Michael Polanyi - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Michael Polanyi, FRS (March 11, 1891 – February 22, 1976) was a Hungarian–British polymath

Polymath

A polymath is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas. In less formal terms, a polymath may simply be someone who is very knowledgeable...

, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and the theory of knowledge. In his philosophical writings he argued that positivism

Positivism

Positivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....

not only gives a false account of the practice of science, it also, if taken seriously, undermines our highest achievements as human beings.

Early life

Polanyi, born Polányi Mihály in Vienna, was the fourth child of Michael and Cecilia Pollacsek, secular Jews from Ungvár (then in Hungary but now in the Ukraine) and Vilnius in Lithuania, respectively. His father's family were entrepreneurs, while his mother's father was the chief rabbi

Chief Rabbi

Chief Rabbi is a title given in several countries to the recognized religious leader of that country's Jewish community, or to a rabbinic leader appointed by the local secular authorities...

of Vilnius. The family moved to Budapest and Magyarized

Magyarization

Magyarization is a kind of assimilation or acculturation, a process by which non-Magyar elements came to adopt Magyar culture and language due to social pressure .Defiance or appeals to the Nationalities Law, met...

their surname to Polányi. His father built much of the Hungarian railway system, but lost most of his fortune in 1899 when bad weather caused a railway building project to go over budget. He died in 1905. Cecilia Polanyi established a salon that was well known amongst Budapest's intellectuals, and which continued until her death in 1939. His older brother was Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi

Karl Paul Polanyi was a Hungarian philosopher, political economist and economic anthropologist known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and his book The Great Transformation...

, the political economist.

Education

In 1909 after leaving the famous Budapest teacher-training secondary school (Mintagymnasium) he trained as a physician, obtaining a medical diploma in 1914. He was an active member of the Galileo Society. With the support of Ignác Pfeifer, professor of chemistry at the József Technical University of Budapest, he obtained a scholarship to study chemistry at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe in Germany. In the First World War, he served in the Austro-Hungarian

Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...

army as a medical officer, and was sent to the Serbian front. While on sick-leave in 1916, he wrote a PhD thesis on adsorption

Adsorption

Adsorption is the adhesion of atoms, ions, biomolecules or molecules of gas, liquid, or dissolved solids to a surface. This process creates a film of the adsorbate on the surface of the adsorbent. It differs from absorption, in which a fluid permeates or is dissolved by a liquid or solid...

. His research, which was encouraged by Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...

, was supervised by Gusztáv Buchböck, and in 1919 the University of Budapest awarded him a doctorate.

Career

In October 1918, Mihály Károlyi

Mihály Károlyi

Count Mihály Ádám György Miklós Károlyi de Nagykároly was briefly Hungary's leader in 1918-19 during a short-lived democracy...

established the Hungarian Democratic Republic

Hungarian Democratic Republic

The Hungarian People's Republic was an independent republic proclaimed after the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918...

, and Polanyi became Secretary to the Minister of Health. In March 1919 when Communists took power, Polanyi returned to medicine. After the Hungarian Soviet Republic

Hungarian Soviet Republic

The Hungarian Soviet Republic or Soviet Republic of Hungary was a short-lived Communist state established in Hungary in the aftermath of World War I....

was overthrown, Polanyi, although he had refused to serve in the Red Army, incurred the disfavour of the new Admiral Horthy régime. In 1920 he returned to Karlsruhe, and was invited by Fritz Haber

Fritz Haber

Fritz Haber was a German chemist, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development for synthesizing ammonia, important for fertilizers and explosives. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid...

to join the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Faserstoffchemie in Berlin. In 1923 Polanyi converted to Christianity, and in a Roman Catholic ceremony married Magda Elizabeth Kemeny. In 1926 he became the professorial head of department of the Institut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie. In 1929, Magda gave birth to their son John

John Charles Polanyi

John Charles Polanyi, PC, CC, FRSC, O.Ont, FRS, born January 23, 1929) is a Canadian chemist who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his research in chemical kinetics. Polanyi was educated at Manchester University, and did postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada and...

, who in later life settled in Canada, and was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Their other son, George Polanyi, became a well known British economist.

As a consequence of his experience of runaway inflation and high unemployment in Weimar Germany Polanyi began to study economics. With the coming to power in 1933 of the Nazi

Nazism

Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

party, he accepted an offer of the chair in physical chemistry at the University of Manchester. Two of his pupils, Eugene Wigner and Melvin Calvin

Melvin Calvin

Melvin Ellis Calvin was an American chemist most famed for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent most of his five-decade career at the University of California, Berkeley.- Life :Calvin was born...

, went on to win a Nobel Prize. As a consequence of a shift in his interests the university created a new chair for him in Social Science (1948–58).

In 1944 Polanyi was elected a member of the Royal Society

Royal Society

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...

, and on his retirement from the University of Manchester in 1958 he was elected a Senior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. In 1962 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

Physical chemistry

Polanyi's scientific interests were extremely diverse, including work in chemical kinetics

Chemical kinetics

Chemical kinetics, also known as reaction kinetics, is the study of rates of chemical processes. Chemical kinetics includes investigations of how different experimental conditions can influence the speed of a chemical reaction and yield information about the reaction's mechanism and transition...

, x-ray diffraction, and the adsorption

Adsorption

of gas

Gas

Gas is one of the three classical states of matter . Near absolute zero, a substance exists as a solid. As heat is added to this substance it melts into a liquid at its melting point , boils into a gas at its boiling point, and if heated high enough would enter a plasma state in which the electrons...

es at solid surfaces. In 1921, he laid the mathematical foundation of fiber diffraction

Fiber diffraction

Fiber diffraction is a subarea of scattering, an area in which molecular structure is determined from scattering data . In fiber diffraction the scattering pattern does not change, as the sample is rotated about a unique axis...

analysis. In 1934, Polanyi, at about the same time as G. I. Taylor

Geoffrey Ingram Taylor

Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor OM was a British physicist, mathematician and expert on fluid dynamics and wave theory. His biographer and one-time student, George Batchelor, described him as "one of the most notable scientists of this century".-Biography:Taylor was born in St. John's Wood, London...

and Egon Orowan

Egon Orowan

Egon Orowan was a Hungarian/British/U.S. physicist and metallurgist.-Life:Orowan was born in the Óbuda district of Budapest. His father, Berthold, was a mechanical engineer and factory manager, and his mother, Josze Spitzer Ságvári was the daughter of an impoverished land owner...

, he realised that the plastic

Plasticity (physics)

In physics and materials science, plasticity describes the deformation of a material undergoing non-reversible changes of shape in response to applied forces. For example, a solid piece of metal being bent or pounded into a new shape displays plasticity as permanent changes occur within the...

deformation

Deformation (mechanics)

Deformation in continuum mechanics is the transformation of a body from a reference configuration to a current configuration. A configuration is a set containing the positions of all particles of the body...

of ductile materials could be explained in terms of the theory of dislocation

Dislocation

In materials science, a dislocation is a crystallographic defect, or irregularity, within a crystal structure. The presence of dislocations strongly influences many of the properties of materials...

s which had been developed by Vito Volterra

Vito Volterra

Vito Volterra was an Italian mathematician and physicist, known for his contributions to mathematical biology and integral equations....

in 1905. The insight was critical in developing the field of solid mechanics

Solid mechanics

Solid mechanics is the branch of mechanics, physics, and mathematics that concerns the behavior of solid matter under external actions . It is part of a broader study known as continuum mechanics. One of the most common practical applications of solid mechanics is the Euler-Bernoulli beam equation...

Philosophy of science

In 1936, while on a visit to the USSR to give lectures for the Ministry of Heavy Industry, Polanyi was told by Bukharin that the distinction between pure and applied science was mistaken, and that in a socialist society all scientific research would be in accordance with the needs of the latest Five Year Plan. Polanyi observed what happened to the study of genetics in the Soviet Union once the doctrines of Trofim Lysenko

Trofim Lysenko

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist of Ukrainian origin, who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them into a powerful...

gained the backing of the State. Demands in Britain, amongst people such as the Marxist John Desmond Bernal, for centrally planned scientific research, led Polanyi to argue that truth seeking generates communities of specialists whose conclusions ought to be the outcome of free debate not central direction. Together with John Baker

John Baker (biologist)

John Randal Baker FRS was a biologist, physical anthropologist, and professor at the University of Oxford in the mid-twentieth century. He is best remembered for his 1974 book, Race, which classifies human races in the same way in which animal subspecies are classified...

, he founded the influential Society for Freedom in Science

Society for Freedom in Science

The Society for Freedom in Science was founded in 1940 by John Baker and Michael Polanyi to defend and promote a liberal conception of science as free enquiry against the instrumental view that science should exist primarily to serve the needs of society...

to defend this view.

In a series of articles, re-published in The Contempt of Freedom (1940) and The Logic of Liberty (1951), Polanyi argued that co-operation amongst scientists is analogous to the way in which agents

Agent (economics)

In economics, an agent is an actor and decision maker in a model. Typically, every agent makes decisions by solving a well or ill defined optimization/choice problem. The term agent can also be seen as equivalent to player in game theory....

co-ordinate themselves within a free market

Free market

A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...

. Just as consumers in a free market determine the value of products, so, without central direction, scientists validate theories by endorsing them as true. The spontaneous order

Spontaneous order

Spontaneous order, also known as "self-organization", is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. It is a process found in physical, biological, and social networks, as well as economics, though the term "self-organization" is more often used for physical and biological processes,...

that arises within the scientific community, arises within the context of a commitment to truth. Whereas John Desmond Bernal argued that science should be directed by the State in the pursuit of practical ends, Polanyi claimed that if science is to flourish scientists should have the freedom to pursue truth as an end in itself:

"[S]cientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization."

"Such self-co-ordination of independent initiatives leads to a joint result which is unpremeditated by any of those who bring it about."

"Any attempt to organize the group ... under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre. It would, in effect, paralyse their cooperation."

Polanyi notes that utilitarian and sceptical arguments in defence of free scientific inquiry undercut what they are invoked to defend. His general defence of a free society is not a negative appeal to the importance of "private liberties", but a positive appeal to the role which "public liberties" play in facilitating our pursuit of transcendent ideals. According to Polanyi ends such as truth, goodness, and beauty, transcend our ability to wholly articulate them; and therefore communities of specialists require the freedom to pursue them. His concept of spontaneous order

Spontaneous order

, a term he derived from Gestalt psychology, although its origins can be traced back to at least Adam Smith

Adam Smith

Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...

, influenced the classical liberal economist Frederick Hayek. Unlike Hayek however Polanyi argued that there are higher and lower forms of spontaneous order. In Full Employment and Free Trade (1948) Polanyi analysed the way in which money circulates around an economy, and argued (unlike Hayek) that a strict/loose monetary policy is an economically neutral way for a central bank

Central bank

A central bank, reserve bank, or monetary authority is a public institution that usually issues the currency, regulates the money supply, and controls the interest rates in a country. Central banks often also oversee the commercial banking system of their respective countries...

to moderate the booms/busts of a free market.

Theory of knowledge

In his book Science, Faith and Society (1946), Polanyi set out his opposition to a positivist account of science, noting that it fails to recognise the role which personal commitments play in the practice of science. While teaching at Manchester, Polanyi was invited to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures

Gifford Lectures

The Gifford Lectures were established by the will of Adam Lord Gifford . They were established to "promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term — in other words, the knowledge of God." The term natural theology as used by Gifford means theology supported...

in 1951-2 at Aberdeen. A revised version of his lectures were later published as Personal Knowledge (1958). In this book Polanyi claims that absolute objectivity

Objectivity (science)

Objectivity in science is a value that informs how science is practiced and how scientific truths are created. It is the idea that scientists, in attempting to uncover truths about the natural world, must aspire to eliminate personal biases, a priori commitments, emotional involvement, etc...

(objectivism) is a false ideal, because all knowledge claims (including those which are derived from rules) rely on personal judgements. He denies that a scientific method

Scientific method

Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...

can yield truth mechanically. All knowing, no matter how formalised, relies upon commitments. Polanyi argued that the assumptions which motivate critical philosophy

Critical philosophy

Attributed to Immanuel Kant, the critical philosophy movement sees the primary task of philosophy as criticism rather than justification of knowledge; criticism, for Kant, meant judging as to the possibilities of knowledge before advancing to knowledge itself...

are not only false, they serve to undermine the commitments which motivate our highest achievements. He advocates a fiduciary post-critical approach, in which we recognise that we believe more than we can prove, and know more than we can say.

A knower does not stand apart from the universe, they participate personally within it. Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments which motivate discovery and validation. Polanyi suggests that great scientists not only identify patterns, they identify the significant questions which are likely to lead to a successful resolution. An innovator risks their reputation by committing to a hypothesis

Hypothesis

A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, ὑποτιθέναι – hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose". For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it...

. He gives the example of Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer and the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe....

, who declared that, contrary to our experience, the Earth revolves around the Sun. He claims that Copernicus arrived at the Earth's true relation to the Sun not as a consequence of following a method, but via "the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the Sun instead of the Earth." What saves this approach from the charge of relativism

Relativism

Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....

is his conviction that our tacit awareness connects us with objective realities.

Polanyi rejected the claim by British Empiricists that experience can be reduced into sense data. Our experience is interpreted, and our interpretations often rely upon acquired practices. Knowing more than we can say explains how apprentices acquire non-explicit knowledge i.e. pupils improve their skills by observing a master. His writings about science influenced Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.Kuhn...

and Paul Feyerabend

Paul Feyerabend

Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades . He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand,...

, although he denies that "indwelling" within (sometimes incompatible) interpretative frameworks traps us within them. Our shared tacit awareness connects us with objective realities. All articulation

Articulation

Articulation may refer to:In linguistics:* Topic–focus articulation, a field of study concerned with marking old and new information in a clause* Manner of articulation, how speech organs involved in making a sound make contact...

becomes meaningful by evoking our tacit awareness. Contrary to the views of his colleague and friend Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

, whose work at The University of Manchester prepared the way for the first modern computer, he denied that minds are reducible to collections of rules. His work influenced the critique by Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....

of "First Generation" Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

.

It was while writing Personal Knowledge that he identified what he calls the "structure of tacit knowing". He viewed it as his most important discovery. He claimed that we experience the world by integrating our subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness. In his later work, for example his Terry Lectures, later published as "The Tacit Dimension" (1966) he seeks to distinguish between the phenomenological

Phenomenology (science)

The term phenomenology in science is used to describe a body of knowledge that relates empirical observations of phenomena to each other, in a way that is consistent with fundamental theory, but is not directly derived from theory. For example, we find the following definition in the Concise...

, instrumental, semantic, and ontological aspects of tacit knowing, as discussed (but not necessarily identified as such) in his previous writing.

Critique of reductionism

In "Life's irreducible structure" (1968), Polanyi argues that the information contained in the DNA

DNA

Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...

molecule

Molecule

A molecule is an electrically neutral group of at least two atoms held together by covalent chemical bonds. Molecules are distinguished from ions by their electrical charge...

is irreducible to physics and chemistry. Although a DNA molecule cannot exist without physical properties, these properties are constrained by higher level ordering principles. In "Transcendence and Self-transcendence" (1970), Polanyi criticizes the mechanistic

Mechanism (philosophy)

Mechanism is the belief that natural wholes are like machines or artifacts, composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other, and with their order imposed from without. Thus, the source of an apparent thing's activities is not the whole itself, but its parts or an external...

world view

World view

A comprehensive world view is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the entirety of the individual or society's knowledge and point-of-view, including natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and...

that modern science has inherited from Galileo.

Polanyi advocates emergence

Emergence

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....

i.e. the claim that there are several levels of reality

Reality

In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...

, and causality

Causality

Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....

. His argument relies on the assumption that boundary conditions supply degrees of freedom

Degrees of freedom (statistics)

In statistics, the number of degrees of freedom is the number of values in the final calculation of a statistic that are free to vary.Estimates of statistical parameters can be based upon different amounts of information or data. The number of independent pieces of information that go into the...

that instead of being random are determined by higher level realities whose properties are dependent, but distinct, from the lower level from which they emerge. The process by which meanings are generated shows us that intentions are downward causal forces.

Mind is a higher level expression of our capacity for discrimination. Our pursuit of self-set ideals such as truth and justice enriches our awareness of the world. The reductionistic attempt to reduce higher level realities into lower level realities generates what Polanyi describes as a moral inversion, in which the higher is rejected in favour of the lower. This inversion is pursued with moral passion. Polanyi identifies it as a pathology of the modern mind, and traces its origins to a false conception of knowledge; which although relatively harmless in the formal sciences, generates nihilism

Nihilism

Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...

in the humanities.