British
mathematician
, biologist
, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. He is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC
television
documentary
series, The Ascent of Man
, and the accompanying book.
Jacob Bronowski was born in Łódź, Congress Poland
, Russian Empire
, in 1908. His family moved to Germany during the First World War
, and then to England in 1920. Although, according to Bronowski, he knew only two English words on arriving in Great Britain, he gained admission to the Central Foundation Boys' School in London
and went on to study at the University of Cambridge
.
As a mathematics student at Jesus College, Cambridge
, Bronowski co-edited—with William Empson
—the literary periodical Experiment, which first appeared in 1928.
These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken, and when he can inject into the uncertainties of others the creative ideas which will strengthen them with purpose. At such a moment the man who can direct others, in thought or in action, can remake the world.
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field—a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it. [...] We condense the laws around concepts. Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.
There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.