The clamps are, however, the norm. They are the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ standard mechanism for turning out new scientists, instilling the iron rule by psychological stratagems rather than by enlightenment or persuasion. What a contrast this makes with the first modern scientists, the inheritors of the Newtonian method in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They followed the iron rule, but they were not its captives. Engaging in public argument, they would perform the role of “the empiricist” in the same way that Newton performed the roles of the mathematical physicist, the
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