As with small objects, another element that makes a story appealing is that it includes ordinary people achieving extraordinary things. The third-class patent clerk formulates a theory that revolutionizes physics. The quiet, modest wife allegedly turns out to be, secretly, a brilliant mathematician and covert mother of the theories of modern physics.
Another factor that makes stories sound true is the inclusion of definite settings and actions. At that particular place, so-and-so was doing such-and-such when this happened. Allegedly, Einstein was examining patents for the synchronization of clocks, or Newton was reading under an apple tree, or Galileo was dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and so forth.
What makes such stories even more compelling is when they come from an authoritative source: a famous scientist, a reputable historian, and so on. Readers assume that authoritative experts are less prone to invent the past. However, my impression is that there is a certain danger in authority. Once someone has written extensively about, say, Galileo, they sometimes tend to develop a kind of empathy, a sense of how that person would have behaved, what he must have thought. It is almost as if the investment of many thousands of hours of work had given the researcher a special power, an ability to divine the past, as if human actions were consistent, as if social and intellectual contexts involve conveniently few factors. The trouble with authority is that it often deters the first process of selection that I mentioned above. A writer or teacher needs to say something about Galileo, so they consult an authority on the matter and they trust that authority at their word. Authority can thus work to stop the already limited search that someone undertakes in order to ascertain the past.
The solution is to trust evidence instead of experts. If someone claims something, even if it is Galileo writing about Aristotle, or Newton writing about Galileo, or even the latest, best biographer writing about Einstein, we should abstain from simply believing what they say, unless they cite the specific evidence to which they refer.
Once a popular writer has told a story, it propagates immensely. It soon reaches science textbooks and school materials. It also spreads to juvenile literature and children's books. Later, when researchers manage to critique and correct a myth, it eventually loses ground in schoolbooks. For example, after the myth of Galileo and the Leaning Tower was clearly exposed in the 1930s, it still took many years for the tale to become relatively rare in textbooks. Still, hundreds of thousands of people learn it today, because it retains a strong presence in children's books.
We might have assumed that myths develop mainly by a process of loss of information, that stories are copied and echoed without full accuracy, and therefore some details are lost. But a greater factor is the addition of information. Writers, teachers, and historians sometimes embellish stories with key words and elements that resonate with their expectations, interests, and concerns. It is a process mostly of unconscious invention.
For example, there is a well-known story that Karl Marx wanted to dedicate his famous book, Das Kapital, to Charles Darwin. The story began in 1931, when Russian scholars of Marx's works claimed that in a letter of 1880, Darwin had turned down Marx's request to dedicate a book to him.1 This claim led writers to misrepresent a letter from 1873 by writing that Darwin thanked Marx for wanting to dedicate a book to him, but cordially declined.2 Actually, the letter in question was from 1880 and does not state Marx's name; it was merely addressed to “Dear Sir.”
Even so, in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars continued to claim that Darwin had mailed this letter to Marx.3 To account for the discrepancy in time (Das Kapital had been published in 1867, years before the letter was written or even thought to be written), one writer conjectured that Marx wanted Darwin to read a French translation of some passages by Marx.4 Other writers supposed that the letter referred to an English translation of Das Kapital.5 Still others speculated that Marx hoped to dedicate the second volume of his work to Darwin.6 They disregarded the fact that Friedrich Engels had reported that Marx intended to dedicate the second and third volumes to his wife (as pointed out by Margaret Fay).
In 1974, Lewis S. Feuer established that Darwin's letter was actually directed to Edward Aveling, who planned to publish a book about Darwin and freethinking in opposition to Christianity.7 Darwin did not want to get involved in such matters. He denied being an atheist; he called himself an agnostic. Darwin's papers in the Robin Darwin Archive in Cambridge, England, include a letter from Edward Aveling, dated 1880, in which Aveling requested permission to dedicate his new book to Darwin.8 In the end, Darwin's 1880 reply became mixed up with Marx's correspondence mainly because Marx's daughter, Eleanor, was Aveling's common-law wife. She committed suicide in 1898, and for a short time Aveling alone held both his own letters and those of Marx. So the claim that Marx wanted to dedicate his book to Darwin was just a misapprehension, one that is still sometimes repeated.
Nevertheless, Darwin and Marx did briefly correspond. In 1873, Marx mailed a copy of his book, Das Kapital, with a handwritten inscription to Darwin. In turn, Darwin wrote a letter to Marx, in which he thanked him for the “great book.” The autographed book is in German, and it still exists in the collection of Darwin's books. Out of 822 pages, only the first 105 have had the edges cut apart, as if someone meant to read them, but Darwin barely knew German, and he made none of the marginal annotations that he usually made in books.9 Also, Marx was not entirely a fan of Darwin; over the years, he occasionally disdained his expressions, and he overtly disliked Darwin's reliance on the work of Thomas Malthus.
The Darwin and Marx story grew from a series of conjectures. We have a compulsion to speculate, to fill in the blanks. It is the urge that moves us to infer meaning in a gesture and to draw constellations in the stars. How much less appealing it would be to look at several disconnected points of light in the night sky, not thinking about the belt and sword of Orion. With his telescope, Galileo tried to draw all the stars that he could see in Orion, but there were just too many of them, he could not replace the simple mythical figure of Orion with a comprehensive accounting of the usually invisible stars. Likewise, too often we prefer to pick and choose the pieces that fit whatever story we would like to tell; it is an urge from which I could hardly escape in this book.
Wherever selective excerpts can be used as evidence, it is difficult to undermine myths. For example, although I studied history of science in graduate school, even taking courses in history of biology, I think that I was not taught that the story of Darwin's finches was a myth. Several years later, I read a brief mention that it was a myth, but even then, for years thereafter, I continued to echo variations of the myth, based partly on selected excerpts such as the relevant passage from Darwin's second edition (1845) of his Voyage of the Beagle. I wrongly taught versions of this myth to my own college students. Only after I finally read the historical articles by Frank J. Sulloway did I begin to grasp the extent of the myth, and I then confirmed it in further detail by turning to primary sources. But if such corrective stories about myths are not clearly told and retold, the myths grow again, like tree branches in various directions.
Some readers who, before reading this book, already knew some stories about Einstein's first wife might well have read other books or articles that briefly dismiss such stories as myths. And hence such readers might imagine that it's just an old story, that it was debunked years ago, that it's not worth any more paper and ink. But these stories defeat facts. Having studied their evolution, I suspect that they will never go away. Details, even single words, will charm and change and grow in fertile imaginations. My point is not that occasional pruning is necessary; obviously it is. My point is that the evolution of such myths should become part of the stories themselves; that we should work to track and enjoy the history of our mistakes. I believe that in studying that history, we learn to think more clearly; we find recurring patterns that illuminate this powerful urge to ever-so-slightly misread and misrepresent.
Much of what Einstein said becam
e widely echoed and distorted. He complained that his fate was similar to that of King Midas: “Like the man in the fairy tale who turned everything into gold, what he touched, so with me everything turns into newspaper hype.”10 After his death, new stories about him continue to be generated, even based on nothing.
In January 2009, I was watching television, and the History Channel was showing a program titled Nostradamus: 2012, which discussed and provided prophecies for ever-present new audiences who might believe whatever sounds occult and agreeable. The program capitalized on the entertaining urge to read between the lines and to project the imminent future onto the past. One of the speakers on TV said: “Einstein was into alchemy, believe it or not, his wife said that what he would do every night before he went to sleep was he would read ancient books on alchemy.”11 So easily said, so easily injected into people's thoughts. Many thousands of people across the world got to hear that statement and likely some of them believed it. By contrast, how many fewer will make it to the back of a bookstore to maybe find a book that might deny that claim? Aside from the immediate reaction that this statement is just not true, let's appreciate it for its beauty. It plainly asserts that “Einstein was into alchemy,” as if this claim were authoritative and evident. It connects two bright dots, like stars in a constellation: Einstein and alchemy. It matches what hopeful viewers might want to believe: that successful scientists were privy to occult secrets that we too might access in our nightly informal readings. And it allegedly purports a credible source: his wife. But which wife, first or second? And to whom did she say this? When? Where? Just as the claim is bolstered by the alleged reference to the credible witness, so too the content is boosted by the qualifier: Einstein didn't just read books on alchemy, allegedly he read ancient books on alchemy.
Writers trying to fairly capture the past navigate a difficult path. Some toil and crawl slowly in a crammed labyrinth of antiquarian details, while others rush to lose their way in a haze of conjectures. It reminds me of a moving song by the Cuban singer Silvio Rodríguez, a fable about brothers. One brother began a journey, wanting to get far, but he was so careful that he closely looked at every step he took, so much that he became enslaved by caution, his neck curved down, he became old and failed to get far because of his nearsightedness. Another brother also yearned to get far, so he began his journey by focusing his eyes on the horizon, but then he kept stumbling over stones and holes at his feet, so he too became old without getting far. A third brother became cross-eyed.
In researching to authenticate stories, I increasingly saw the extent to which many books blend speculations with evidence. There are patterns, for example, that when writers claim that he must have (done this or known that), or that it cannot be doubted that, such expressions usually belie, to the contrary, gratuitous conjectures. Words such as doubtless, probably, evidently, to be sure, certainly, always, are often used as patches precisely where writers really don't know the certainty of what they want to claim. So for this book I decided to not use such words and similar guesswork: he may have, nor common symptoms of imprecision, such as: scientists in the nineteenth century and the modern age. I am not saying that nobody should ever use such expressions, but the present book involved the experiment of not using such expressions at all, aside from quotations.
Myths connect us to famous individuals by placing such individuals in situations that we can visualize and that convey some idea that we find appealing. Most heroic myths are not malicious. Some fictions satisfy and empower: hearsay legends inspire us even when misconstrued as history. There's an urge to use intriguing historical figures—like Pythagoras, Galileo, and Einstein's wife—as characters in a morality play, to edit the past, to try to make it teach us what we're eager to learn. We project our concerns onto what we read. There remains, though, a need for genuine accounts that struggle to answer the questions: What happened? What can we fairly say about the past? By engaging in this struggle, we contribute to the evolution of stories: the gradual replacement of speculative myths with science and history. After having carefully studied how stories evolve in the recent past, when we are rich with documentary sources, we might again ponder the likelihood of much older stories and ancient accounts. Having traced the emergence of the story that Darwin was inspired by finches' beaks, or that J. J. Thomson discovered the electron, or that Einstein allegedly was inspired to relativity by evaluating patents for city clocks, we might return to analyze stories about Pythagoras. The more recent stories echo ancient forms; tales of heroes and unlikely feats.
On one hand, we may lose faith in some stories about feats of ancient genius, so it might seem that history loses some of its magic. On the other hand, there is no shortage of wonderful and astonishing stories that are true. For ages, alchemists failed to find the mythical Philosophers' Stone, but eventually chemists did find substances that emit rays, cure cancer, and are far more valuable than gold. It seemed impossible that elements might evolve, and that we might create gold. It seemed impossible that species too might evolve. It seemed impossible that we might breed animals to have innate friendly behaviors. It seemed impossible that there might be changes in the heavens. It seemed ridiculous that there might exist other worlds. Moreover, stories about how apparent impossibilities were overcome inspire us because they often involve rather ordinary people: Darwin was an average graduate from college, Coulomb was a retired engineer, Einstein was a third-class patent clerk. Whether they were bright, ordinary, or sometimes unpleasant, their successes inspire us to recall the proverb: What one fool can do, another can.
Notes
PREFACE
1. Albert Einstein to Max Brod, 22 February 1949, Einstein Papers Project, item 34–066, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.
2. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 1–7.
3. Jürgen Neffe, Einstein, A Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 95.
4. Sweeping currents of meaning and debates precede my sentences and threaten to swallow up my point in the hollow suspicion that I am likely trying to criticize the sciences. How can we escape the seeping context of the “the two cultures” and “the science wars” and all that makes us suspect that someone hurls rocks either from within science or against it? We can try.
5. Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (New York: Random House/Broadway Books, 2003), acknowledgments.
6. Tony Rothman, Everything's Relative: And Other Fables from Science and Technology (Hoboken, N. J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2003). John Waller, Einstein's Luck: The Truth Behind Some of the Greatest Scientific Discoveries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
7. Rothman, Everything's Relative, xv.
8. Ronald N. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 7.
9. “Amanda” (Becki Newton), in Ugly Betty, ABC television network, 2008.
10. Rothman, Everything's Relative, x, xi.
11. Karl Popper, “Science: Conjectures and Refutations,” (lecture, Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1953); printed in Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 50.
CHAPTER 1. GALILEO AND THE LEANING TOWER OF PISA
1. R. A. Gregory, Discovery, or The Spirit and Service of Science (London: Macmillan and Co., 1916), 2.
2. Ivor B. Hart, Makers of Science; Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, with an introduction by Charles Singer (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 105.
3. J. J. Fahie, “The Scientific Works of Galileo,” in Studies in the History and Method of Science, ed. Charles Singer, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 216.
4. James Stewart, Lothar Redlin, Saleem Watson, College Algebra, 5th ed. (Belmont, California: Cengage Learning, 2008), 293; Richard Panchyk and Buzz Aldrin, Galileo for Kids: His Life and Ideas, 25 Activities, rev. ed. (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005), 33; L
eon Lederman, with Dick Teresi, The God Particle (1993; repr., New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 73–74; Wendy MacDonald and Paolo Rui, Galileo's Leaning Tower Experiment: A Science Adventure (Watertown, Mass.: Charlesbridge Publishing, 2009); Chris Oxlade, Gravity (Chicago: Heinemann-Raintree Library, 2006), 28; Rachel Hilliam, Galileo Galilei: Father of Modern Science (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2005), 101; Ellen Kottler, Victoria Brookhart Costa, Secrets to Success for Science Teachers (Thousand Oaks, Calif., Corwin Press, 2009), 50–51; Gillian Clements, The Picture History of Great Inventors, rev. ed. (London: Frances Lincoln Ltd, 2005), 21; Stillman Drake, Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science, ed. Noel M. Swerdlow and Trevor Harvey Levere, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 34–35; Gary F. Moring, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Einstein, 2nd ed. (New York: Alpha Books, 2004), 36; Kerri O'Donnell, Galileo: Man of Science (New York: Rosen Classroom, 2002), 7; Gerry Bailey, Karen Foster, Leighton Noyes, Galileo's Telescope (New York: Crabtree Publishing Company, 2009), 13; Stephen P. Maran, Astronomy for Dummies, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, N. J.: Wiley, 2005), 159; David Hawkins, How to Get Your Husband's Attention, rev. ed. (Eugene, Ore.: Harvest House Publishers, 2008), 187.
5. Lane Cooper, Aristotle, Galileo, and the Tower of Pisa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1935); Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978; New York: Courier Dover Publications, 2003), 415. For a fair review of the literature, plus valuable arguments, see Michael Segre, “Galileo, Viviani and the Tower of Pisa,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20, no. 4 (1989): 435–54.
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