The scientists, p.1
The Scientists, page 1
Praise for The Scientists
“In many ways The Scientists also serves as a handy reference work. Each scientist’s story, succinct and entertaining, can be perused and appreciated individually. Historians may quibble over a particular detail or analysis, but no matter. Gribbin’s work offers general audiences an engaging and informative view of modern science’s prodigious accomplishments since the Renaissance.”
—The Washington Post
“Beginning with Copernicus and the shift from mysticism to reason, Gribbin tracks 500 years of Western-science history through the life stories of the people who charted the course. The text is enlivened by anecdotes that define the characters and their achievements. ... All fields of science are included. Gribbin carefully illustrates how each ... accomplishment, rather than being an isolated advance, has been part of a burgeoning scientific revolution that continues today.”
—Science News
“The Scientists is best read for its insights into scientific personalities and how science builds on itself. The author, an astrophysicist but better known as a science historian, takes pains to record contributions of relatively unknown scientists whose discoveries led to the insights of science’s stars.”
—The Columbus Dispatch
“The prolific Gribbin has written the human history of the physical sciences. From the Renaissance to today, the cast of major scientific characters includes the exalted and the obscure, and their personal stories make this comprehensive history a page-turner.”
—Library Journal, Best Science-Technology Books 2003
“Populated by [colorful] characters and replete with scientific clarity, Gribbin’s work is the epitome of what a general-interest history of science should be.”
—Booklist (starred, boxed review)
“A thoroughly readable survey of scientific history, spiced by a brilliant and memorable cast of characters.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“As expansive (and as massive) as a textbook, this remarkably readable popular history explores the development of modern science through the individual stories of philosophers and scientists both renowned and overlooked.... The real joy in the book can be found in the way Gribbin ... revels not just in the development of science but also in the human details of his subjects’ lives.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Science buffs will love this book for the nuggets of hard-to-find information.... But the book also serves tyros as an excellent introduction to science.”—The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC)
“A terrific read ... Tell[s] the story of science as a sequence of witty, in-formation-packed tales ... complete with humanizing asides, glimpses of the scientist’s personal life and amusing anecdotes.”
—The Sunday Times (London), Books of the Year
“Excels at making complex science intelligible to the general reader ... If you’re looking for a book that captures the personal drama and achievement of science, then look no further.”
—The Guardian
John Gribbin trained as an astrophysicist at Cambridge University and is currently Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex. His many books include In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality, and Q Is for Quantum.
2004 Random House Trade Paperback
Copyright © 2002 by John and Mary Gribbin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Random House Trade Paperbacks and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book was originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, in 2002 and in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2003.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Gribbin, John R.
The scientists: a history of science told through the lives of its greatest inventors / John Gribbin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN O-8129-6788-7
1. Scientists—Biography. 2. Science—History. I. Title.
Q141.G79 2003 509.2'2—dc2i 2003046607
[B]
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
Printed in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Book One: OUT OF THE DARK AGES
1 - Renaissance Men
2 - The Last Mystics
3 - The First Scientists
Book Two: THE FOUNDING FATHERS
4 - Science Finds its Feet
5 - The ‘Newtonian Revolution’
6 - Expanding Horizons
Book Three: THE ENLIGHTENMENT
7 - Enlightened Science I: Chemistry catches up
8 - Enlightened Science II: Progress on all fronts
Book Four: THE BIG PICTURE
9 - The ‘Darwinian Revolution’
10 - Atoms and Molecules
11 - Let There be Light
12 - The Last Hurrah! of Classical Science
Book Five: MODERN TIMES
13 - Inner Space
14 - The Realm of Life
15 - Outer Space
Coda: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following institutions for providing access to their libraries and other material: Académie Française and Jardin des Plantes, Paris; Bodleian Library, Oxford; British Museum and Natural History Museum, London; Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge; Geological Society, London; Down House, Kent; Linnaean Society, London; Royal Astronomical Society; Royal Geographical Society; Royal Institution; Trinity College, Dublin; University of Cambridge Library. As always, the University of Sussex provided me with a base and support, including Internet access. It would be invidious to single out any of the many individuals who discussed aspects of the project with me, but they know who they are, and all have my thanks.
Both singular and plural forms of the personal pronoun appear in the text. ‘I’, of course, is used where my own opinion on a scientific matter is being presented; ‘we’ is used to include my writing partner, Mary Gribbin, where appropriate. Her help in ensuring that the words which follow are comprehensible to non-scientists is as essential to this as to all my books.
Introduction
The most important thing that science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special. The process began with the work of Nicolaus Copernicus in the sixteenth century, which suggested that the Earth is not at the centre of the Universe, and gained momentum after Galileo, early in the seventeenth century, used a telescope to obtain the crucial evidence that the Earth is indeed a planet orbiting the Sun. In successive waves of astronomical discovery in the centuries that followed, astronomers found that just as the Earth is an ordinary planet, the Sun is an ordinary star (one of several hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy) and the Milky Way itself is just an ordinary galaxy (one of several hundred billion in the visible Universe). They even suggested, at the end of the twentieth century, that the Universe itself may not be unique.
While all this was going on, biologists tried and failed to find any evidence for a special ‘life force’ that distinguishes living matter from non-living matter, concluding that life is just a rather complicated form of chemistry. By a happy coincidence for the historian, one of the landmark events at the start of the biological investigation of the human body was the publication of De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius in 1543, the same year that Copernicus eventually published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies). This coincidence makes 1543 a convenient marker for the start of the scientific revolution that would transform first Europe and then the world.
Of course, any choice of a starting date for the history of science is arbitrary, and my own account is restricted geographically, as well as in the time span it covers. My aim is to outline the development of Western science, from the Renaissance to (roughly) the end of the twentieth century. This means leaving to one side the achievements of the Ancient Greeks, the Chinese, and the Islamic scientists and philosophers who did so much to keep the search for knowledge about our world alive during the period that Europeans refer to as the Dark and Middle Ages. But it also means telling a coherent story, with a clear beginning in both space and time, of the development of the world view that lies at the heart of our understanding of the Universe, and our place in it today. For human life turned out to be no different from any other kind of life on Earth. As the work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace established in the nineteenth century, all you need to make human beings out of amoebas is the process of evolution by natural selection, and plenty of time.
All the examples I have mentioned here highlight another feature of the story-telling process. It is natural to describe key events in terms of the work of individuals who made a mark in science - Copernicus, Vesalius, Darwin, Wallace and the rest. But this does not mean that science has progressed as a result of the work of a string of irreplaceable geniuses possessed of a special insight into how the world works. Geniuses maybe (though not always); but irreplaceable certainly not. Scientific progress builds step by step, and as the example of Darwin and Wallace shows, when the time is ripe, two or more individuals may make the next step independently of one another. It is the luck of the draw, or historical accident, whose name gets remembered as the discoverer of a new phenomenon. What is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution ‘coincides’ with the development of the telescope and the microscope.
I can think of only one partial exception to this situation, and even there I would qualify the exception more than most historians of science do. Isaac Newton was clearly something of a special case, both because of the breadth of his scientific achievements and in particular because of the clear way in which he laid down the ground rules on which science ought to operate. Even Newton, though, relied on his immediate predecessors, in particular Galileo Galilei and René Descartes, and in that sense his contributions followed naturally from what went before. If Newton had never lived, scientific progress might have been held back by a few decades. But only by a few decades. Edmond Halley or Robert Hooke might well have come up with the famous inverse square law of gravity; Gottfried Leibniz actually did invent calculus independently of Newton (and made a better job of it); and Christiaan Huygens’s superior wave theory of light was held back by Newton’s espousal of the rival particle theory.
None of this will stop me from telling much of my version of the history of science in terms of the people involved, including Newton. My choice of individuals to highlight in this way is not intended to be comprehensive; nor are my discussions of their individual lives and work intended to be complete. I have chosen stories that represent the development of science in its historical context. Some of those stories, and the characters involved, may be familiar; others (I hope) less so. But the importance of the people and their lives is that they reflect the society in which they lived, and by discussing, for example, the way the work of one specific scientist followed from that of another, I mean to indicate the way in which one generation of scientists influenced the next. This might seem to beg the question of how the ball got rolling in the first place - the ‘first cause’. But in this case it is easy to find the first cause - Western science got started because the Renaissance happened. And once it got started, by giving a boost to technology it ensured that it would keep on rolling, with new scientific ideas leading to improved technology, and improved technology providing the scientists with the means to test new ideas to greater and greater accuracy. Technology came first, because it is possible to make machines by trial and error without fully understanding the principles on which they operate. But once science and technology got together, progress really took off.
I will leave the debate about why the Renaissance happened when and where it did to the historians. If you want a definite date to mark the beginning of the revival of Western Europe, a convenient one is 1453, the year the Turks captured Constantinople (on 29 May). By then, many Greek-speaking scholars, seeing which way the wind was blowing, had already fled westwards (initially to Italy), taking their archives of documents with them. There, the study of those documents was taken up by the Italian humanist movement, who were interested in using the teaching found in classical literature to re-establish civilization along the lines that had existed before the Dark Ages. This does rather neatly tie the rise of modern Europe to the death of the last vestige of the old Roman Empire. But an equally important factor, as many people have argued, was the depopulation of Europe by the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which led the survivors to question the whole basis of society, made labour expensive and encouraged the invention of technological devices to replace manpower. Even this is not the whole story. Johann Gutenberg’s development of moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century had an obvious impact on what was to become science, and discoveries brought back to Europe by another technological development, sailing ships capable of crossing the oceans, transformed society.
Dating the end of the Renaissance is no easier than dating the beginning - you could say that it is still going on. A convenient round number is 1700; but from the present perspective an even better choice of date might be 1687, the year Isaac Newton published his great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) and, in the words of Alexander Pope, ‘all was light’.
The point I want to make is that the scientific revolution did not happen in isolation, and certainly did not start out as the mainspring of change, although in many ways science (through its influence on technology and on our world view) became the driving force of Western civilization. I want to show how science developed, but I don’t have space to do justice to the full historical background, any more than most history books have space to do justice to the story of science. I don’t even have space to do justice to all of the science here, so if you want the in-depth story of such key concepts as quantum theory, evolution by natural selection or plate tectonics, you will have to look in other books (including my own). My choice of events to highlight is necessarily incomplete, and therefore to some extent subjective, but my aim is to give a feel for the full sweep of science, which has taken us from the realization that the Earth is not at the centre of the Universe and that human beings are ‘only’ animals, to the theory of the Big Bang and a complete map of the human genome in just over 450 years.
In his New Guide to Science (a very different kind of book from anything I could ever hope to write), Isaac Asimov said that the reason for trying to explain the story of science to non-scientists is that:
No one can really feel at home in the modern world and judge the nature of its problems - and the possible solutions to those problems - unless one has some intelligent notion of what science is up to. Furthermore, initiation into the magnificent world of science brings great esthetic satisfaction, inspiration to youth, fulfillment of the desire to know, and a deeper appreciation of the wonderful potentialities and achievements of the human mind.
I couldn’t put it better myself. Science is one of the greatest achievements (arguably the greatest achievement) of the human mind, and the fact that progress has actually been made, in the most part, by ordinarily clever people building step by step from the work of their predecessors makes the story more remarkable, not less. Almost any of the readers of this book, had they been in the right place at the right time, could have made the great discoveries described here. And since the progress of science has by no means come to a halt, some of you may yet be involved in the next step in the story.
John Gribbin
Book One: OUT OF THE DARK AGES
1 - Renaissance Men
Emerging from the dark - The elegance of Copernicus - The Earth moves! - The orbits of the planets - Leonard Digges and the telescope - Thomas Digges and the infinite Universe - Bruno: a martyr for science? - Copernican model banned by Catholic Church - Vesalius: surgeon, dissector and grave-robber - Fallopio and Fabricius - William Harvey and the circulation of the blood
The Renaissance was the time when Western Europeans lost their awe of the Ancients and realized that they had as much to contribute to civilization and society as the Greeks and Romans had contributed. To modern eyes, the puzzle is not that this should have occurred, but that it should have taken so long for people to lose their inferiority complex. The detailed reasons for the hiatus are outside the scope of this book. But anyone who has visited the sites of classical civilization around the Mediterranean can get a glimpse of why the people of the Dark Ages (in round terms, roughly from AD 400 to 900) and even those of the Middle Ages (roughly from AD 900 to 1400) felt that way. Structures such as the Pantheon and the Colosseum in Rome still inspire awe today, and at a time when all knowledge of how to build such structures had been lost, it must have seemed that they were the work almost of a different species - or of gods. With so much physical evidence of the seemingly god-like prowess of the Ancients around, and with newly discovered texts demonstrating the intellectual prowess of the Ancients emerging from Byzantium, it would have been natural to accept that they were intellectually far superior to the ordinary people who had followed them, and to accept the teaching of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and Euclid as a kind of Holy Writ, which could not be questioned. This was, indeed, the way things were at the start of the Renaissance. Since the Romans contributed very little to the discussion of what might now be called a scientific view of the world, this meant that by the time of the Renaissance the received wisdom about the nature of the Universe had been essentially unchanged since the great days of Ancient Greece, some 1500 years before Copernicus came on the scene. Yet, once those ideas were challenged, progress was breathtakingly rapid -after fifteen centuries of stagnation, there have been fewer than another five centuries from the time of Copernicus to the present day. It is something of a cliché, but nonetheless true, that a typical Italian from the tenth century would have felt pretty much at home in the fifteenth century, but a typical Italian from the fifteenth century would find the twenty-first century more unfamiliar than he or she would have found the Italy of the Caesars.
