Bacon referred to this approach as the "untried, true way." Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was the first great exemplar of this Baconian vision. His logical interpretations of the observations and measurements of celestial bodies using the newly invented telescope, of the motions of the pendulum, and of balls rolling down inclined planes were practical and widely noted illustrations of this new approach to achieving knowledge. Copernicus expanded on similar themes in his deathbead publication, De Revolutionibus, in 1543, and just over a hundred years later, in 1687, Newton published his spectacular synthesis, Principia Mathematica. This publication provided a coherent and mathematically predictive integration of all of the activity in mathematics and astronomy that the previous century had produced, embracing Copernicus's sun-centered solar system, Kepler's planetary laws, and the inspired scientific work and celestial observations of Galileo. It is a tour de force, probably the greatest scientific paper ever written. Examining this transformational period through the optics of a philosopher and historian can teach us underlying and subtle details important to understanding the evolution of mental activity needed to achieve Bacon's untried, true way. The standard way to arrive at the scientific frontier of knowledge in any area is to become a doctoral student and to be guided to that frontier by a mentoring professor. The student will perceive the frontier to have the contours and content already embedded in the mind of the professor. The student will then carve out some generally minor improvement to the contours thus encountered, gaining the experience that is rewarded with a PhD. Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) recognized the constraining consequences of this normal path. Kuhn asserted that major scientific advances occur not in a uniform cumulative manner but rather in discontinuous Understanding the Scientific Mind wavell f. cowan above left: In his scientific investigations in the 1930s, Boyd Campbell recognized that after pressing, the fibers in the wet sheet hold together by surface tension forces exerted by the water adhering to the fibers in the network. All illustrations by the author and redrawn by Russell Maret. above right: Boyd Campbell hypothesized that during drying, the water connecting fibers evaporates, and as it does so it exerts increasing surface tension forces that act to pull fibers closer together. opposite page: Boyd Campbell concluded that the OH character of water molecules causes them to have a high affinity for the hydroxyl (OH) groups on cellulose surfaces. This affinity is responsible for the surface tension forces that draw fiber surfaces together. When close enough, the hydroxyl groups of adjacent cellulose molecules form hydrogen bonds, permanently connecting the fibers together in the dry sheet of paper. winter 2007 - 23 and uncertain periods of dramatic change when an anomaly "subverts the existing tradition of scientific practice." It takes a scientific mindset to advance knowledge. In testing a hypothesis, a scientific mind unequivocally accepts that when a predicted consequence does not materialize—yet no fault can be found with the experimental approach—the premise or hypothesis or theory that supported the prediction must be wrong. This approach is at the very root of what philosophically scientific investigation is really all about. Science can prove nothing. Rather it is universally concerned with disproving. Even when science can demonstrate the utility of an idea, it can never prove that the idea is universally true. The most famous example of this is the utility of the Newtonian synthesis, which was certainly accepted as "true" for over two centuries by the generations who found that time and again it provided predictable outcomes over an increasingly wide range of observations. However, as observational data reached modern levels of precision, it was observed that Newtonian mathematics did not quite place the planet Mercury in its actual orbit. While Newtonian physics still has great value, the scientific mindset cannot ignore a single failure; it demands new thinking, new ideas, more hard work. Albert Einstein in the second decade of the twentieth century published his general theory of relativity, which provided a new synthesis, of which it turned out that the Newtonian synthesis was but a special case. A few years after its publication, Sir Arthur Eddington announced that he would challenge Einstein's relativity theory by testing one of its predictions. Einstein was asked what he would do if Eddington were to disprove his theory. Einstein's answer was unequivocal. He would start rethinking his ideas—the expected response of a scientific mindset! In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper eloquently advocated the importance of disproving ideas in scientific investigation, "It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory—if we look for confirmations…Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it." Scientific knowledge generated by the human race over the last few brief moments of its long evolutionary journey has been created by individuals who each possess a scientific mindset. What is remarkable in view of this spectacular success story is how little attention this mode of thinking receives as a desirable model. One is left to wonder how much more productive and successful our societies might prove to be should this mode of thinking become more widespread and thus more manifest in the quality of the decision making by which our societies develop and progress. Papermaking was a practical artisan activity for centuries. The nineteenth-century industrialization of papermaking was, in its turn, a very practical engineering activity. The scientific mind only became interested in papermaking very recently, in the 1920s. How and why a wet fiber mat becomes a sheet of paper when dried was an unanswerable question until informed by the scientific investigations of Boyd Campbell in the 1930s. He identified that surface tension forces active during drying were necessary to pull fiber surfaces sufficiently close together to allow the hydroxyl groups of cellulosic materials to form the hydrogen bonds which account for paper's coherence when dried. Only in the late 50s and early 60s, with studies conducted by Geoffrey Taylor and Peter Wrist, among others, did we begin to appreciate the complexities that underlie the structure of paper, and start to make progress in explaining why paper acted the way it did when subjected to stresses. There is, however, much that we still cannot explain. The substantial research activity over the past thirty years associated with the renaissance of hand papermaking in America and elsewhere has been largely empirical, dealing with the conversion to pulp of many non-traditional fibers and the techniques employed to achieve a wide range of novel artistic effects. For example, we have seen advances in the development and use of beaters, moulds, and presses for the hand papermaker and the emergence of pulp painting, new forms of watermarking, and paper's strong visual presence in artist books. Increased interest in the longevity of paper has spurred research in order to understand why some historical papers have lasted so well compared to many more recent papers that have not. My association with the field of hand papermaking suggests a particular area of research based on the following hypothesis. The optimum properties of any particular paper cannot be achieved using a single fiber source. Different fiber types, each beaten in an optimum (and possibly quite different) manner, including bleached wood fibers as well as traditional hand papermaking fibers, ought be blended to achieve the optimum properties required for a specific paper. The results might be quite surprising!