Everything's Relative , livre ebook

EVERYTHING S RELATIVE
Also by Tony Rothman

Nonfiction
Doubt and Certainty (with George Sudarshan)
Instant Physics
A Physicist on Madison Avenue
Science la Mode
Frontiers of Modern Physics

Fiction
Censored Tales
The World Is Round
EVERYTHING S RELATIVE
AND OTHER FABLES FROM SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
T ONY R OTHMAN

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
Copyright 2003 by Tony Rothman. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
Permission to quote George Antheil s description of his meeting with Hedy Lamarr as written in his 1945 autobiography Bad Boy of Music on pages 179-180 is granted by the Estate of George Antheil.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Rothman, Tony.
Everything s relative : and other fables from science and technology /
Tony Rothman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-20257-6
1. Science-History-Miscellanea. 2. Technology-History-
Miscellanea. I. Title.
Q125.R763 2003
509-dc21
2003013944
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The common belief that we gain historical perspective with increasing distance seems to me utterly to misrepresent the actual situation. What we gain is merely confidence in generalization which we would never dare to make if we had access to the real wealth of contemporary evidence.
-O. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity
CONTENTS
Preface
Lapses, Sources, and Acknowledgments
I. THE DOMAIN OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY
1. The Mafia Invents the Barometer
2. The Riddle of the Sphinx: Thomas Young s Experiment
3. Joseph Henry and the (Near) Discovery of (Nearly) Everything
4. Neptune: The Greatest Triumph in the History of Astronomy, or the Greatest Fluke?
5. Invisible Light: The Discovery of Radioactivity
6. Light, Ether, Corpuscles, and Charge: The Electron
7. Einstein s Miraculous Year (and a Few Others)
8. What Did the Eclipse Expedition Really Show? And Other Tales of General Relativity
9. Two Quantum Tales: Bohr and Hydrogen, Dirac and the Positron
10. A Third Quantum Tale: Southpaw Electrons and Discounted Luncheons
II. THE DOMAIN OF TECHNOLOGY
11. What Hath God Wrought? Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Samuel Morse, and the Telegraph
12. Fiat Lux: Edison, the Incandescent Bulb, and a Few Other Matters
13. Magna Est Veritas et Praevalet : The Telephone 137
14. A Babble of Incoherence: The Wireless Telegraph, a.k.a. Radio
15. Mind-Destroying Rays: Television
16. Plausibility: The Invention of Secret Electronic Communication
III. THE DOMAIN OF CHEMISTRY AND BIOLOGY
17. The Evolution of Evolution: Erasmus, Charles, Gregor, and Ronald
18. Dreams with Open Eyes: Kekule, Benzene, and Loschmidt
19. Chance, Good and Bad: Penicillin
IV. THE DOMAIN OF MATHEMATICS: CLOSED FOR RENOVATION
References and Notes
Index
PREFACE

Napol on once said, History is a fable agreed upon. Perhaps it was fraud. According to authorities, he made the remark after Waterloo when Wellington asked him how it felt to suffer history s most monumental defeat. Napol on replied, History is a fraud agreed upon, and was exiled.
This book is an amateur s stroll through the history of science. It is not a serious book. Professional historians will sniff that what I write is well known and that I have left out the really important, the agonizing minutiae. Professional scientists will shrug: Who cares? None of this makes any difference to the course of progress anyway. Both are probably right. I thank the historians for their diligence, which I have plundered mercilessly. To the scientists I say, well, I am a professional, and if we cannot profit by the mistakes of our forebears, at least we can be entertained by them.
No, this book does not intend to edify professionals of either a scientific or historical persuasion. My position is closer to that of the cavalier who pursued the famous courtesan Madame Recamier. When she rebuffed his advances with the pretense Monsieur, my heart belongs to another, he answered without a blush, Madame, I never aimed so high as that.
My aim is at the rest of us, the masses weaned on high school and college texts, television and magazines. My weapon of choice is the anecdote, more precisely the antianecdote. Although serious work goes on in the history of science, by the time it filters down to the level of high school or college texts, NASA Web sites, Time magazine, or even the average popular science book, it has become a collection of just-so stories. You know what I mean: Edison invented the lightbulb, Morse invented the telegraph, Fleming discovered penicillin, George Washington never told a lie. When it comes to scientists, well scientists occasionally work, but the really significant advances are made by solitary geniuses in blinding flashes of insight, usually when stepping onto a streetcar or dozing off before a fire.
So I am going to tell some stories, antistories. I hope one or two will surprise you. The reason I am going to tell stories is because the rage, current now for some years, has been for narrative. The trouble with narrative is that one gets carried away with the, um, narration. The fact is, most popular science books take two or three hundred pages to tell a story that might be reasonably condensed into about five pages, and that is because they are more concerned with biography, glamour, plot narrative.
The facts. Yes, because I m a writer I like to tell stories, but because I am a scientist I have a penchant for facts. So I ll tell a few stories, but I hope they will be reasonably well researched stories, antianecdotes. I ll keep them short, maybe a dozen pages per dose, so that if I m lucky, there will be at least one page of content. Strangely, if you read from beginning to end, you will find that this hunchbacked history does seem to contain a narrative thread, if one told by the losers as often as the winners.
I have few illusions that this little book can make a dent in just-so history. Just-so history just holds too many advantages for all parties gathered around the campfire. It is, after all, perfect for textbook writers and journalists who, hamstrung by space limitations, need microwavable history to pass on to their readers. Readers and listeners are rewarded as well. Let s face it, we aren t a people interested in process. Results, that s what we need. In any case, these days we are overloaded. We lack sufficient ROM to deal simultaneously with nonfunctioning Web sites, customer nonservice, and ringing cell phones and to be forced to remember more than one hero, more than one discoverer, more than one version, a hint of subplot. How much more efficient to assign an invention to Bell, a discovery to Fleming, a dream to Kekul , rather than to find out what really happened-or what really didn t happen.
Just-so history is perhaps most convenient for scientists themselves. Not only is it easy to remember, but it is simultaneously a history of logical completeness, for lack of a better term. From the blinding flashes (the only sort produced when dozing off before a fire on a streetcar) spring forth logically complete and completely understood concepts.
Just so.
You see, scientists make lousy historians. And for many years they were the only people who wrote the history of science. Whereas science is sometimes logical, history is not. Scientists, equipped with superior analytical faculties, are unsurpassed at reconstructing history into a seamless narrative to arrive at the present state of affairs. Anyway, why spoil a good story? After twenty or thirty years in the field, after hundreds of tellings, retellings, overtellings, and undertellings, after your logic and your perfect hindsight have laundered history until it is neat, pressed, and starched, are you going to ruin everything? Of course not. You know it must have happened like that.
If it strikes you as odd that the profession most vociferously devoted to Truth should remain unstimulated to apprehend the truth of its own past, you are not alone. I often wonder the same thing before dozing off on a bicycle in front of a streetcar. Actu