THE
STORY
OF
WESTERN
SCIENCE
From the WRITINGS of ARISTOTLE
to the BIG BANG THEORY
SUSAN WISE BAUER
The Books
The Aphorisms of Hippocrates (ca. 420 BC)
Plato, Timaeus (ca. 360 BC)
Aristotle, Physics (ca. 330 BC)
Aristotle, History of Animals (ca. 330 BC)
Archimedes, “The Sand-Reckoner” (ca. 250 BC)
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (ca. 60 BC)
Ptolemy, Almagest (ca. AD 150)
Nicolaus Copernicus, Commentariolus (1514)
Francis Bacon, Novum organum (1620)
William Harvey, De motu cordis (1628)
Galileo Galilei, Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)
Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (1661)
Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665)
Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687/1713/1726)
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural History: General and Particular (1749–88)
James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1785)
Georges Cuvier, “Preliminary Discourse” (1812)
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830)
Arthur Holmes, The Age of the Earth (1913)
Alfred Wegener, The Origin of Continents and Oceans (1915)
Walter Alvarez, T. rex and the Crater of Doom (1997)
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy (1809)
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)
Gregor Mendel, Experiments in Plant Hybridisation (1865)
Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
James D. Watson, The Double Helix (1968)
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)
E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (1978)
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981)
Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916)
Max Planck, “The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory” (1922)
Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (1944)
[Edwin Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae (1937)]
Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (1950)
Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977)
James Gleick, Chaos (1987)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Or, How to use this book
PART I: THE BEGINNINGS
ONE The First Science Texts
The first written attempt to explain the physical world in physical terms
TWO Beyond Man
The first big-picture accounts of the universe
THREE Change
The first theory of evolution
FOUR Grains of Sand
The first use of mathematics to measure the universe
FIVE The Void
The first treatise on nature to dispense entirely with the divine
SIX The Earth-Centered Universe
The most influential science book in history
SEVEN The Last Ancient Astronomer
An alternate explanation for the universe, with better mathematics, but no more proof
PART II: THE BIRTH OF THE METHOD
EIGHT A New Proposal
A challenge to Aristotle, and the earliest articulation of the scientific method
NINE Demonstration
The refutation of one of the greatest ancient authorities through observation and experimentation
TEN The Death of Aristotle
The overthrow of ancient authority in favor of observations and proofs
ELEVEN Instruments and Helps
Improving the experimental method by distorting nature and extending the senses
TWELVE Rules of Reasoning
Extending the experimental method across the entire universe
PART III: READING THE EARTH
THIRTEEN The Genesis of Geology
The creation of the science of the earth
FOURTEEN The Laws of the New Science
Two different theories are proposed as explanations for the earth’s present form
FIFTEEN A Long and Steady History
Uniformitarianism becomes the norm
SIXTEEN The Unanswered Question
Calculating the age of the earth
SEVENTEEN The Return of the Grand Theory
Continental drift
EIGHTEEN Catastrophe, Redux
Bringing extraordinary events back into earth’s history
PART IV: READING LIFE
(With Special Reference to Us)
NINETEEN Biology
The first systematic attempt to describe the history of life
TWENTY Natural Selection
The first naturalistic explanation for the origin of species
TWENTY-ONE Inheritance
The laws, and mechanisms, of heredity revealed
TWENTY-TWO Synthesis
Bringing cell-level discoveries and the grand story of evolution together
TWENTY-THREE The Secret of Life
Biochemistry tackles the mystery of inheritance
TWENTY-FOUR Biology and Destiny
The rise of neo-Darwinist reductionism, and the resistance to it
PART V: READING THE COSMOS
(Reality)
TWENTY-FIVE Relativity
The limits of Newtonian physics
TWENTY-SIX Damn Quantum Jumps
The discovery of subatomic random swerves
TWENTY-SEVEN The Triumph of the Big Bang
Returning to the question of beginnings, and contemplating the end
TWENTY-EIGHT The Butterfly Effect
Complex systems, and the (present) limits of our understanding
Notes
Works Cited
Index
List of Illustrations
4.1 The Pythagorean Theorem: a2 + b2 = c2
6.1 The Scheme of Hipparchus
6.2 The Scheme of Ptolemy
7.1 The Copernican Universe
8.1 The Novum organum
10.1 Galileo’s Experiment
10.2 Galileo and Jupiter
17.1 Pangea and Continental Drift
17.2 Convection
25.1 Einstein’s Railway
26.1 Rutherford’s Atom
26.2 Einstein’s Tube
26.3 Einstein’s Waves
Preface
Or, How to use this book
There is no human knowledge which cannot lose its
scientific characterwhen men forget the conditions under
which it originated,the questions which it answered, and the
functions it was created to serve.
—Benjamin Farrington,
Greek Science: Its Meaning for Us
This is not a history of science.
Histories of science have been written, in great numbers (and at great length), by many other writers. They abound: studies of Greek science, Renaissance science, Enlightenment science, Victorian science, modern science, science and society, science and philosophy, science and religion, science and “the people.”
Of course these histories have value. But somehow, the nature of science itself seems to get lost in the details. Most “people,” regular citizens who have no professional training in the sciences, still have no clear view of what science does—or what it means.
Most of us are fed science in news reports, interactive graphs, and sound bites. These may give us a fuzzy and incomplete glimpse of the facts involved, but
the ongoing science battles of the twenty-first century show that the facts aren’t enough. Decisions that affect stem cell research, global warming, the teaching of evolution in elementary schools—these are being made by voters (or, independently, by their theoretical representatives) who don’t actually understand why biologists think stem cells are important, or how environmental scientists came to the conclusion that the earth is warming, or what the Big Bang actually is (neither big nor a bang; see Chapter 27).
So this is a slightly different kind of history. It traces the development of great science writing—the essays and books that have most directly affected and changed the course of scientific investigation. It is intended for the interested and intelligent nonspecialist. It shows science to be a very human pursuit: not an infallible guide to truth, but a deeply personal, sometimes flawed, often misleading, frequently brilliant way of understanding the world.
Each part presents a chronological series of “great books” of science, from the most ancient works of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Plato, all the way up to the modern works of Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, James Gleick, and Walter Alvarez. The chapters provide all of the historical, biographical, and technical information you need to understand the books themselves, and conclude with recommended editions. Older works, which don’t necessarily need to be read in their entirety, are also excerpted on this book’s website; links are provided in the text. (The website also lists available e-book versions, many of which can be difficult to find for pre-twentieth-century volumes.)
This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive list of important books in science, and readers may quibble with my selections. Many worthy books in science are not on my lists (search for any “great books of science” list and you’ll find hundreds). I chose these books not merely to highlight particular discoveries in science as such, but to illuminate the way we think about science. It is an interpretive list, not an exhaustive one.
Part I, “The Beginnings,” covers the origins of science itself. Part II, “The Birth of the Method,” explains how and why the scientific method that we now take for granted arose. The rest of the book is an introduction to major works in three different areas: the science of the earth, the science of life, and the science of the cosmos. The order is deliberate. Geology steered us toward the time frame that modern biology demands, and that time frame then led us to a new contemplation of the entire cosmos.
In Parts III–V, alert readers will notice a shift: sometime after the 1940s, the “classics” listed are most often the books that made new theories or discoveries visible to the world, not the journal articles or conference papers that first introduced them to other scientists. So, to understand catastrophism, you will read Walter Alvarez’s 1997 book T. rex and the Crater of Doom rather than the 1980 article “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction” written by Alvarez and three coauthors; to understand the Big Bang, Steven Weinberg’s best-selling The First Three Minutes rather than any of the (multiple) scientific papers about cosmic background radiation that preceded it.
After World War II, the practice of science became increasingly specialized.* Scientists gained academic recognition, the interest of their colleagues, and (occasionally) financial reward through the careful investigation of individual puzzle pieces, not through attempts to sketch entire scientific landscapes. Scientific theories were formed, evaluated, and supported or rejected by a scientific community that talked, more and more, to itself—and often in a language incomprehensible to outsiders. The Double Helix and The Selfish Gene are “great books” of biology in quite a different sense than is William Harvey’s De motu cordis; Harvey could lay out his discoveries to his colleagues and the general public simultaneously, but neither James Watson nor Richard Dawkins could count on anyone outside an academic department to read his original paper. (“Parasites, Desiderata Lists and the Paradox of the Organism” reached a relatively small audience.) Instead, they had to popularize: synthesize, simplify, and explain.
Yet The Double Helix, The Selfish Gene, and De motu cordis all performed the same task: they opened up, for all of us, a new way of thinking about the natural world.
•
You do not actually have to read every text I discuss. Pick the great books you want to start with. If you’re most interested in biology, or cosmology, you don’t have to read all of my recommended texts from Parts I and II before you jump into the recommended texts in Part IV or Part V.
But at the very least, read my chapters about the books and the ideas behind them. Scientists who grapple with biological origins are still affected by Platonic idealism today; Charles Lyell’s nineteenth-century geological theories still influence our understanding of human evolution; quantum theory is still wrestling with Francis Bacon’s methods.
To interpret science, we have to know something about its past. We have to continually ask not just “What have we discovered?” but also “Why did we look for it?” In no other way can we begin to grasp why we prize, or disregard, scientific knowledge in the way we do; or be able to distinguish between the promises that science can fulfill and those we should receive with some careful skepticism.
Only then will we begin to understand science.
•
A note on vocabulary: Throughout, I tend to use the terms “theory” and “hypothesis” interchangeably. A twenty-first century scientist might point out that a theory is more comprehensive than a hypothesis, or longer-lived, or has stronger mathematical underpinnings. But both words refer to a theoretical structure that makes sense of evidence. Since it isn’t always clear when a hypothesis becomes a theory, and since scientists in different centuries and different fields tend to use the words in different contexts, I have declined to struggle over the distinction.
* * *
* This specialization had multiple causes; massive investment by Western industrialists in research projects that might yield commercial gains and the growing role of the university in nurturing (and paying) scientists are probably central, but other factors played a part as well. The phenomenon is beyond the scope of this book, but interested readers might want to consult John J. Beer and W. David Lewis, “Aspects of the Professionalization of Science,” Daedalus 92, no. 4 (Fall 1963): 764–84; or Chapter 8 of I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Harvard University Press, 1985).
PART
I
THE
BEGINNINGS
The Aphorisms of Hippocrates (ca. 420 BC)
Plato, Timaeus (ca. 360 BC)
Aristotle, Physics (ca. 330 BC)
Aristotle, History of Animals (ca. 330 BC)
Archimedes, “The Sand-Reckoner” (ca. 250 BC)
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (ca. 60 BC)
Ptolemy, Almagest (ca. AD 150)
Nicolaus Copernicus, Commentariolus (1514)
ONE
The First Science Texts
The first written attempt to explain the physical world in physical terms
Life is short, and Art long, the crisis fleeting; experience
perilous, and decision difficult.
—The Aphorisms of Hippocrates, ca. 420 BC
Hippocrates, the Greek doctor, lived in a world of solids and gods.
The solids surrounded him. The grey-green leaves of the olive trees, the earth beneath his feet, the brains and bladders of his patients, even the wine that he drank (in moderation); all of these were absolute, uncompounded, simple. How they came to be in their present forms, how those forms might change in the future—these questions occupied Greek scholars for long hours. But what composed them, what intricacies might lie beneath their surfaces and explain them; asking this was like interrogating a rock.
Twenty-three centuries later, Albert Einstein and the physicist Leopold Infeld jointly offered an analogy for the Greek plight. The ancient investigator of the natural world was like
a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the m
oving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he . . . will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.1
Instead of mechanisms, the Greeks had gods.
The gods lived among the solids of the natural world, wandered through the olive groves, resided in their sanctuaries and shrines. They were always watching, judging, and warning men. “The gods . . . notice all my doings,” explains a character in Xenophon’s Symposium, “and because they know how every one of these things will turn out, they give me signs, sending as messengers sayings and dreams and omens about what I ought to do.” The divine suffused and guided the natural order. “All things are full of gods,” the mathematician Thales remarked, 150 years before Hippocrates: all things and all places.2
The Greeks studied, and philosophized about, both the presence of the gods and the properties of solid nature. They were curious, not blindly accepting. But their world was not divided into the theological and the material, as ours is. The divine and the natural mingled freely.
In this they were like their contemporaries. The Egyptians, who had honed astronomical observations to an exactness, had already constructed a calendar that accounted for the flooding of the Nile. They could predict when the star Sirius would begin to appear in the predawn sky just before the sun (“heliacal rising”), and they knew that Sirius’s rising meant the inundation was on its way. Yet the certainty of their calculations didn’t destroy their conviction that the Nile rose at Osiris’s pleasure.3
East of Athens, Persian astronomers were tracking lunar and solar eclipses, hard on the trail of a new discovery: the saros cycle, a period of 6,585.32 days during which a regular pattern of eclipses plays itself out and then begins again. Their equations made it possible to forecast the next lunar eclipse with mathematical precision, which meant that the temple priests had enough time to prepare rituals against the evil forces that a lunar eclipse might release. (According to Persian documents from about 550 BC, precautions involved beating a copper kettledrum at the city gates and yelling, “Eclipse!”)4
The Story of Western Science Page 1