Abstract
Professor Duzheng YE’s name has been familiar to me ever since my postdoctoral years at MIT with Professors Jule CHARNEY and Norman PHILLIPS, back in the late 1960s. I had the enormous pleasure of meeting Professor YE personally in 1992 in Beijing. His concern to promote the very best science and to use it well, and his thinking on multi-level orderly human activities, reminds me not only of the communication skills we need as scientists but also of the multi-level nature of science itself. Here I want to say something (a) about what science is; (b) about why multi-level thinking—and taking more than one viewpoint—is so important for scientific as well as for other forms of understanding; and (c) about what is meant, at a deep level, by “scientific understanding” and trying to communicate it, not only with lay persons but also across professional disciplines. I hope that Professor YE would approve.
摘要
20世纪60年代后期当我还在麻省理工学院师从Jule CHARNEY教授和 Norman PHILLIPS教授做博士后的时候, 就已经熟悉叶笃正教授的名字. 心怀巨大的喜悦, 我终于在1992年于北京见到了叶教授本人. 他对如何最好地发展科学和正确地运用科学的关注以及对人类有序活动的思考, 使我不但联想到作为科学家所需要的交流技巧, 更让我思索科学本身的多层面特性. 在这篇文章里, 我想谈论1) 什么是科学; 2) 为什么多层面思考, 也即采取多重视角看待问题, 对科学以及其他形式的人类理解如此重要; 3) 在一个深层意义上, 科学理解以及与外行和跨专业领域人士对科学理解的交流究竟意味着什么. 我希望叶教授能够同意我的观点.
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Acknowledgements
Professor Jianhua LÜ and Dr Yixin WAN kindly helped me with the Chinese sentences displayed above, as did Ms Zheng LIN and Ms Xüejing LOI. Professor LÜ also gave valuable help with several other aspects of the lectures I gave in China. I want to thank especially Professors Jiang ZHU and Song YANG, respectively, for their kind invitations to speak in this Symposium and at the Guangzhou and Zhuhai campuses of Sun Yatsen University. For kind and generous hospitality, and further sponsorship, at Nanjing University and at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing, I want to thank also Professors Yimin LIU, Zhemin TAN, and Guoxiong WU. Professors WU and Congbin FU advised me on matters concerning the Paris Agreement. A referee, Dr Paul WILLIAMS, kindly made useful suggestions for improving this article.
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McIntyre, M.E. On multi-level thinking and scientific understanding. Adv. Atmos. Sci. 34, 1150–1158 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-017-6283-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-017-6283-3
Keywords
- communication skills
- cross-disciplinary communication
- scientific understanding
- unconscious assumptions
- multiple viewpoints
- brain hemispheres
- biological evolution