Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Myths and Apparent Myths
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa
2. Galileo's Pythagorean Heresy
3. Newton's Apple and the Tree of Knowledge
4. The Stone of the Ancients
5. Darwin's Missing Frogs
6. Ben Franklin's Electric Kite
7. Coulomb's Impossible Experiment?
8. Thomson, Plum-Pudding, and Electrons
9. Did Einstein Believe in God?
10. A Myth about the Speed of Light
11. The Cult of the Quiet Wife
12. Einstein and the Clock Towers of Bern
13. The Secret of Einstein's Creativity?
14. Eugenics and the Myth of Equality
Epilogue
Notes
Illustration Sources and Credits
Index
Science Secrets
The Truth about Darwin's Finches, Einstein's Wife, and Other Myths
Alberto A. Martínez
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2011, Alberto A. Martínez
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-62304
ISBN 10: 0-8229-6230-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martinez, Alberto A.
Science secrets : the truth about Darwin's finches, Einstein's wife, and other myths / Alberto A. Martinez.
p. cm.
Summary: “Accessibly written in an engaging style, this book examines classic popular stories in the history of science. Some of the myths discussed include Franklin's Kite, Newton's Apple, and Thomson's plum pudding model of the atom. Martinez successfully holds readers' attention by relying on rich documentation from primary sources to debunk speculations that have become reified over time. He argues that although scientists have disagreed with one another, the disagreements have been productive. Features includes extensive primary source documentation and detailed explanations of how to compare contradictory sources in order to determine which accounts are truly valid”—Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8229-4407-2 (hardback)
1. Science—History—Miscellanea. I. Title.
Q173.M316 2011
500—dc22
2011003484
ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8017-9 (electronic)
if they list to try
conjecture, He his Fabric of the Heavens
has left to their disputes, perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint Opinions wide
hereafter, when they come to model Heaven,
and calculate the Stars, how they will wield
the mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive
to save appearances…
Milton, Paradise Lost I do not deal in conjectures.
Isaac Newton, 1724
Contents
List of Myths and Apparent Myths
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa
2. Galileo's Pythagorean Heresy
3. Newton's Apple and the Tree of Knowledge
4. The Stone of the Ancients
5. Darwin's Missing Frogs
6. Ben Franklin's Electric Kite
7. Coulomb's Impossible Experiment?
8. Thomson, Plum-Pudding, and Electrons
9. Did Einstein Believe in God?
10. A Myth about the Speed of Light
11. The Cult of the Quiet Wife
12. Einstein and the Clock Towers of Bern
13. The Secret of Einstein's Creativity?
14. Eugenics and the Myth of Equality
Epilogue
Notes
Illustration Sources and Credits
Index
List of Myths and Apparent Myths
Did Galileo drop objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
Was Galileo born right after Michelangelo died?
Was Ptolemy's system more complicated than Copernicus's system?
Did Luther and Calvin condemn Copernicus?
Did nearly nobody read the book of Copernicus?
Did Aristotle posit crystalline spheres in the heavens?
Did the Inquisition kill Bruno for believing in Copernicus?
Did Pythagoras believe that Earth moves?
Did Galileo defy the Inquisition, saying “But it moves”?
Was Newton born in the same year that Galileo died?
Did a falling apple inspire Newton to conceive of universal gravity?
Did Pythagoras know the inverse square law of gravity?
Did Pythagoras discover the laws of musical harmony?
Is Newton's apple tree still alive?
Did Pythagoras master alchemical transmutation?
Did Pythagoras learn secrets from the Egyptians?
Did Boyle discover Boyle's law?
Did Boyle advocate skepticism against alchemy?
Is it impossible to convert dull metals into gold?
Has nobody become rich with the Philosophers' Stone?
Did finches inspire Darwin to his theory of evolution?
Did Benjamin Franklin fly a kite in a thunderstorm?
Did Coulomb fake his proof of an inverse square law?
Did J. J. Thomson imagine plum-pudding in the atom?
Did J. J. Thomson discover the electron?
Did Einstein believe in God?
Do experiments show that the velocity of light is constant?
Did Einstein's wife secretly contribute to his theories?
Was Einstein inspired to relativity by Swiss clock towers?
Is it impossible to change human nature with eugenics?
Did Marx want to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin?
Preface
Stories about Albert Einstein range widely: countless writers claim that he was a genius while others claim that he had a learning disability; some portray him as a saintly sufferer for humanity who wanted to read the mind of God, while others portray him as a bohemian opportunist or an atheist. In 1949, Einstein complained: “There have already been published by the bucketsful such brazen lies and utter fictions about me that I would have gone to my grave long ago if I had let myself pay attention to them.”1
We tend to imagine scientists as gifted prodigies, lonesome heroes or martyrs, saints or sinners. Their stories acquire the shapes of myths. Giordano Bruno and Galileo appear as noble martyrs. Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton loom as marble giants in a pantheon. Some biologists invoke Darwin as a patron saint, quoting him word for word. Scientists working on eugenics appear to be a deadly sect. Many posters portray the old Einstein as an inspirational holy man.
In the newest bestselling biography of Einstein (#1 New York Times Best Seller), by Walter Isaacson, I find the following words in the first seven pages: tidings, halo, brilliance, genius, faith, testament, genius, miraculous, miracle, glory, reverential, faith, God, cult, genius, canonized, secular saint, halo, genius, aura, priest-like, glories, inspiring, brilliance, guardian angel, reverence, and “usher in the modern age.”2 Such language is typical, it helps to win readers, but is it necessary? Hype is not distinctive of science, it is the common ancient currency by which we tell stories of heroes and miracles. I don't want to insinuate that I dislike Isaacson's book, that's not what I mean; it's a rich bio
graphy, well worth reading. But even great writers portray the history of science with mythical tones, as if success were a matter of destiny, such as in claims that Newton was born the year Galileo died or that the young Einstein “would become” one of the greatest physicists of all time. Many writers echo traditional stories rather than dig up documentary facts, interpreting bits of evidence to match conjectures rather than to test them. Consciously or not, writers inflate tales to sell books. As rightly noted by Jürgen Neffe, another good biographer of Einstein, “speculations evolve into anecdotes that are then proliferated in book-length studies.”3 Can we write history without mythical exaggerations? Einstein did not want to be worshipped; he repudiated how people exaggerated his contributions. Likewise, Darwin felt mortified by overblown praise, and I think Pythagoras would be stunned by what writers have made of him.
A tension exists between the need to fairly describe the past and the craving to bridge gaps, to conjecture. It is not exclusive to popular books, it also appears in academic writing. Some historians portray speculations as secure findings. Other historians later deny such conjectures as unwarranted. But often they replace the old guesswork with new speculations, presented again as solid findings. Moreover, the ground that each historian tries to cover is often broad, so errors creep in wherever one relies on common knowledge and trusts other writers' words. It takes much work to authenticate some common hearsay; it takes more work to falsify, and some conjectures are too seductive to resist.4
Lately, some good writers of popular science have sought help from historians to check their claims. For example, while editing his Short History of Nearly Everything, the acclaimed author Bill Bryson, having received corrections and comments from historians, increasingly surmised the extent to which “inky embarrassments” might lurk in the pages of his book.5 It became a best seller nonetheless, and to Bryson's credit, some critics were frustrated to not find many inaccuracies in his book. Still, many teachers and writers ignore the findings of historians. It is comparable to the degree to which most professional historians, in turn, print no comment on how some authors misrepresent history. Why do exaggerations and guesswork circulate more than any fair accounting of evidence? Is truth less interesting? No, the problem is that most specialists aim their work at a small group of peers. Yet truths are so much more attractive than myths that specialists spend thousands of hours absorbed in efforts to illuminate the past. But some of us should challenge misconceptions in order to delineate legends from substantive findings that are also fascinating.
This book analyzes several famous topics in the history of science: the lore of Pythagoras, the Copernican revolution, the alchemical quest for the Philosophers' Stone, Darwin's path to evolution, the mysteries of electricity, Einstein's relativity, and the rise of eugenics. Each topic involves great stories that we tell and tell again, as we should. And then we change the stories, they evolve. But they sometimes lose genuine aspects and gain an opaque gloss. Again we feel compelled to analyze them, so I too have now tried to untangle hearsay. Of course, I'm not immune to mistakes either; for each error addressed in this book, I too have made many others, but I've struggled to keep mine out, to not clutter these pages. Mistakes are more interesting when issued by prominent sources, so I discuss few of my own. But again and again I rewrote; what I had somewhere first read crumbled later on close inspection. Some of what I had taught for years turned out to be baseless, plausible fictions.
Layers of conjecture have caked stories about dead scientists like plaster, paint, and acrylic gloss. Yet there are some sparkling facts underneath. Precious, neglected gems of history compensate for the loss of the surface sheen. So we will do plenty of nitpicking. Much of it will be tacit, hidden in the struggle to fairly represent evidence; but in other instances, we must explicitly pinpoint the nits to be picked—because nits, the tiny eggs of parasitic insects such as lice, are not as harmless as they seem. They hatch and they feed and they grow and they breed. How much illusory history would we have been spared if writers centuries ago had nitpicked seemingly harmless infidelities before they spread?
Besides, nitpicking can be fun. There is a long tradition of writers who have written corrections to popular myths in science and math. Most recently, I have enjoyed books by Tony Rothman and John Waller.6 As those authors did, I now cover an idiosyncratic selection of topics. In this regard, Rothman frankly noted: “The contents of this book are entirely arbitrary, having been determined by accident.”7 In my case, the present topics are connected by the theme of how stories evolve, and to various degrees, by Pythagoras and Einstein: legendary heroes from ancient and more recent times. Pythagoras is particularly noteworthy because his name strangely recurs in many fields. We still learn about him in early school courses on math, music, and astronomy. He led a religion in the sixth century BCE and allegedly he made many contributions to philosophy, society, the sciences, and supposedly he performed miracles, did not eat beans, and he never laughed. But actually, all or nearly all of the mathematical discoveries that are often attributed to Pythagoras are fiction, the result of writers' guesswork. In the present book, I trace his mythical influence in the sciences. As in math, it is again striking to see how often scientists attributed discoveries to Pythagoras, so he will again and again show up in these pages. Pythagoras emerges as the patron saint of the urge to conjecture, to pretend to know the past.
So we pit stories against evidence. Stories powerfully influence the public conception of science; true or false, they leave a deep impression on the imagination. Therefore, those issues and others will arise in the pages that follow, some will be briefly addressed by pointing to the appropriate evidence while others will be disentangled in detail. Every chapter relies on primary sources and new translations.
I'm impressed by an excellent recent book where the authors frankly state that although the word myth has a sophisticated academic meaning, they yet use it “as done in everyday conversation—to designate a claim that is false.”8 I too will tend to follow this common usage, though I will also refer to myths as valuable fiction. Myths disguise our ignorance, but they also link powerful notions.
Yet the present book is not essentially about debunking myths; that's a secondary goal. It is more an effort to retell history, to squint at it through plausible myths. Instead of just collecting errors, we must try again to tell the past fairly. And to do so, I will follow the structure of successful stories, true or false. Myths become pervasive because they work, they function or satisfy. Despite being historically untrue, they convey deep truths about human psychology. We enjoy some stories more than others partly because they are tales of individuals: touching vignettes of often solitary explorers struggling to overcome difficulties to win unlikely success. So we can reconstruct remarkable happenings in the moving frames of individuals and their struggles. This book studies how stories evolve, and it contributes to that process.
Above all, this book shows why opinions that were once secret and seemingly impossible became scientifically compelling. Ink that might go to the usual hero-worship or to academic spin will instead be used to clearly explain. For it is unfair for historians to demand that scientists include more proper history in their teaching if by contrast historians do not include science when writing history. Specialists have carved deep divisions among their fields, disconnecting disciplines from their past. Even famous scientists leave a wake of confusions. Darwin acknowledged that the plan of his argument in Origin of Species could be improved. Einstein was plagued by a barrage of curious inquirers who did not understand relativity, and he blamed himself for initiating many of the confusions that arose.
Incidentally, I once heard the following phrase on television: “it's magic—and like science you don't have to actually understand it, you just have to believe it.”9 There it was, right there, the problem. Some people give up on understanding. Despite the efforts of many writers, there remain many readers who, having fairly tried to understand the reasonings of dead sci
entists, remain quite unconvinced that reason was there at all. They conclude that science constitutes just another blind cult.
My concern is not that they remain unconvinced. People may well study something such as Einstein's relativity and rightly remain skeptical, as did Einstein, that it constitutes a satisfactory solution. Instead, I'm concerned that often writers don't explain the order of the arguments and the historical conditions that give meaning to scientific knowledge. Contrary to common impressions, science books do not all say the same things. For example, in some physics books the constancy of the speed of light shows up as a fundamental assumption, while in others it is an experimental fact. Which is it? In some books, Darwin was crucially inspired to evolution thanks to finches, while in others he was most influenced by giant tortoises, and in others by pigeons or by mockingbirds. Which is it?
In his lively book on historical myths, physicist Tony Rothman repeatedly admitted: “I have few illusions that this little book can make a dent in just-so history…. I have few illusions that this book will make the slightest puncture in the status quo.”10 But in the end, to the contrary, I find it inspiring that despite our failings, writers do jointly struggle to capture and convey truth, to advance our understanding. Stories change, and it is wonderful to contribute to the process.
Contrary to the common phobia against science and math, many people are immensely attracted to pseudoscience. We should therefore decipher how the secrets and specifics of history can meet the cravings that pull readers to the realms of conjectures. As brilliantly suggested by Karl Popper: “science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths.”11 Alongside the precious findings of inquiry, there are also neglected dimensions of stories—trinkets and skeletons in the backroom closets of science and math, not entirely the sort of thing that some teachers would like you to see, but nevertheless just as seductive as good myths.
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