Science Firsts , livre ebook

Science Firsts
F ROM THE C REATION OF S CIENCE TO THE S CIENCE OF C REATION
Robert Adler
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2002 by Robert Adler. All rights reserved
The author gratefully acknowledges the following sources for permission to use photographs in this book: Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, University of Pennsylvania Library (pp. 39, 47, 54, 57, 63, 70, 76, 88, 98, 103, 110, 116, 123, 127, 137); The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (p. 142); Dart Collection, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (p. 151); Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (p. 159); Lucent Technologies, Inc./Bell Labs (pp. 170, 183); Jeremy Norman and the Archive for the History of Molecular Biology (p. 174); Paul Schnaittacher, courtesy of Lynn Margulis (p. 189); University of Geneva, Press Information Publications (p. 195); The Roslin Institute (pp. 202, 204); Roddy Field, courtesy of The Roslin Institute (p. 205).
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ISBN 0-471-40174-9
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To Jo
Your sparkling eyes, mischievous spirit, and mysterious soul make every day with you a discovery.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
   1   Thales and Natural Causation
   2   Anaximander Orders the Cosmos
   3   Pythagoras Numbers the Cosmos
   4   Atoms and the Void
   5   Aristotle and the Birth of Biology
   6   Aristarchus, the Forgotten Copernicus
   7   Archimedes’s Physics
   8   Ibn al-Haitham Illuminates Vision
   9   Copernicus Moves the Earth
10   Galileo Discovers the Skies
11   Kepler Solves the Planetary Puzzle
12   Van Leeuwenhoek Explores the Microcosm
13   Newton: Gravity and Light
14   A Breath of Fresh Air
15   Humphry Davy, Intoxicated with Discovery
16   Visionaries of the Computer
17   Darwin’s Great Truth
18   A Genius in the Garden
19   Mendeleev Charts the Elements
20   In the Realm of Radioactivity
21   Planck’s Quantum Leap
22   Wired on Wireless
23   Rutherford Dissects the Atom
24   Einstein: Matter, Energy, Space, and Time
25   Wegener Sets the Continents Adrift
26   Hubble’s Expanding Universe
27   Out of Africa
28   Fermi and the Fire of the Gods
29   McClintock’s Chromosomes
30   A Bit of Genius
31   The Dynamic Duo of DNA
32   Echoes of Creation
33   We Are Not What We Seem
34   Planetary Pioneers
35   After Dolly, Life Will Never Be the Same
References and Further Reading
Index
Acknowledgments
I n a beautiful poem, e. e. cummings wrote, “My father moved through . . . haves of give.” I think of that poem frequently. My father, Hy Adler, was an immensely loving, generous, and giving man. He helped me in countless ways throughout my life and at every stage of this book. I had the opportunity to thank him many times in person before his death at the age of 89, but I want to express my undying gratitude to him publicly as well. His vitality, charm, and creativity warmed and illuminated every moment with him. He will always be loved and missed.
I also want to thank Dr. Robert Utter, whose exuberant appreciation of knowledge and ideas, and whose willingness to search through and share his superb collection of books and articles on the history of science contributed greatly to Science Firsts.
Another person who helped greatly with my research is Jack Ritchie, Circulation Supervisor at the Sonoma State University library. I hope he will accept my thanks for making every visit to the library a pleasure. I am also grateful to John Pollack of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, who greatly facilitated my search for illustrations.
Thanks go also to my brother, Les Adler, my great friend, Lou Miller, and to the other members of the institute, for being unfailing sources of encouragement, ideas, and fun.
The person who has done the most to help bring this book into the world is my wife, Jo Ann Wexler. She has patiently given me enormous amounts of time and every kind of support. She has single-handedly kept our lives running smoothly, despite my long preoccupation with this project. It will take more than thanks to show my appreciation for all that she has done.
And of course, I want to thank my editor, Jeff Golick, for shepherding Science Firsts through from concept to completion.
Introduction
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious. It is the source of all true art and true science.
—Albert Einstein
A sense of mystery. Einstein had it, and so did Aristotle and Aristarchus, Curie and Dart, Margulis and McClintock. They never lost their childlike wonder about the universe, or, as Noam Chomsky described it, “the ability to be puzzled by simple things .” Throughout history, a few people have combined that insistent tickle of curiosity with other qualities of mind and character that goad them into uncharted territories, stir them to ask probing questions, and attune them to new answers. Among those explorers, a very few are privileged to break new ground, discover new worlds, or glimpse shining new vistas no one has seen before.
The greatest of those—creators like Thales, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein—gave us radically new ways to understand the universe and our place in it. Like the great impact that ended the era of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, their discoveries punctuated history, brought epochs to an end, and cleared the way for new systems to emerge. This book tells the stories of some of those gifted, driven, and complex explorers and the new worlds they were the first to enter.
Science Firsts starts in Greece 2,600 years ago. The sweeping curiosity of Ionian philosophers such as Thales, Anaximander, and Leucippus led them to ask basic questions about nature. How did the world come about? What is it made of? How does it work? Equally important, they were the first to insist on answers from within nature itself, to demand explanations that did not depend on the whims of the gods. By the time of Archimedes four centuries later, the Greeks had built the foundations of science. But the ancient world soon crumbled. Along with its theaters and temples, Greek science lay buried and forgotten—at least in the West—for a thousand years. Luckily, it was preserved, and in a few cases improved upon, by scholars in the Islamic world. Rediscovered, it helped ignite the Renaissance. That brings us to figures like Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, the heroic forebears of modern science. We have to peer across a thousand-year gap, but we can trace today’s science straight back to Thales.
That’s not to say that science only developed in the West. The precursors to science—the keen observation of nature, classifying, counting, remembering, discovering regularities—date back at least to the Neolithic. The people who reached and colonized Australia 60,000 years ago, who left us vivid paintings of cave bears and shamans in France and Spain 30,000 years ago, also left us cryptic signs that they counted the months, tracked the phases of the moon and the changing seasons, and studied the skies. Ethnobotanists working today praise the sophisticated biological knowledge of indigenous groups, and exploit it to identify medicinal plants and substances. The very survival of our ancient ancestors suggests that they studied their environments just as avidly. Led by Joseph Needham, scholars have discovered that technology, mathematics, and science all have deep roots in China. Many significant inventions and innovations appeared in China centuries or even millennia before they made it to the West. India, too, can claim its own early and important contributions, especially in physics, mathematics, and medicine. And the Greeks benefited from centuries of work in astronomy, mathematics, and medicine by anonymous Egyptian and Babylonian scholars.
Science Firsts , however, will follow the stream of Western science. The story starts in the world of Homer and Hesiod, where the stormy skies and