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 *Insight: What are the major obstacles to scientific insight, and how can I avoid them?
 * The scientist’s world: What issues affect the scientist’s interactions with fellow scientists and with society?
 * The scientist: What are the essential characteristics of successful scientists?

Thumbnail History of Scientific Methods
What are the essential elements of scientific method, and what are the incidentals? Let’s ask history. We can use the Method of Difference (described in Chapter 3): examine changes in the vitality of science as scientific methods evolved. We need to avoid a pitfall: mistaking coincidence for causality (see Chapters 3 and 4).

To many scientists, the field of history offers little interest. A gap separates the ‘two cultures’, scientific and literary, and prevents each from appreciating the contributions of the other [Snow, 1964]. Yet even a brief history of the development of scientific methods demonstrates compellingly that:
 * communication, particularly access to previous writings, is critical for vitality of science;
 * an individual can have a remarkable impact on science -- as an actor or as a mentor;
 * we exaggerate our links to the Greeks and to the Italian Renaissance; and
 * our 20th century intellectual chauvinism is not justified.

This narrative, like history itself, seems at times to be a string of related, adjacent events rather than an upward evolution toward some objective. Over the past 2500 years, many ingredients of the scientific method ebbed or flowed. More than once, almost all of these elements came together, but they failed to transform because some catalyst was missing.

Fowler [1962] provides a more comprehensive but still concise history of these developments.

In 399 B.C., a jury of 500 Athenians sentenced Socrates to death. The charges: religious heresy and corrupting the morals of the youth. His crimes: asserting that there is only one God and that people should personally evaluate the meaning of virtue. Perhaps he could have recanted and lived, but the seventy-year-old man chose drinking hemlock over refuting his life’s teachings.

His student, Aristocles (Plato), must have been devastated. Plato left Athens and traveled extensively for twelve years. His anguish over the trial ripened into a contempt for democracy and for democratic man:

“He lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour;...His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.” [Plato, ~427-347 B.C., a]