Ascent of Science

Posted by jns on 4 October 2005

I recently finished reading the massive but excellent book The Ascent of Science, by Brian L. Silver (Oxford University Press, New York, 1998). I had noted many passages that caught my eye as I read, and have shared some. As usual, I got behind, so here are the remainders.

Linnaeus, in 1735, commented, “It is remarkable that the stupidest ape differs so little from the wisest man, that the surveyor of nature has yet to be found who can draw the line between them.” [p. 269]

Just as true, it seems, going on 300 years later now that the genes of the chimpanzee have been sequenced.

Now this following example I have yet to see put forth as fundamentalist support for creationist doctrine:

Lamarck’s belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics ws anticipated by Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, and has in fact persisted for centuries. It is part of the folklore of many societies and has been around too long to be killed by ugly facts. One example of the effect on their offspring of what their parents see is about 4000 years old. Genesis 30:37–39 reads: “Jacob then got fresh shoots of poplar, and of almond and plane, and peeled white stripes in them, laying bare the white of the shoots. The rods that he had peeled he set up, in front of the goats, in the troughs, the water receptacles, that the goats came to drink from. The mating occured when they came to drink, and since the goats mated by the rods, the goats brought forth streaked, speckled, and spotted young.” [p. 288]

Einstein’s feelings about relativity and religion — which should not come as a surprise:

Einstein was much concerned with questions of morality and meaning. When asked what effect relativity had on religion, he replied, “None. Relativity is a purely scientific theory, and has nothing to do with religion. Nevertheless, there is a long history of fruitless attempts to relate the specifics of mathematics or physics to man’s religious and moral life. This is the wacky side of the Pythagorean heritage. The most general lesson that man can learn from science is the need to apply the highest standards of reason to those problems to which they can be applied. [p. 400, emphasis in original]

About the events that put Einstein’s name on everyone’s lips:

Einstein’s theory predicted that the path of light would be bent near massive bodies. Newton had also believed that his light corpuscles would be attracted by gravity, and Faraday looked unsuccessfully for the effect of gravity on light. Einstein’s prediciton was tested in 1919, during an eclipse of the Sun. The man who organized the experiment, which involved sending observers to Brazil and Principe, an island in the Gulf of Guinea, was the English cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington, who was an early convert to relativity. [...]

The experiment had been on a grnd scale. An account of the observations was presented at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, in London, and the announcement of the results by the astronomer royal, Sir Frank Watson Dyson, was a dramatic high point in the history of science. The deviations recorded by the two expeditions were 1.61 and 1.98 seconds of arc, although the experimental error was rather large. Einstein had predicted a deviation of 1.74 seconds of arc. The chairman of the meetings, J.J. Thomson, proclaimed, “This is the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton’s day [and] one of the highest achievements of human thought.” That was on 6 November 1919. The following day there was an announcement in the London Times, and within days Einstein’s name became known to more people at one time than that of anyone else in the history of science. [p. 431]

The heading to Chapter 33 on “Cosmology” [p. 442]:

The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star.
– Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, early nineteenth-century gastronome

A curious footnote to scientific history and theory that I’d never heard before:

Before Galileo turned his telescope to the night sky in 1610, the universe was a much smaller place. There are fewer than 5000 stars visible to the naked eye, although it must have been assumed that there were many more, in view of the common European belief that each person had his own personal star. [footnote:] In the fifth century, Bishop Eusebius of Alexandria asked if “there were only two sars at the time of Adam and Eve.” [p. 451]

Finally, a remark that has not lost its defining utility:

In the early 1920s the automated production line turned America into an object of mass envy and admiration. Technology, not art or basic science, was confirmed as civilization’s status symbol. Few heeded the words of Dean Inge, in the 1920 Romanes Lecture: “The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.” [p. 488]