And the glory of the scientific method is that, shunning a priori assump tions, it insists on observing and learning from things as they are. The true scientist tries never to impose his expectations on objective reality. That everyone has expectations, and that these expectations do sometimes impose themselves, unsuspected, on even the work of scientists, should go without saying. Einstein and Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, both great physicists, were in disagreement on some obscure point of science. Einstein settled the matter by declaring that it was, after all, only a matter of taste.
Scientists are human.
We should not be dismayed if sometimes we even find them out there in the pit of competition, slugging away with the best. What is dismaying is the widespread assumption that, if one can only train oneself to adopt a completely scientific outlook, he will rise altogether above human feeling, and that, in his cold objectivity, he will achieve superior understanding as though, in that unfeeling state, he could become some kind of intellectual superman. According to this view, human nature is an obstacle, not an aid, to understanding. It is no accident that so many fictional glimpses into the future portray a world stripped of such superficial nonsense as beauty, kindness, happiness, and probably the first of all to go humor. Science fiction, a prime example of this genre of literature, can be depressingly sterile.