Playing Chess with Nature

How can the Tripos tradition be invoked to explain both failure, in the case of lift, and success, in the case of stability? Should not the same cause have the same effect? The answer is that my causal explanation is not meant to ex­plain success and failure. It explains the preconditions of success and failure, that is, what succeeded or failed, and the response to success and failure. It concerns the path that the Cambridge scientists and their associates chose to follow, or declined to follow, rather than the consequences of the choice and what was found along the path that was selected. Neither the British nor the Germans knew what awaited them. Neither group could select their course of action in the knowledge of what would be successful or unsuccessful. Both had to take a gamble. In the case of the theory of lift, the British gamble failed and the German gamble succeeded.

Lanchester did not approve of the theoretical choices made by what he called the Cambridge school, but he had a clear understanding of the meth­odological gamble involved. He did not use the language of gambling, but as we have seen in his reflections on the role of the engineer, he chose the more cerebral metaphor of playing chess. The scientist and the engineer were like players in a game of chess who were confronting an opponent called Nature. As a player, Nature was subtle and her moves could not be easily predicted. Lanchester expressed the contingency of the outcome by saying that, at the outset, no one could identify which moves in the game were good ones and which were bad. A sound-looking move might turn out to be a mistake, and an apparent mistake might turn out to be the winning move. Only the un­known future would reveal this.

Lanchester’s metaphor can, and should, be taken further. It does not just apply to the opening moves in the game of research or to what is sometimes called “the context of discovery” as distinct from “the context of justifica­tion.” It applies to the entire course of research and development ranging from the origin of ideas to their acceptance and rejection. The game with Nature does not come to an end when results begin to emerge and when the chosen strategy of research starts to generate successes and failures. The uncertainties Lanchester identified at the outset of the game still inform the responses that have to be made to the feedback from experience. If the scien­tist or engineer scores a success, the question remains whether it will prove to be of enduring significance or short-lived. If there is a failure, does it indicate the need for a revision of the strategy or merely call for more resolve? These radical contingencies and choices can never be removed, and in one form or another, whether remarked or unremarked, they are present throughout sci­ence. Indeed, they are present in every single act of concept application. The game never comes to an end.49