Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation

by Robert E. Adler

Overview

Be on hand to witness some of the most monumental scientific discoveries of the past three millennia
This engaging collection offers readers the unique experience of being on hand to witness some of the most epic breakthrough in the history of science. From ancient Greeks Thales and Pythagoras to Enrico Fermi, Francis Watson and James Crick, and even Dolly the Sheep, Science Firsts provides an unparalleled opportunity to peer over the shoulders of great scientists as they become the first to set eyes on new worlds. Over the course of thirty-five concise, superbly written accounts, science writer Robert Adler takes readers on an lively journey through nearly three millennia of epic scientific discovery, offering accessible explanations of the science involved along with vivid historical and biographical details that help place the discoveries and their discoverers in context for contemporary readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780471463139
Publisher:	Trade Paper Press
Publication date:	05/01/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

ROBERT E. ADLER, Ph.D., is a freelance science writer who contributes frequently to Nature and other leading scientific publications. He lives in northern California, where he is currently working on his second book for Wiley, highlighting advances in medicine.

Read an Excerpt

Science Firsts

From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation

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By Robert E. Adler

John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0-471-40174-9

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Chapter One

Thales and Natural Causation

Blessed is he who has learned how to engage in inquiry, with no impulse to harm his countrymen or to pursue wrongful actions, but perceives the order of immortal and ageless nature, how it is structured. -Euripides

In the beginning was a question. Twenty-six centuries ago Thales (c. 624 B.C.-c. 547 B.C.), a citizen of the Greek colony of Miletus, asked, "What is the world made of?" With that question, and by his insistence that it not be answered by a story about the gods, Thales planted the seed that would grow into Western science. The answer he gave was unsatisfactory, as his pupil Anaximander soon pointed out. Yet, by basing his speculations on observation and reason rather than revelation, Thales invited others to criticize his ideas and offer arguments and answers of their own. Anaximander was the first to accept that invitation. The dialogue they began - marked by an open clash of competing ideas, and with the ultimate appeal not to the whims of the gods but to nature and reason - marks the birth of science.

We know little about Thales. Historians conjure up the dates of his birth and death from events that took place during his life. He was born in Miletus, then a bustling regional center on the southern coast of what is now Turkey. His father was a Carian named Examyes, his mother, Cleobuline, was probably Greek. Miletus's cultural roots lay in mainland Greece, but it thrived because of trade throughout Asia Minor and the Middle East. Thales appears to have been a man of affairs. He seems to have traveled widely, and is credited with being the first to bring geometry and astronomy to Greece from already ancient Egypt. He is reputed to have been an engineer who was able to change the course of a river so that an army could cross it. The later Greeks listed Thales as one of their Seven Sages. Like those other revered figures, his expertise included politics. The farsighted Thales warned the Ionians that they needed to unite to defend themselves against the Persians. Ionia remained divided and fell to the Persians fifty years after Thales's death.

Plato and Aristotle tell two very different stories about Thales. With a suspicious wealth of detail, Plato writes, "Theodorus, a witty and attractive Thracian servant girl, is said to have mocked Thales for falling into a well while he was observing the stars...." That would make Thales both the first philosopher and the first absent-minded one. In contrast, Aristotle tells us that, based on his knowledge of astronomy, Thales was able to predict a bumper crop of olives and parlay that prediction into a fortune by gaining control of the region's oil presses. That would make him the world's first scientist-entrepreneur.

Absent-minded or shrewd - we can't be sure, but we do know that Thales was the first person we can name who asked a fundamental question about nature and answered it on strictly natural terms. Long before anyone had thought of atoms, before there were words for matter, science, or even philosophy, Thales sought to know what the world was made of. He refused to rest with how things seemed. He believed that mountains and seas, plants and animals, wind and rain - all the things we perceive - stem from a common source. And, crucially, he was not willing to accept an answer invoking the gods or anything else above or apart from nature. An angry Zeus was not the source of thunder and lightning, nor was "broad-bosomed Earth" created by Chaos. Thales was a politician and engineer. To his practical mind, everything must have evolved or differentiated from something real, something he could see and touch.

Aristotle restated Thales's great insight two and a half centuries later: "For there has to be some natural substance, either one or more than one, from which the other things come to be, while it is preserved." The choice Thales made for that primordial substance was water. We don't know why. Aristotle speculated that Thales looked at creation biologically, observing that all living things contain water, and that the processes of insemination and nutrition involve moisture. But, as we'll see, Aristotle was fascinated by living things, a fascination there is no evidence that Thales shared. It's equally likely that Thales observed the different physical states of water - solid, liquid, and mist or vapor, and reasoned that this protean substance could account for all the varied things of the world.

As bold as he was, Thales could not divorce himself totally from ancient traditions. He found it difficult to explain the movement of wind and water, lodestones and living things, on the basis of substance alone. But he also refused to look for the source of nature's dynamism outside of nature. Instead, he invested everything with a kind of life force. Later philosophers would call Thales and his followers hylozoists - those who believe everything is alive.

Thales went on to create a model of the universe - the first strictly physical cosmology. Earth, he thought, had formed from the primordial waters, like the Egyptian delta emerging from the Nile. He conjectured that the Earth was a flat disk, floating like a log. Earthquakes, sensibly, were caused by waves in the surrounding waters. The heavens were circled by a great river, with the sun, moon, planets, and stars being blown across the sky by winds stirred by the water's circulation.

Anaximander, Thales's brilliant pupil, soon devised a much more sophisticated picture of the cosmos. But he addressed the same kind of questions Thales asked. What is the world made of? How did it develop? What keeps the Earth in place? In turn, Anaximander's student Anaximenes criticized both his predecessors and developed his own models and explanations. However much these first philosophers differed, they shared two beliefs: nature must be understood without resorting to supernatural causes, and humans are capable of discovering nature's truths through observation and reason.

As if it were not enough to have invented scientific inquiry, Thales was also celebrated as an astronomer. The most hotly debated of his feats is his supposed prediction of a solar eclipse that marked the end of a long war between the Lydians and the Medes. Both ancient and modern writers rightfully saw this as a remarkable accomplishment - one that other astronomers would not be able to duplicate for centuries. The Roman historian Herodotus repeated the story, which he derived from earlier sources. The eclipse in question must have occurred during the Forty-ninth or Fiftieth Olympiad (between 585 and 577 B.C.). In the nineteenth century, astronomers calculated that a total eclipse of the sun had in fact darkened the skies of Ionia on May 28, 585 B.C. That, they believed, was Thales's eclipse.

Until recently, most historians accepted the story. They assumed that Thales had gleaned astronomical knowledge from the Egyptians that enabled him to foretell the time and place of the eclipse. Scholars knew, for example, that in the second century A.D. the great astronomer Ptolemy studied Babylonian eclipse records dating back to 747 B.C. Today, however, with much greater knowledge of ancient astronomy, historians of science are convinced that the best the Babylonians or Egyptians could do was to identify periods when solar eclipses were possible somewhere on Earth. However good their records, they could not predict that a solar eclipse would definitely take place, much less pin it down to a particular locale. In light of the olive-press story, it's not difficult to imagine that Thales might have been enough of a risk-taker to predict an eclipse even if he was far from sure of being right. Still, scholars today suggest we reverse our understanding of the tale: Thales didn't become famous because he foretold an eclipse. Rather, later writers attributed the prediction to him because of his fame. It's almost certainly a myth, like the story of George Washington throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac.

Putting the stories aside, Thales still stands as a heroic figure, a true culture-giver. Even if all he did was to see past the bewildering variety of what we perceive, to ask what all things are made of, he would deserve his fame. But by insisting that the answer must be found within nature, not above it, he gave us our first scientific tools. The classical scholar G. E. R. Lloyd credits Thales with nothing less than "the discovery of nature."

Far more remarkable than any story about Thales is the fact that twenty-first-century physicists, wielding the most powerful experimental tools ever devised, are simply attempting to complete what Thales started 2,600 years ago. By blasting atoms together with enormous energy they are recreating the conditions that existed an instant after creation - a time when all the forces of nature were unified and matter was reduced to its fundamental constituents. Aristotle described the goal that Thales and all his followers sought:

that from which all things are, and out of which all things come to be in the first place, and into which they are destroyed in the end - while the substance persists, but the qualities change - this, they say, is the element and first principle of things.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Science Firsts by Robert E. Adler Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of 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.

Editorial Reviews

. . 35 fast-paced and intriguiging biographical sketches of famous scientists, from Thales to Wilmut and Campbell. . . Adler presents the experiences of scientists as individuals, not as currencies . . .
—Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley Endeavour, March 2004

Pam Stello

Science Firsts is stylishly written, with each chapter containing a strong storyline that draws out the personalities of the scientists involved. And with 35 chapters spread over 200 pages, each topic is given the space to breathe. There is also an excellent reference list containing a wealth of other popular-science titles.—Physics World

Matin Durrani

Science history is served up splendidly in Robert E. Adler's very readable Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation ($38.95, John Wiley & Sons.) In a series of short essays, Adler takes us back to the ancient Greeks and their discoveries, to Newton's extraordinary theories, to Einstein, the discovery of DNA, and much more in between. How I wish this book were required reading in every school in America!
— Bookviews

Alan Caruba

....a collection of short biographies of individuals whose work made possible the sudden leaps forward that seem to occur in scientific progress, and how they did it. Among the ranks are many familiar faces - Bacon, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Marconi, Claude Shannon . . . Er, who?

That question illustrates one merit of Robert Adler's book. He has included people who never had that glamorous glow of fame. (Einstein, aware that his face and mop of grey hair had been turned into a universal symbol for a scientist, once wryly claimed that he was an artist's model by profession.) Shannon's appearance and name are little known, but his ideas are fundamental to today's explosion of communications technology.

There are others mentioned here who are as important in the story of science but just as obscure to the general public. Adler does them justice, cramming a surprising amount of information into a slim space. He also extends the usual gallery of portraits at both ends by beginning with Thales and Anaximander and ending with Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell, famous for cloning Dolly the sheep....
— New Scientist

Roy Herbert

An astrophysical wisecrack goes, "When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover they are not it." Among the visionaries in Science Firsts, a slim volume of chronological sketches from ancient Greece to the present day, are many wholly destroying the belief that we are the segregated hub of the cosmos. There are, of course, the usual suspects: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein. But happily, science writer Robert E. Adler profiles several poorly known mavericks who upset our conviction of a puffed-up, pristine existence-including a few women beyond the paragon of female scientists, the obligatory Marie Curie.

Adler's remarkably compact portraits serve largely to prompt wider reading, and he offers a discriminating bibliography for each chapter. Because the current status of scientific thought is intrinsically the most provocative, Adler's most engaging studies are of latter-day pioneers. Perhaps he should have re-thought his book as Poorly Publicized, Contemporary Science Firsts.

Among the notable modern sages, Adler includes Barbara McClintock, a Nobel prize-winning geneticist, who identified transposable sections of chromosomes in the 1940s, the decade before Watson and Crick hit on DNA's structure. McClintock's transposons dictate how cells differentiate in organisms as disparate as yeast, maize, and humans.

Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis upset Darwin's theory of gradual, linear evolution in 1967 by offering something called endosymbiosis. Spinning a Darwinian theme, Margulis "details how the cells of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms evolved through a specific series of symbiotic mergers between different types of organisms early in life's history," Adler writes. To Margulis, humans are not simply a naturally selected product of simian development; we are also a genetic and cellular amalgam of absorbed lowly viruses and bacteria.

In 1995, astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first planet outside our solar system, which was promptly followed by a variety of newly found extra-solar orbs. Adler remarks, "Mayer and Queloz show us that the ancient atomists were right-nature is capable of making many planets…[I]t may not be too long before an array of telescopes, orbiting in deep space, relays back to Earth the blue-tinged signature of a second living planet." And maybe that will be the center of creation.

Admittedly Adler selects firsts of only Western history. But a project of nonetheless encyclopedic scope mandates that he make necessarily arbitrary choices, which exclude important breakthroughs. For example, Adler omits the deduction of dark matter in 1933, when a cluster of galaxies was observed to move considerably faster than the rate predicted by its detectable mass. Dark (or currently unrecordable) matter-the nature of which is still debated-either makes up a vast part of the universe (in which case, we're composed of incredibly trivial stuff), or Newtonian laws need serious revamping.

Science Firsts also suffers from the lack of a consistent, binding premise-such as recognizing our place in the heavens. Adler concludes his small compendium with Ian Wilmot and Keith Campbell, the Scottish biologists who created Dolly the sheep, the premier animal cloned from an adult cell. This is a first, to be sure, but Dolly itself is not so much a large-scale revelation as it is the product of a tool for understanding animal development.
—for Curled Up With a Good Book

Barbara J. Martin

This book about science and scientists is filled with poetry and poets -- Shakespeare, John Donne and e.e. cummings. It's also infused with a sense of mystery about life and the universe. The author -- Santa Rosa resident Robert Adler -- takes complex ideas about math, physics, biology and astronomy and writes about them for the common reader in a way that's clear, concise and best of all, delightful.

His is a rare talent in a society like ours that's increasingly specialized and compartmentalized. There's no babying here and no bullying, either. Adler knows how to humanize the sciences. He focuses on several dozen men and women who made fundamental discoveries about the world, and revolutionized the way human beings have imagined the universe -- from the invisible atom to the human cell.

Many of the scientists in "Science Firsts" are familiar -- Newton, Darwin and Einstein -- but others -- Anaximander, Pythagoras and Ibn al-Haitham -- are less well known. Adler presents basic information about their lives -- where and when they were born, raised, educated -- and he places them in the context of their times, whether it's the Renaissance, the French Revolution or World War II. His approach makes a whole lot of sense; scientific ideas are connected to biography and history. There are no abstract ideas floating in a vacuum. You might call the author a post-modernist. He certainly knows that while scientists use a different set of tools than poets, painters and novelists, they too have been engaged in an ongoing enterprise to explain the origin of things. Like writers, scientists are storytellers.

Adler begins his story in ancient Greece and then moves through the centuries all the way to the present day. You meet Thales, who invented scientific inquiry itself, Johannes Kepler, the father of modern astronomy, and Francis Crick and James Watson who described the structure of DNA. "Science Firsts" generates a sense of excitement and awe. The men and women depicted here were for the most part courageous figures. They confronted popes and kings, superstition and ignorance. Some, like Galileo, were persecuted. Others, like Humphry Davy, become glamorous superstars.

Adler doesn't romanticize the key scientists of the Western world. He lets readers know that Copernicus was obsequious, arrogant and a procrastinator. Like the rest of us, scientific geniuses have flaws. And yet what they seem to have in common is a sense of curiosity, and a willingness to be surprised by their discoveries.
I especially like the chapter on Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the self-taught, practical-minded Dutchman who spent much of his life peering into a microscope, as well as the chapter on Charles Babbage and Ada Byron Lovelace, the eccentric Victorians who pioneered the modern computer and modern computer programs.

In some ways "Science Firsts" feels anticlimactic after the chapter on Albert Einstein. There hasn't been anyone of Einstein's genius, humanity and stature since Einstein. Still, Adler does good work with the scientists who followed him. He writes compellingly about Barbara McClintock, and the challenges that women scientists have faced in the largely male-dominated world of science. And his chapter on Lynn Margulis and symbiogenesis is fascinating and provocative.

"If Margulis is right, nature has been far more promiscuous and far more creative than Darwin dreamed," Adler writes.

"Science Firsts" has a helpful introduction. "Many significant inventions and innovations appeared in China centuries or even millennia before they made it to the West," Adler explains. And he adds that our understanding of the universe "has been won by someone pushing into the darkness, breaking free from preconceptions, and glimpsing something clearly for the first time."

The book could use a concluding chapter in which the author looks back at the discoveries he describes and into the future, as well, to suggest what we might expect in the 21st century.

"Science Firsts" has a useful index and a helpful list of books for further reading. If you want accurate, uncluttered information about Joseph Priestly, Max Planck, Dmitri Mendeleev and their ilk this is the place to look. If you want a fascinating story about human genius, then put "Science Firsts" first on your list of new books to read about the sciences.

— Special To The Press Democrat

Jonah Raskin

* "...a fascinating collection of stories about key 'firsts' in the history of science..." (Materials World, December 2002)

"...I think scientists and lay readers alike would find this book worthwhile and enjoyable, because of its historical sweep and depth. Something of a Christmas cracker this one..." (Chemistry in Britain, December 2002)

"...stylishly written...each topic is given the space to breath...an excellent reference list containing a wealth of popular science titles..." (Physics World, February 2003)

"...this fascinating book is complimented by black and white photographs..." (The Alchemist, 19 September 2003)

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