The Scientists A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors

by Gribbin, John; Hook, Adam

• ISBN13: 9780812967883
• ISBN10: 0812967887
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780593134030
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-08-10
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• More Book Details

Summary

A wonderfully readable account of scientiFic development over the past Five hundred years, focusing on the lives and achievements of individual scientists, by the bestselling author ofIn Search of Schrodinger's Cat In this ambitious new book, John Gribbin tells the stories of the people who have made science, and of the times in which they lived and worked. He begins with Copernicus, during the Renaissance, when science replaced mysticism as a means of explaining the workings of the world, and he continues through the centuries, creating an unbroken genealogy of not only the greatest but also the more obscure names of Western science, a dot-to-dot line linking amateur to genius, and accidental discovery to brilliant deduction. By focusing on the scientists themselves, Gribbin has written an anecdotal narrative enlivened with stories of personal drama, success and failure. A bestselling science writer with an international reputation, Gribbin is among the few authors who could even attempt a work of this magnitude. Praised as "a sequence of witty, information-packed tales" and "a terriFic read" byThe Timesupon its recent British publication,The Scientistsbreathes new life into such venerable icons as Galileo, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Linus Pauling, as well as lesser lights whose stories have been undeservedly neglected. Filled with pioneers, visionaries, eccentrics and madmen, this is the history of science as it has never been told before. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

<b>John Gribbin</b> trained as an astrophysicist at Cambridge University and is currently Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex. His many books include <b>In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality</b> and <b>Q Is for Quantum. </b>He lives in Sussex, England.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Acknowledgements	xv
Introduction	xvii
Book One: OUT OF THE DARK AGES
Renaissance Men	3	(30)
Emerging from the dark
The elegance of Copernicus
The Earth moves!
The orbits of the planets
Leonard Digges and the telescope
Thomas Digges and the infinite Universe
Bruno: a martyr for science?
Copernican model banned by Catholic Church
Vesalius: surgeon, dissector and grave-robber
Fallopio and Fabricius
William Harvey and the circulation of the blood
The Last Mystics	33	(35)
The movement of the planets
Tycho Brahe
Measuring star positions
Tycho's supernova
Tycho observes comet
His model of the Universe
Johannes Kepler: Tycho's assistant and inheritor
Kepler's geometrical model of the Universe
New thoughts on the motion of planets: Kepler's first and second laws
Kepler's third law
Publication of the Rudolphine star tables
Kepler's death
The First Scientists	68	(39)
William Gilbert and magnetism
Galileo on the pendulum, gravity and acceleration
His invention of the `compass'
His supernova studies
Lippershey's reinvention of the telescope
Galileo's developments thereon
Copernican ideas of Galileo judged heretical
Galileo publishes Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems
Threatened with torture, he recants
Galileo publishes Two New Sciences
His death
Book Two: THE FOUNDING FATHERS
Science Finds its Feet	107	(42)
Rene Descartes and Cartesian co-ordinates
His greatest works
Pierre Gassendi: atoms and molecules
Descartes's rejection of the concept of a vacuum
Christiaan Huygens: his work on optics and the wave theory of light
Robert Boyle: his study of gas pressure
Boyle's scientific approach to alchemy
Marcello Malpighi and the circulation of the blood
Giovanni Borelli and Edward Tyson: the increasing perception of animal (and man) as machine
The `Newtonian Revolution'	149	(44)
Robert Hooke: the study of microscopy and the publication of Micrographia
Hooke's study of the wave theory of light
Hooke's law of elasticity
John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley: cataloguing stars by telescope
Newton's early life
The development of calculus
The wrangling of Hooke and Newton
Newton's Principia Mathematica: the inverse square law and the three laws of motion
Newton's later life
Hooke's death and the publication of Newton's Opticks
Expanding Horizons	193	(48)
Edmond Halley
Transits of Venus
The effort to calculate the size of an atom
Halley travels to sea to study terrestrial magnetism
Predicts return of comet
Proves that stars move independently
Death of Halley
John Ray and Francis Willughby: the first-hand study of flora and fauna
Carl Linnaeus and the naming of species
The Comte de Buffon: Histoire Naturelle and thoughts on the age of the Earth
Further thoughts on the age of the Earth: Jean Fourier and Fourier analysis
Georges Couvier: Lectures in Comparative Anatomy; speculations on extinction
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: thoughts on evolution
Book Three: THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Enlightened Science I: Chemistry catches up	241	(44)
The Enlightenment
Joseph Black and the discovery of carbon dioxide
Black on temperature
The steam engine: Thomas Newcomen, James Watt and the Industrial Revolution
Experiments in electricity: Joseph Priestley
Priestley's experiments with gases
The discovery of oxygen
The chemical studies of Henry Cavendish: publication in the Philosophical Transactions
Water is not an element
The Cavendish experiment: weighing the Earth
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier: study of air; study of the system of respiration
The first table of elements; Lavoisier renames elements; he publishes Elements of Chemistry
Lavoisier's execution
Enlightened Science II: Progress on all fronts	285	(34)
The study of electricity: Stephen Gray, Charles Du Fay, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Coulomb
Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta and the invention of the electric battery
Pierr
ouis de Maupertuis: the principle of least action
Leonhard Euler: mathematical description of the refraction of light
Thomas Wright: speculations on the Milky Way
The discoveries of William and Caroline Herschel
John Michell
Pierre Simon Laplace, `The French Newton': his Exposition
Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford): his life
Thompson's thoughts on convection
His thoughts on heat and motion
James Hutton: the uniformitarian theory of geology
Book Four: THE BIG PICTURE
The `Darwinian Revolution'	319	(40)
Charles Lyell: His life
His travels in Europe and study of geology
He publishes the Principles of Geology
Lyell's thoughts on species
Theories of evolution: Erasmus Darwin and Zoonomia
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: the Lamarckian theory of evolution
Charles Darwin: his life
The voyage of the Beagle
Darwin develops his theory of evolution by natural selection
Alfred Russel Wallace
The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species
Atoms and Molecules	359	(41)
Humphry Davy's work on gases; electrochemical research
John Dalton's atomic model; first talk of atomic weights
Jons Berzelius and the study of elements
Avogadro's number
William Prout's hypothesis on atomic weights
Friedrich Wohler: studies in organic and inorganic substances
Valency
Stanislao Cannizzaro: the distinction between atoms and molecules
The development of the periodic table, by Mendeleyev and others
The science of thermodynamics
James Joule on thermodynamics
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and the laws of thermodynamics
James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann: kinetic theory and the mean free path of molecules
Albert Einstein: Avogadro's number, Brownian motion and why the sky is blue
Let There be Light	400	(42)
The wave model of light revived
Thomas Young: his double-slit experiment
Fraunhofer lines
The study of spectroscopy and the spectra of stars
Michael Faraday: his studies in electromagnetism
The invention of the electric motor and the dynamo
Faraday on the lines of force
Measuring the speed of light
James Clerk Maxwell's complete theory of electromagnetism
Light is a form of electromagnetic disturbance
Albert Michelson and Edward Morley: the Michelson
Morley experiment on light
Albert Einstein: special theory of relativity
Minkowski: the geometrical union of space and time in accordance with this theory
The Last Hurrah! of Classical Science	442	(45)
Contractionism: our wrinkling planet?
Early hypotheses on continental drift
Alfred Wegener: the father of the theory of continental drift
The evidence for Pangea
The radioactive technique for measuring the age of rocks
Holmes's account of continental drift
Geomagnetic reversals and the molten core of the Earth
The model of `sea-floor spreading'
Further developments on continental drift
The `Bullard fit' of the continents
Plate tectonics
The story of Ice Ages: Jean de Charpentier
Louis Agassiz and the glacial model
The astronomical theory of Ice Ages
The elliptical orbit model
James Croll
The Milankovitch model
Modern ideas about Ice Ages
The impact on evolution
Book Five: MODERN TIMES
Inner Space	487	(42)
Invention of the vacuum tube
`Cathode rays' and `canal rays'
William Crookes: the Crookes tube and the corpuscular interpretation of cathode rays
Cathode rays are shown to move far slower than light
The discovery of the electron
Wilhelm Rontgen & the discovery of X-rays
Radioactivity; Becquerel and the Curies
Discovery of alpha, beta and gamma radiation
Rutherford's model of the atom
Radioactive decay
The existence of isotopes
Discovery of the neutron
Max Planck and Planck's constant, black-body radiation and the existence of energy quanta
Albert Einstein and light quanta
Niels Bohr
The first quantum model of the atom
Louis de Broglie
Erwin Schrodinger's wave equation for electrons
The particle-based approach to the quantum world of electrons
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: wav
article duality
Dirac's equation of the electron
The existence of antimatter
The strong nuclear force; neutrinos
Quantum electrodynamics
The future? Quarks and string
The Realm of Life	529	(43)
The most complex things in the Universe
Charles Darwin and nineteenth-century theories of evolution
The role of cells in life
The division of cells
The discovery of chromosomes and their role in heredity
Intracellular pangenesis
Gregor Mendel: father of genetics
The Mendelian laws of inheritance
The study of chromosomes
Nucleic acid
Working towards DNA and RNA
The tetranucleotide hypothesis
The Chargaff rules
The chemistry of life
Covalent bond model and carbon chemistry
The ionic bond
Bragg's law
Chemistry as a branch of physics
Linus Pauling
The nature of the hydrogen bond
Studies of fibrous proteins
The alpha-helix structure
Francis Crick and James Watson: the model of the DNA double helix
The genetic code
The genetic age of humankind
Humankind is nothing special
Outer Space	572	(41)
Measuring the distances of stars
Stellar parallax determinations
Spectroscopy and the stuff of stars
The Hertzsprun
ussell diagram
The colou
agnitude relationship and the distances to stars
The Cepheid distance scale
Cepheid stars and the distances to other galaxies
General theory of relativity outlined
The expanding Universe
The steady state model of the Universe
The nature of the Big Bang
Predicting background radiation
Measuring background radiation
Modern measurements: the COBE satellite
How the stars shine: the nuclear fusion process
The concept of `resonances'
CHON and humankind's place in the Universe
Into the unknown
Coda: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out	613	(4)
Bibliography	617	(8)
Index	625

Excerpts

From the Introduction

My aim is to outline the development of Western science, from the Renaissance to (roughly) the end of the twentieth century. This means leaving to one side the achievements of the Ancient Greeks, the Chinese, and the Islamic scientists and philosophers who did so much to keep the search for knowledge about our world alive during the period that Europeans refer to as the Dark and Middle Ages. But it also means telling a coherent story, with a
clear beginning in both space and time, of the development of the world view that lies at the heart of our understanding of the Universe, and our place in it today. For human life turned out to be no different from any other kind of life on Earth. As the work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace established in the nineteenth century, all you need to make human beings out of amoebas is the process of evolution by natural selection, and plenty of time.

All the examples I have mentioned here highlight another feature of the story-telling process. It is natural to describe key events in terms of the work of individuals who made a mark in science ­ Copernicus, Vesalius, Darwin, Wallace and the rest. But this does not mean that science has progressed as a result of the work of a string of irreplaceable
geniuses possessed of a special insight into how the world works. Geniuses maybe (though not always); but irreplaceable certainly not. Scientific progress builds step by step, and as the example of Darwin and Wallace shows, when the time is ripe, two or more individuals may make the next step independently of one another. It is the luck of the draw, or historical accident, whose name gets remembered as the discoverer of a new phenomenon. What is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution `coincides' with the development of the telescope and the microscope.

I can think of only one partial exception to this situation, and even there I would qualify the exception more than most historians of science do. Isaac Newton was clearly something of a special case, both because of the breadth of his scientific achievements and in particular because of the clear way in which he laid down the ground rules on
which science ought to operate. Even Newton, though, relied on his immediate predecessors, in particular Galileo Galilei and Rene´ Descartes, and in that sense his contributions followed naturally from what went before. If Newton had never lived, scientific progress might have been held back by a few decades. But only by a few decades.

Edmond Halley or Robert Hooke might well have come up with the famous inverse square law of gravity; Gottfried Leibniz actually did invent calculus independently of Newton (and made a better job of it); and Christiaan Huygens's superior wave theory of light was held back by Newton's espousal of the rival particle theory.

None of this will stop me from telling much of my version of the history of science in terms of the people involved, including Newton. My choice of individuals to highlight in this way is not intended to be comprehensive; nor are my discussions of their individual lives and work intended to be complete. I have chosen stories that represent the
development of science in its historical context. Some of those stories, and the characters involved, may be familiar; others (I hope) less so.

But the importance of the people and their lives is that they reflect the society in which they lived, and by discussing, for example, the way the work of one specific scientist followed from that of another, I mean to indicate the way in which one generation of scientists influenced the next. This might seem to beg the question of how the ball got rolling in the first place ­ the `first cause'. But in this case it is easy to find the first cause ­ Western science got started because the Renaissance happened. And once it got started, by giving a boost to technology it ensured that it would keep on rolling, with new scientific ideas leading to improved technology, and improved technology providing the scien- tists with the means to test new ideas to greater and greater accuracy.

Technology came first, because it is possible to make machines by trial and error without fully understanding the principles on which they operate. But once science and technology got together, progress really took off.

I will leave the debate about why the Renaissance happened when and where it did to the historians. If you want a definite date to mark the beginning of the revival of Western Europe, a convenient one is 1453, the year the Turks captured Constantinople (on 29 May). By then, many Greek-speaking scholars, seeing which way the wind was
blowing, had already fled westwards (initially to Italy), taking their archives of documents with them. There, the study of those documents was taken up by the Italian humanist movement, who were interested in using the teaching found in classical literature to re-establish civilization along the lines that had existed before the Dark Ages. This does rather neatly tie the rise of modern Europe to the death of the last vestige of the old Roman Empire. But an equally important factor, as many people have argued, was the depopulation of Europe by the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which led the survivors to question the whole basis of society, made labour expensive and encour- aged the invention of technological devices to replace manpower.

Even this is not the whole story. Johann Gutenberg's development of moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century had an obvious impact on what was to become science, and discoveries brought back to Europe by another technological development, sailing ships capable of crossing the oceans, transformed society.

Dating the end of the Renaissance is no easier than dating the beginning ­ you could say that it is still going on. A convenient round number is 1700; but from the present perspective an even better choice of date might be 1687, the year Isaac Newton published his great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy) and, in the words of Alexander Pope, `all was light'.

The point I want to make is that the scientific revolution did not happen in isolation, and certainly did not start out as the mainspring of change, although in many ways science (through its influence on technology and on our world view) became the driving force of Western civilization. I want to show how science developed, but I don't have space to do justice to the full historical background, any more than most history books have space to do justice to the story of science. I don't even have space to do justice to all of the science here, so if you want the in-depth story of such key concepts as quantum theory, evolution by natural selection or plate tectonics, you will have to look in other books (including my own). My choice of events to highlight is necessarily incomplete, and therefore to some extent subjective, but my aim is to give a feel for the full sweep of science, which has taken us from the realization that the Earth is not at the centre of the Universe and that human beings are `only' animals, to the theory of the Big Bang and a complete map of the human genome in just over 450 years.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Excerpted from The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors by John Gribbin
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.