* Here, then, is the answer to when, where, and how “the scientific method” originated: not in any field or practice of science, but in the popular, professional, industrial, and commercial exploitation of its authority. This exploitation crucially involved the insistence that science held an exclusive monopoly on truth, knowledge, and authority, a monopoly for which “the scientific method” was a guarantee.
* I would call it a feat of branding equal to “diamonds are forever” or “Coke is it”: “The scientific method” became science’s brand.
* Bohr reflected that any observation involves an interference with the thing observed. Our own acts of observation are a part of the world we see: we are “both onlookers and actors in the great drama of existence.” Heisenberg elaborated the idea by emphasizing that “what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” and that science was therefore “a part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.” Scientists in this period were recognizing the necessity of interpretation and putting that recognition to work in radical new ways that were neither humanistic nor scientific but integrally both. Meanwhile “the scientific method” continued in pursuit of its manifest destiny.
* David Starr Jordan—Stanford’s first president, an ichthyologist, and avid eugenicist—announced that the extended application of the scientific method had transformed education, calling it a “magic wand.” Among Stanford’s twenty-two founding faculty members was (the confusingly named) Fernando Sanford, a physicist specializing in electricity and its applications, and a partisan of the scientific method. Sanford gave the address at Stanford’s eighth commencement in 1899 where, with great simplicity and lucidity, he bestowed the scientific method upon the new graduates. First, collect facts; second, seek out causal relations among these; third, deduce conclusions; fourth, perform experiments to test these conclusions. Sanford also warned his audience to be on their guard against practitioners in fields such as history, philology, and even Latin who, “wish[ing] to appear especially progressive,” had “learned to use the language and to adopt the name of the scientific method.” These were mere pretenders; the scientific method bore no relation to language or literature, nor they to it, and Sanford closed by advising these scholars that if they didn’t want to be left in the dust, they could bloody well go out and find their own methods.
