SCIENCE: A HISTORY, 1543-2001
2 August 2011 , Articles
John Gribbin; Penguin Books, 2002
Reviewed by Dr. Nidhal Guessoum (Professor of Physics and Astronomy, American University of Sharjah)
The history of science is a fascinating subject for many reasons. First it deals with one of the most successful human endeavors, Science. Secondly, although it deals with a seemingly cold, factual, objective field of human knowledge, it is ripe with personal stories and developments, including rivalries and treachery. Thirdly, there are conflicting theories regarding the way science has evolved: by revolutionary quantum leaps (“paradigm shifts”) or by small-step continuous progress. And so scholars are not quite certain whether the appearance of a Copernicus or a Newton was merely a normal, expected development or a sudden break in the chronology of events…
As a perennial student of physics and astronomy, I have continued to captivated by such issues. At first, that is when I entered college and was enthralled by concepts in atomic physics, it was the mesmerizing developments of modern physics; then it was the long and rich history of astronomy (read, for sheer pleasure, Timothy Ferris’s “Coming of Age in the Milky Way”); and more recently it was the culturally loaded history of cosmology. So it was with great pleasure that I discovered and immediately ordered a copy of John Gribbin’s “Science: A History (1543—2001)” sometime last year and eagerly awaited the summer to devour its 600+ pages.
The book is doubly fulfilling: not only does it contain a set of important and far-from-trivial theses about the development of modern science, it moreover bursts with beautiful anecdotes and revealing tales (some of them critically reviewing and resetting the historical record) as well as sharp quotes and flashes of brilliant writing.
First, a few words about John Gribbin. In addition to being a “practicing” astrophysics researcher, who recently obtained the most precise measurement of the size of our galaxy, he is a prolific, award-winning author of popular science books (close to 50!), each of which is a beautiful addition to the library of humanity, along with six novels, a dozen short stories, and countless articles. He has also been the consultant of various TV and Radio (BBC) shows. (And John Gribbin is not yet 60 years old…) His latest book is “Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life” (2003).
The science history book covers “only” the period from 1543 to the present. It starts at a date that is doubly important: the publication of both Copernicus’s De RevolutionibusOrbium Coelestium, which removed Earth – and thus humans – from the center of the universe, and Vesalius’s De Humanis Corporis Fabrica, where medicine was freed from the errors of Galen and biology was started on its modern course. Indeed the book is a double-track chronology of developments of the two main fields of science: astronomy/physics and biology/medicine. Sometimes the two tracks intersect, as in the surprising revelation that the all-too-important principle of conservation of energy actually came from the study of heat intake and output by the human body and of how the circulation and color of blood reflect that…
The first major thesis of the book is that science has evolved by small incremental steps, not by “revolutions” or major “paradigm shifts” as the Kuhnean theory holds (see Thomas Kuhn’s seminal science history and philosophy work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”). This is a controversial thesis, mostly going against the current tide of views, and Gribbin does a very good job at defending his viewpoint. Another thesis or objective of the author is to show that not only are specific scientists unimportant in the overall discovery of how the universe works (from the microscopic and biological levels to the cosmic scales), so that the removal of any one of them would not have changed the history of science, but that humans altogether are unimportant in the overall scheme of things and mere trivial by-products of the most abundant elements in nature, namely hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen (helium does not react with other elements and so is essentially irrelevant). But the exposition of the ideas is so rich that even when I did not subscribe to the author’s philosophy, I could always understand it and accept it.
Among the joys one continuously feels when reading the book is the ode being sung to the scientists who went to pain to answer the scientific questions that perplexed them. Moreover, Gribbin makes sure that unsung heroes are given their dues at least equally as the famous giants. For instance, even though Gribbin pays the highest respect to Newton, considering him perhaps the only scientist who, with his Principia, gave a singular and almost miraculous birth to Physics, takes dozens of pages to show how the great genius literally wrote a false history of crucial discoveries and developments to try to relegate Robert Hooke to the level of a historical footnote. And it is rather telling that one would come across the following statement, particularly stunning to a Physics professor: “…in spite of the Newton bandwagon that has now been rolling for 300 years… it is impossible for the unbiased historian to say whether Newton or Hooke made the more significant contribution.”
I wish to highlight one other major aspect of the book, the fact that it corrects many erroneous historical assertions or attributions. A few quick examples will illustrate this:
- Copernicus never had any fear of the Church, and his delaying the publishing of his book until the year of his death was essentially for worldly reasons…
- William Gilbert, who made his fame in medicine but made more important contributions to Physics, deserves the title of “first scientist” (not Galileo).
- Galileo most likely never uttered the “famous” words ‘Eppur, si muove’ (‘and yet, it does move’) about Earth during his trial…
- The idea of periodically ordering the chemical elements according to similar properties must be credited to the English industrial chemist John Newlands and the French mineralogist Alexandre Beguyer de Chancourtois, who both arrived at it in the 1860’s, before the German chemist and physician Lothar Meyer, who slightly preceded the wrongly credited Dimitri Mendeleev…
I was also delighted to see a seemingly minor theme carried and subtly underscored throughout this epic story, namely the fact that with very few exceptions, scientists went about their discoveries simply to satisfy an intellectual hunger, seeking what the author calls in his epilogue “the pleasure of finding things out”, and rarely sought any fame or material reward, to the point that oftentimes they did not even bother to publish or announce their discoveries, which is why many of the scientific breakthroughs are today named after people who made re-discoveries (after some time and unknowing of the earlier finding).
Now to give a flavor of how this history of science is told here, I wish to cite a few anecdotes and/or passages:
- Descartes had “one of the greatest mathematical insights of all time” (his realization that any point’s location in space can be described by 3 numbers, or coordinates) on November 10, 1619 while lazily lying in bed and following a fly’s motion in his room…
- When Marya/Marie Sklodowska/Curie set out to do her Ph.D. work on ‘uranium rays’ in September 1897, not only had no woman yet done a thesis at any European university, but she had to use a shed separate from the main laboratory… “for fear that sexual excitement of her presence there might prevent any research getting done”…
- George Thomson shared a Nobel Prize for proving that electrons are waves, whereas his father J. J. Thomson had gotten the prize for proving that electrons are particles. Both were correct, of course, and it seems that in this case, Quantum Mechanics extended its duality effects from the electrons to the Nobel Prize committee…
- When critics scorned at the eminent English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s proposition that almost all chemical elements in the universe are produced in the stars, he replied: “we do not argue with the critic who urges that the stars are not hot enough for this process; we tell him to go and find a hotter place” (in other words to “go to Hell”)…
It should be clear to the reader by now that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this hugely informative and entertaining book. A reviewer, however, is expected to find a couple of deficiencies in the book s/he is presenting, so I will oblige. First, despite being a physicist and knowing the power of this science, I honestly believe that the author was overly biased and deferent toward Physics, so much so that, to cite just two quick examples, he states that “the key to Mendel’s work [Mendel discovered the laws of heredity] – the point which is often overlooked – is that he worked like a physicist”, and “the person who put all of the pieces together and made chemistry a branch of physics was the American Linus Pauling”… Another slight criticism I may raise is the author’s decision to completely leave out some, in my view historically important, scientists such as Louis Pasteur and Stephen Hawking, especially in such a thick volume where some marginal stories and issues sometimes occupied many pages.
But I hasten to add that the author’s accomplishments are tremendous, and I for one will often be going back to this work, for I have always believed that a thorough understanding of many key scientific issues requires some knowledge of their historical developments.