Scientifica Historica: How the world's great science books chart the history of knowledge
272
Scientifica Historica: How the world's great science books chart the history of knowledge
272eBook
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Overview
The book is divided into five eras and explores the leading scientific pioneers, discoveries and books within them:
- Ancient World – looks at the beginnings of language, plus the first ever scientific documents produced and translated
- Renaissance in Print – explores the effects of the invention of the printing press and the exploration of the seas and skies
- Modern Classical – surveys the nineteenth century and the development of science as a profession
- Post-Classical – dissects the twentieth century and the introduction of relativity, quantum theory and genetics
- The Next Generation – reviews the period from 1980 to the modern day, showing how science has become accessible to the general public
From carvings and scrolls to glossy bound tomes, this book beautifully illustrates the evolution of scientific communication to the world. By recounting the history of science via its key works—those books written by the keenest minds our world has known—this book reflects the physical results of brilliant thought manifested in titles that literally changed the course of knowledge.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782408796 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Ivy Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2019 |
| Series: | Liber Historica |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 37 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Brian Clegg read Natural Sciences, focusing on experimental physics, at Cambridge University. He has written for numerous publications including Nature, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and has lectured at Oxford and Cambridge universities and the Royal Institution. He is editor of the book review site www.popularscience.co.uk, and his publications include A Brief History of Infinity and How to Build a Time Machine.
Brian Clegg read Natural Sciences, focusing on experimental physics, at Cambridge University. He has written for numerous publications including Nature, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and has lectured at Oxford and Cambridge universities and the Royal Institution. He is editor of the book review site www.popularscience.co.uk, and his publications include A Brief History of Infinity and How to Build a Time Machine.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ANCIENT WORLD
LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS
For centuries there have been debates over what makes humans unique among the animals. Biologists frequently insist that there is nothing special about the species Homo sapiens. The term 'exceptionalism' is used in biology circles in a derogatory fashion to describe the attempt to give us a special status. And, certainly, there are few human abilities that aren't duplicated in some fashion by other animals. However, Homo sapiens far exceeds other species in its collective capabilities to adapt its environment for life, and the driver for this ability seems to be creativity.
This remarkable trait was present when Homo sapiens first evolved, over 200,000 years ago. Creativity means that humans do not simply accept things as they are and live in the present, but can think outside the moment and ask questions such as 'Why does that happen?' or 'What if I did this?' or 'What could I do to make things different?'
When early humans looked beyond scratching an existence to the full might of nature – from the Sun and the stars to the devastating power of lightning and hurricanes – the first responses to the question 'Why does that happen?' involved deities or magic. The assumption was that there had to be supernatural forces, capable of actions that were forever beyond our understanding, even if they perhaps could be placated by human rituals. However, with the establishment of static gatherings of people in the early cities, there was an opportunity to begin to take what we would now consider a more scientific approach.
First came the use of numbers (although arguably a separate discipline to science, mathematics is so tightly tied to the sciences that we will be considering it an integral part of Scientifica Historica). More accurately, what seems to have come first was the tally, a mechanism for counting that did not require numbers. Say, for example, a neighbour borrowed some loaves of bread and you wanted to make sure that your loaves were all replaced. Without numbers, you could put a pebble in a safe place for each loaf the neighbour took. When they handed over a replacement loaf, you would throw away a pebble corresponding to it until there were no pebbles left.
We don't know for certain how long such systems were used as they leave no permanent record, but a number of ancient bones have been discovered that appear to have tally marks on them. The Ishango bone, which is over 20,000 years old, is a baboon's leg bone, found on what is now the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has a series of notches carved into it, which are widely interpreted as being a tally. The even older Lebombo bone, dating back over 40,000 years, also has a series of notches, though there is more dispute about their nature.
Tally markers can preserve information remarkably well, as witnessed by the fact that these bones still exist so long after they were first created. Such bones can be considered the earliest ancestor of a written record. Of a similar age to the Lebombo bone are some of the early cave paintings, which provide another form of communication that had the potential to establish traditions across a period of time.
Keeping a long-term written record may not have had significance for the makers of the bone tallies, but as cities and trade grew, the need for accounting meant that records began to be kept. At the time, these may simply have been markers of financial transactions, however the ability to keep information to a later date, and to share it, would be crucial for the development of a scientific view of the world.
From tallies to writing
Over the centuries, straightforward pictures and simple notch-based tallies developed into pictograms. As the name suggests, pictograms were image-based, but unlike cave paintings they were stylised into a standard form to represent individual concepts. Some modern Chinese characters still take this form – the character for 'door' for example, looks a little like a door.
With some thought, pictograms could also be used to convey less concrete notions.
For example, a series of pictograms could be used to communicate the process of putting bread into a basket. If we see a loaf of bread, then a hand, then a loaf in a basket, the message is fairly clear. (For a modern example of a message using pictograms, think of an IKEA instruction sheet.) In that basic form there is no separate symbol to display the concept of 'in' or 'into', meaning that we need an awful lot of pictograms. There would need to be, for example, a different symbol for a loaf in a basket and for a dog in a basket. But it is not hard to imagine something like an arrow being used to indicate the relationship of 'in', after which we just need the pictograms for bread (or dog) and basket with that linking arrow image. A symbol such as this arrow is known as an ideogram, as it indicates something significantly more abstract than an object or an action.
It was this kind of gradual abstraction that led to the formation of proto-writing, the precursor to modern scripts, which seems to have developed at least 6,000 years ago. One early example appearing to carry such proto-writing is a set of tablets found in Tartaria, located in modern-day Romania, in what was once Transylvania. These are clay tablets marked with a mix of pictograms, lines and symbols. As we don't know what they mean, it's possible they were purely decorative, but they are usually assumed to be a precursor to writing, putting across information in a more structured fashion than simple decoration.
In some ways similar, Egyptian hieroglyphs also combined pictograms and ideograms, but did so with more distinct structures. The symbols were not restricted to words, but could also form parts of words, making it possible to build compound words from a mix of symbols, requiring a stock of fewer distinct images. We tend to think of hieroglyphics as the standard script of ancient Egypt because it is what we see on ancient tombs and wall paintings, but in fact it was developed as a formal means of writing for special settings and was too complex for everyday use. Another system, hieratic, was developed in parallel and involved far fewer, more stylised symbols – similar to Chinese characters – which could be written more quickly than hieroglyphs.
However, the Egyptians were not to the first to develop a stylised writing system. Another of the ancient powers of the region, the Sumerian civilisation (which later developed into the Babylonians), devised their cuneiform script around 3600 BCE, making it the earliest known writing system. This script originally combined stylus marks representing numbers with a pictogram-based form of writing. A millennium later, it had become more stylised, with all characters made up of combinations of wedge-shaped marks produced on clay tablets using a stylus: this was the origin of the words 'style' and 'stylised'.
The European alphabet has a Greek name (alpha and beta are the first two letters of the Greek alphabet), but a more complex background. It seems to have originally derived from the proto-Canaanite abjad. An abjad is like an alphabet but without vowels, which are implied or shown by accent markers – both Arabic and Hebrew use modern abjads. The proto-Canaanite abjad was in use in parts of the Middle East from around 3,500 years ago. Used by the Phoenicians, it was the source of both Greek and Aramaic letters. Greek, though, appears to have been the first true alphabet, with vowels represented by separate characters, originating about 1000 BCE.
The alphabet used in most Western countries is often called Latin or Roman; our upper-case letters are pretty much the same as those used for carving inscriptions by the Romans – their equivalent of Egyptian hieroglyphs. (The character set is not identical, as the Romans didn't have separate letters J and U, using I and V, which were easier to carve.) Like the Egyptians with hieratic, the Romans also had an everyday set of characters, known as Roman cursive, which morphed into our lower-case letters. For the Romans these were two totally separate styles which would not be mixed, but after the fall of the Roman Empire various options of combining them were tried, such as using capitals to emphasise new sections of writing, or to pick out nouns (as is still the case in modern German).
When first introduced, though, these letters would not have been called upper case and lower case. This terminology dates from the moveable type printing era, when pages of type were set using individual metal letters, bound together to form a page (see page 14). The two kinds of character were kept in separate boxes, with the basic letters (technically referred to as minuscule) in a lower case and the fancier capital versions in a higher 'upper case'.
Why is the development of writing so important? Because without writing, it is hard to see how a scientific tradition could be built. Stories of the gods at work in the heavens or throwing lightning do not need precision. They benefit, if anything, from the embellishment and modification that inevitably accompanies an oral tradition. As verbal stories are passed from person to person, less and less of the original remains. But for scientific ideas to be tested and built on, nothing else could match the unchanging foundation provided by the written word.
The permanence of clay
As we have seen, the earliest written records were not books, but pieces of clay. Working on a far greater scale than the Tartaria tablets, the Sumerians and the later Babylonians of Mesopotamia produced vast quantities of clay tablets, originally for accounting purposes. These blocks of clay could be easily marked using the stylus-end 'cuneiform' markers which were first used to represent numbers, but soon also used in combination to form the stylised characters derived from earlier pictograms.
If the markings were just a temporary note, the clay could be moistened, wiped and reused – but by baking the clay tablet in an oven it became a permanent store of the information recorded on it. It would be an exaggeration to describe these tablets as scientific, but some did give guidance on, for example, practical mathematics. They did not contain mathematical proofs, but there were examples of Pythagorean triples – collections of numbers such as 3, 4, 5 and 8, 15, 17, which reflect the relationship of lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle that would later be proved in Pythagoras's theorem.
Remarkably, these numerical records date back around 3,800 years. Such tablets also began to be used to record what we would now think of as scientific data, specifically astronomical observations. This information provided the basis both for calendars and for astrological use – there is no evidence at this stage of the application of scientific theories – yet like the invention of writing itself, such collections of data were necessary precursors to the scientific approach.
Similar practical examples (rather than work that had a detailed theoretical basis) began to crop up in the Egyptian civilisation. Practical geometry was an essential for both the measurement of fields and the construction of buildings, again bringing in the guidance of Pythagorean triples. And medicine took the first steps in its long journey from magic to science. The oldest-known example of a written document giving medical guidance with some resemblance of a scientific approach – although not long enough to be considered a true book – is the Egyptian Edwin Smith papyrus, which is around 3,600 years old. It takes the form of a papyrus scroll around 4.7 metres (15 feet) in length, and deals primarily with injuries and surgical techniques, though it does also include a number of magic spells intended for medical purposes.
China was the next of the great civilisations to venture into proto-scientific fields, with mathematical documents dating back at least 3,000 years. It would be relatively late coming to physical or biological sciences, however, as there were philosophical barriers in the way of accepting a purely mechanistic view of the world. India, too, would produce impressive mathematical and later astronomical works from around 500 BCE, which would feed into the development of modern science.
However, the foundations of the approach that has come to dominate science worldwide were primarily developed in ancient Greece. The Greeks built on mathematical ideas from Babylonia and Egypt, but they would take the lead in attempting to build a rational explanation for nature that would eventually become science. They were also the earliest to produce what is close to the modern concept of a science book, though many of the early examples no longer survive.
The early Greeks
The Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus was one of the first to move away from ascribing the forces and structures of nature to the mythical actions of the gods, constructing instead a philosophy that built on theories of the interaction of natural objects. Thales was alive at the same time as the now better-known Pythagoras, who was born around 570 BCE and whose school put numbers at the centre of the explanation of the universe.
With many of the early Greek philosophers it is difficult to know exactly which ideas belonged to the big names that get remembered and which were produced by their followers. Using a famous name added weight to an argument (rather like having a celebrity endorse a product today), and it was common to deploy the big names in a piece of writing even if they weren't directly involved. We know that Pythagoras did not come up with the mathematical theorem named after him. As we have seen, Pythagorean triples predated him by 1,000 years, and proofs of the theorem were developed well before he was born. It is possible, though, that he was responsible for the first scientific theorising on the nature of music, showing how specific ratios of lengths of vibrating objects (strings or organ pipes, for example) produced notes that sounded harmonic and pleasant.
With the output of Thales and Pythagoras we have the problem that not a single piece of their writing has survived. Everything we know is hearsay. Among the earliest extant examples of what could be considered scientific books is the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of disparate works on the subject of medicine, which includes the famous Hippocratic Oath requiring a physician to behave ethically with patients. Again, we don't know if the fifth-century BCE Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos wrote any of the 60 or so titles in this collection. Certainly, the majority of the volumes date back to his period and a little later, though the last was added as much as nine centuries afterwards.
Because of having multiple authors over a period of time, the Corpus is a mix of ideas with no consistency of viewpoint: some of its texts are aimed at other physicians, others at lay readers. If these books can be considered amongst the earliest of scientific titles, they very much take the form of a compendium presenting competing theories, rather than providing the reader with the scientific consensus of the time. There was no 'standard text' here. However, some ideas were better supported than others, notably that of the 'four humours' – blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm – fluids in the body which it was believed, incorrectly, had to be kept in balance for health. This led to such treatments as bloodletting to reduce an 'excess' of blood – a life-threatening and useless practice that would remain central to medical work all the way through to the nineteenth century. Like the earlier Egyptian medical documents, these books were originally produced in the form of scrolls, though later editions would see them copied into the familiar codex book form, where eventually all the books of the Corpus would be made available as a single volume.
The survival of books from this period is very much hit and miss (and far more miss than hit). In modern times, many of the books that are conventionally published will be produced in the thousands. However, prior to the printing press, each volume had to be painstakingly copied by hand. It's entirely possible that initially only a handful of copies of a title may have existed, though if a title became successful there would be a branching out of copies, copies of copies, and so on.
Though this copying process helped preserve some text it also presented a distinct danger to the accuracy of the contents. Copyists regularly introduced variations in the text, either accidentally or intentionally if they disagreed with the message. Examples of deliberate later additions and 'improvements' are often found in much-copied ancient works, where modern analysis can show how the original message was modified to match the cultural requirements of a later period. This presented a particular danger for scientific books where preserving the detail was essential. However, copying did at least mean that there were fall-backs if an original book was lost. A much greater danger than either errors or deliberate changes introduced in copying was the instability of ancient societies – and no better example of this can be found than the fate of the Library of Alexandria.
(Continues…)
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