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The Truth Is Out There

February 1, 2016 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 94, Issue 5

Jan. 18, page 32: The Science & Technology story about fabricating catalyst particles with fine control over their structure mistakenly abbreviated manganese oxide as MgO. The spikes on the outside of the catalyst particles in question are, in fact, made of manganese oxide, not magnesium oxide.

In regards to the short article by Michelle Francl that encourages chemists to be more proactive in writing scientific divulgation papers (C&EN, Aug. 10/17, 2015, page 13), I can only support this noble goal!

I was disappointed by the negative letter by James D. Hadley about this article (C&EN, Nov. 2, 2015, page 2). C&EN should not be a forum for personal attacks, and the past work of a scientific colleague should not be taken as a qualification/disqualification of his or her ability to plead for a human cause.

For the rest, I think that science is not only experience (or else everybody would be a scientist) but that it is ordered experience: experience bundled within a theory. There are metaphysical assumptions in every theory, among them the most basic one is that the things we study in science are, in fact, really out there. Even Hadley will agree on this: The things are not what we think about them, but are instead what they are, and we need to approach this with the help of observation and measurement.

A further metaphysical assumption is that being (that is, the things out there) may not contradict itself, otherwise it would cease to be. And so must follow also our theories: They should be logically consistent; it is precisely here where mathematics comes into play in science.

Thus, science follows the classical definition of truth: adaequatio rei et intellectus, a definition that goes back to Isaac Israeli ben Solomon (855–955) and that came into the Western culture via Avicenna (980–1037) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). There must be an adequation of the thing out there (rei) and the human intellect studying that thing, and this adequation is a common base of mankind’s mutual understanding. We can talk worldwide to each other about scientific truth, because it is talking about something out there, which the other can also grasp, and hence he or she can understand the meaning of my words.

Edgar Müller
Prilly, Switzerland

Hadley refers to ab initio computational chemists (of which I admit to being one). In fairness to the first users of the term “ab initio” in computational chemistry (Robert G. Parr, David Craig, and Ian G. Ross in the late 1940s), it should be noted that while they meant “from the beginning” they did not mean or claim “from first principles.”

The calculations they reported (on the π-electron approximation to benzene’s electronic structure) were carried out separately, Parr in the U.S. and Craig and Ross in the U.K., using calculators, not computers. By “ab initio” they meant that all of the calculations were begun and carried through independently and then checked for consistency between the two groups at the end. No intermediate data were exchanged. It was some years later that the term started to be applied to what are now called ab initio or first-principles calculations.

Peter R. Taylor
Aarhus, Denmark

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