The Story of Western Science

by Susan Wise Bauer

  His response to On Human Nature, titled The Mismeasure of Man, was (like Wilson’s own book) aimed at a general readership. It was a focused and powerful refutation of one specific instance of biological determinism: the “abstraction of intelligence” as a biochemically determined quality, its “quantification” as a number (thanks to the increasing popularity of IQ tests), and “the use of these numbers to rank people” in a biologically determined “series of worthiness.”

  The argument was intended to play a much larger role than simply debunking IQ tests: Gould intended it to refute the biological determinism and disciplinary reductionism so prominent in Wilson’s works. “The Mismeasure of Man is not fundamentally about the general moral turpitude of fallacious biological arguments in social settings,” he wrote, in his introduction. “It is not even about the full range of phony arguments for the genetic basis of human inequalities” (a clear shot at Sociobiology). Rather,

  The Mismeasure of Man treats one particular form of quantified claim about the ranking of human groups: the argument that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number capable of ranking all people on a linear scale of intrinsic and unalterable mental worth. Fortunately—and I made my decision on purpose—this limited subject embodies the deepest (and most common) philosophical error, with the most fundamental and far-ranging social impact, for the entire troubling subject of nature and nurture. . . . If I have learned one thing as a monthly essayist for over twenty years, I have come to understand the power of treating generalities by particulars.18

  Like Wilson, Gould was assailed by some (“More factual errors per page than any book I have ever read,” snapped the prominent psychologist Hans Eysenck, himself a believer in the genetic basis of intelligence) and praised by others (the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982). The battle lines—both of them—were drawn.19

  And they remain, more or less, in the same place. In the twenty-first century, we still hear much about the struggle between evolutionary scientists and creationists (at least in the United States). But the struggle between biological determinists and evolutionary biologists who rejected determinism is far more wide-ranging and complicated. In 1997, Gould complained bitterly about what he called “Darwinian fundamentalism,” the use of natural selection to explain all of life. To see human beings as merely genes “struggling for reproductive success” is, for Gould, “a hyper-Darwinian idea that I regard as a logically flawed and basically foolish caricature of Darwin’s genuinely radical intent.”20

  Gould and his followers believed that other factors were at work—not divine intervention, but multiple, overlapping factors too complex to be reduced to simple survival of the gene. The evolution of human intelligence was certainly one of these factors, but there were still more to be found. “We live in a world of enormous complexity in organic design and diversity,” Gould concluded, shortly before his death from cancer in 2002,

  a world where some features of organisms evolved by an algorithmic form of natural selections, some by an equally algorithmic theory of unselected neutrality, some by the vagaries of history’s contingency, and some as by-products of other processes. Why should such a complex and various world yield to one narrowly construed cause? Let us have a cast . . . some more important and general, others for particular things—but all subject to scientific understanding, and all working together in a comprehensible way.21

  RICHARD DAWKINS

  The Selfish Gene

  (1976)

  The first edition can be easily located secondhand, but the thirtieth-anniversary (third) edition, published in 2006, contains an updated bibliography and a new introduction, as well as the prefaces from the first and second editions.

  Read the whole book, but note especially Chapter Nine, where Dawkins discusses the ways in which cultural as well as biochemical information is transmitted from generation to generation. Looking for a name for a “unit of cultural transmission” (he offers, as examples, “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches”), Dawkins abbreviates the Greek word mimeme to meme, thus contributing a brand-new (and now common) word to the English language.

  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press (hardcover and paperback, 1976, ISBN 978-0198575191).

  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary edition, Oxford University Press (paperback and e-book, 2006, ISBN 978-0199291151).

  E. O. WILSON

  On Human Nature

  (1978)

  Hardcover copies of the first edition are widely available. The 2004 revision contains a useful preface by Wilson, reflecting on the public reception of the original book.

  Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Harvard University Press (hardcover, 1978, ISBN 978-0674634411).

  Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, revised edition (with a new preface), Harvard University Press (paperback and e-book, 2004, ISBN 978-0674016385).

  STEPHEN JAY GOULD

  The Mismeasure of Man

  (1981)

  Paperback copies of the 1981 edition can be located secondhand; W. W. Norton published a revised and expanded edition of the title, including Gould’s updated defense of his argument and his interaction with biological determinism in the years since original publication.

  Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, W. W. Norton (paperback, 1981, ISBN 978-0393300567).

  Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, revised and expanded edition, W. W. Norton (paperback and e-book, 1996, ISBN 978-0393314250).

  PART V

  V

  READING

  THE COSMOS

  (Reality)

  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)

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Relativity

  The limits of Newtonian physics

  We require to extend our ideas of the space-time continuum

  still farther.

  —Albert Einstein, Relativity:

  The Special and General Theory, 1916

  For nearly two centuries, the universe was Newtonian.

  His principles governed all investigations of the cosmos: all that there is, the solar system and the galaxy, the galaxies beyond and the stars, the earth and what is within and on it. The Newtonian cosmos was ruled by universal laws that always worked the same, in every place. (“If a property can be demonstrated to belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made,” the third Rule for the Study of Natural Philosophy had declared, “it can be assumed to belong to all bodies in the universe.”) Gravity functioned in the same way in every corner of the universe. Time passed, everywhere, at the same rate. Motion was absolute; it could, at least in theory, be measured according to some fixed, unchanging point in fixed, unchanging space (“absolute space”). The universe was static and infinite; it was neither expanding nor contracting (both would change the ways in which universal laws function), and it went on forever.

  Even from the beginning, an occasional voice objected.

  In 1721, just before the third edition of the Principia was published, the mathematician and philosopher George Berkeley questioned the existence of Newton’s “absolute” space and time. Since man can measure space and time using only his own senses, Berkeley argued, all motion has to be relative—it must be measured in relation to our own position, our own understanding. To propose the existence of absolute motion and space was to theorize beyond what science was capable of measuring; it was to edge over into the province of philosophy. “The philosopher of nature,” he wrote, pointedly, in his essay De motu, “should remain ent
irely with his experiments, his laws of motion, his mechanical principles, and the conclusions derived therefore; if he has something to say on other matters, he should relate what is accepted in the respective higher science.”

  Newton, in other words, should stick to formulas, and leave questions of absolute existence to the “higher science” of philosophy. “Consider motion as something sensible . . . and . . . be content with relative measures,” Berkeley advised.1

  But in practice, Newtonian physics triumphed—because it worked so extremely well.

  In fact, it worked even better than Newton himself expected. His laws of gravity and motion made it possible to predict the movements of heavenly bodies with astonishing accuracy. But the gravitational forces of the solar system were so complicated, each body acting on another, constantly changing with motion, that it couldn’t possibly run on its own indefinitely; Newton seems to have assumed that God would occasionally need to “reset” its delicate equilibrium. Certainly he believed that such a labyrinthine system demanded, at the very least, a divine send-off. “Though gravity might give the planets a motion of descent towards the sun,” he wrote, in the early 1690s, “yet the transverse motions by which they revolve in their several orbits required the divine arm to impress them.” And in another letter, “So then gravity may put the planets into motion, but without the divine power it could never put them into such a circulating motion as they have about the sun.”2

  A century after the Principia first appeared, the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace began a twenty-five-year, five-volume set of calculations intended to demonstrate that Newtonian physics not only explained every motion in the solar system, but accounted for its eternal stability.

  He succeeded. Much later, the story began to circulate that the Emperor Napoleon (whom Laplace had, very briefly, served as minister of the interior) had criticized the five volumes of the Treatise on Celestial Mechanics for never mentioning God. “Sir,” Laplace is said to have answered, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”3

  Whether or not the conversation ever took place, Laplace’s answer rings true. It was not a declaration of atheism, merely a statement of fact. The solar system had no need of a divine finger to tap it back into place.

  In fact, Laplace also argued, in his less mathematical and more popular System of the World, that the divine finger was unnecessary at the very beginning as well. Newton’s laws of gravitation suggested that the sun and planets could have coalesced from a rotating cloud of gas particles, each attracting the other until they clumped together into the bodies we now see. The philosopher Immanuel Kant had recently made a similar suggestion. It was very much a grand theory, immune to proof, but it fell in line with Laplace’s commitment to Newtonian laws: They could explain the universe in toto. No other principle, no other explanation, was necessary.4

  At least, until you got far away from the solar system, and into the deeper and more mysterious reaches of the universe.

  •

  Despite the third Rule, Newton never truly extended his beautifully calibrated mechanics to the farther corners of the cosmos. “The universe,” for him, was the known universe: the stars, planets, and other objects that could be seen, tracked, plotted. He assumed that this universe was infinite, because in a finite universe, all stuff would eventually be pulled by gravity toward the center: in his own words, “the matter on the outside of this space would by its gravity tend towards all the matter on the inside, and by consequence fall down into the middle of the whole space, and there compose one great spherical mass.” In an infinite universe, each particle would instead be pulled equally in all directions, producing equilibrium, stasis.5

  Universal gravitation suggested that the individual masses (stars, planets, star clusters) should be more or less evenly distributed across this infinite space. But better and better telescopes revealed clumps, sparse spots, clusters.

  Nor were these masses static. Fifty years after Laplace, the British astronomer William Huggins concluded that stars were moving, in relationship to the earth. The Austrian physicist Christian Doppler had recently shown that sound waves change in frequency when either the object emitting them or the hearer receiving them is moving; shortly afterward, the French researcher Armand Fizeau had extended this “Doppler effect” to the wavelengths of light. Huggins measured the changes in starlight (the “shift in . . . spectral lines”) and used them to show that the star Sirius (among others) was receding from us, while others were approaching: “Speaking generally,” he wrote, “the stars which the spectroscope shows to be moving from the earth . . . are situated in a part of the heavens opposite to Hercules . . . while the stars in the neighborhood of this region . . . show a motion of approach.”6

  In the Newtonian system, this movement was hard to account for.

  At the same time that Huggins was discovering unexpected measurements, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was mounting a challenge to the foundation of all measurements: Euclidean geometry, which assumes that any stuff in the universe can be located within three dimensions (the x, y, and z coordinates: length, width, depth).* Intuitively, human beings resonate with Euclidean geometry, since we live in three dimensions. But Gauss had come to think that the infinite universe could not be expected to adhere only to methods easily understood by three-dimensional thinkers: “Finite man cannot claim to be able to regard the infinite as something to be grasped by means of ordinary methods of observation,” he wrote to his colleague Heinrich Schumacher.7

  Gauss played around with two-dimensional geometry and geometry done on a curve. (The curvature of a sphere, it turned out, could be calculated from a single point on the curve’s surface, which meant that it wasn’t necessary for three-dimensional space to surround the point in order for it to curve—which was certainly anti-Euclidean.) But Gauss could not come up with a full alternative to Euclidean geometry that he could publish and stand behind: “Perhaps only in another life will we attain another insight into the nature of space, which is unattainable to us now,” he wrote to a friend.8

  Instead, Gauss challenged one of his students, the fragile and conscientious Bernhard Riemann, to pick up the challenge. Riemann became so immersed in the challenge that he suffered a nervous breakdown, but in 1854 he pulled himself together long enough to present his ideas to the faculty of the University of Göttingen.

  There was, Riemann proposed, a fourth dimension. This dimension, which can be expressed algebraically, is impossible to visualize; it has to be explained through metaphor, as the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku does brilliantly:

  Riemann imagined a race of two-dimensional creatures living on a sheet of paper. But the decisive break that he made was to put these bookworms on a crumpled sheet of paper. What would these bookworms think about their world? Riemann realized that they would conclude that their world was still perfectly flat. Because their bodies would also be crumpled, these bookworms would never notice that their world was distorted. However, Riemann argued that if these bookworms tried to move across the crumpled sheet of paper, they would feel a mysterious, unseen “force” that prevented them from moving in a straight line. They would be pushed left and right every time their bodies moved over a wrinkle on the sheet.9

  Riemann then replaced the two-dimensional sheet with our three-dimensional world, crumpled in the fourth dimension. It would not be obvious to us that our universe was warped. However, we would immediately realize that something was amiss when we tried to walk in a straight line. We would walk like drunkards, as though an unseen force were tugging at us, pushing us left and right.

  The existence of the fourth dimension suggested that neither Euclidean geometry nor Newtonian physics described the universe as it actually was. The fourth dimension implied that gravity and magnetism, and electricity were not mysterious invisible “forces” that exerted power on objects. Instead they were geometric effects, caused by the warping of the fourth dimension.

  This was a startling new way
to look at the world: instantly appealing to a mathematician, because the calculations necessary to predict how these “forces” would work were potentially much simpler and more elegant than the calculations that Newtonian physics required. Working the calculations out was a massive task, however, and Riemann died of tuberculosis in 1866, aged thirty-nine, still struggling with the numbers.

  Seven years later, the English mathematician William Clifford translated Riemann’s space-shattering presentation to the Göttingen faculty; it was published for the first time in English in the journal Nature. Clifford suggested that the motion itself could also be explained simply by the distortion of the fourth dimension. “This variation of the curvature of space,” he wrote, “is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter.”10

  The mathematical exploration of this idea ran well ahead of the ability of physicists and astronomers to apply it to the real world, or to use it as an explanation of actual phenomena. But by 1900, more and more physicists were concluding that Newton’s universe was on the skids; all that remained was to figure out the laws that governed the newly non-Euclidean universe.

  •

  In 1900, Albert Einstein had just received his first academic degree (from the Polytechnical Institute of Zurich) and, like most brand-new graduates, was finding the job market a tough one.

  He had hoped to find a position doing advanced research, somewhere in the academic world. But no position appeared, and when a friend offered to help him get an interview at the Swiss patent office in Bern, he accepted. By 1902 he had become a Technical Expert Third Class—a patent examiner, in training.11

  Einstein was well suited for the job, both by temperament (it was a quiet, solitary position that gave him plenty of time to think) and by training (his task was to evaluate patents involving electromagnetism, something he was particularly interested in). By 1905 he was in the running for a promotion to Technical Expert Second Class and had drafted five different papers on various problems in electricity, magnetism, and related issues of space, time, and motion. One dealt with the movement of particles in liquid, others with the motions of atoms, the makeup of light. One of the papers proposed a formula for the conversion of energy into mass: