very careful like that because of course some of the genetic material is single stranded DNA. It’s very difficult to make a statement, especially in biology, in which you won’t find minor exceptions. I mean, Newtonian mechanics is true unless you get- get up to speeds approaching the velocity of light or if you get under certain conditions usually of very low mass when you have to use quantum mechanics, you see. But for sending a- sending something– a satellite or something to go and- go and look at one of the major planets or something like that, Newtonian mechanics is perfectly ok. Well, is it true? Well, the answer is it’s not absolutely true; it’s true within that very large range of things but not at the extremes. So what do you call that? So the scientific enterprise, it isn’t just to find out what’s true and what isn’t true; it’s to improve on- Well we use that terminology, you know, in everyday life. We do say 'I don’t think that’s true'. And you say that in science as well. But if you’re then being very pressed as to what you actually mean, then you have to make a more cautious statement the way I did. But in ordinary- in ordinary, everyday life, you know, you- people will tell you something and you’ll say, 'Well I bet that’s wrong', you see. Or you can say, 'That sounds right to me', or something like that, you see. Or you can say 'Look, we’ve got this observation and this observation and this observation. This seems right. What’s your objection?' That type of thing, you see? So in everyday conversation among scientists, they will certainly use the word 'true', but they won’t necessarily mean it in the absolute sense that a layman would use it.
Title: Truth in science
Listeners:
Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
In 1993 he and his wife, Lotte, made a series for BBC2 called 'Seven
Wonders of the World', in which outstanding scientists were invited to
talk about themselves and their own seven wonders... Francis Crick
declined to play this particular game (on the basis that 'everything is
wonderful'), but he did agree to spend a couple of hours talking about
his life and and work. The footage did not appear in the 'Seven
Wonders' series, and has never been publicly shown. When Crick died in the summer of 2004, BBC TV kindly gave permission for it to be included in 'Peoples Archive'.
Technical note: the videotapes from which the Peoples Archive streaming version has been prepared had timecode-in-vision in the lower third of the picture. We have reframed the material to exclude this timecode because it is distracting, although this does mean that the image is sometimes a more extreme close-up than either director or cameraman ever intended!
Duration:
2 minutes, 15 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
08 January 2010
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