Bridging psychology and mathematics : can the brain understand the brain?

Abstract

We are told scientists are divided into experimentalists and theoreticians. The dialectic description of the dynamics of science, with one tribe gathering data and collecting evidence and another tribe providing form to these observations, has striking examples that argue for the importance of synthesis. The 16th century revolution, which settled the way in which we see the sky today, is probably one of the best examples of how comparatively ineffective each of these tribes can be in isolation. Tycho Brahe, the exquisite observer, who built, calibrated, and refined instruments to see in the sky what no one else could, collected the evidence to prove a theory that Copernicus had already stated years before (in a book he dedicated to the Pope). It was only many years later that Galileo established the bridge between theory and observation; he understood the data in terms of the theory and thereby cemented the revolution. Copernicus's statements, showed Galileo, were not only figments of his imagination; they were an adequate description of the universe as he and Brahe had observed