Abstract
Our ancestors emerged out of the mists of time with a developing conscious awareness of themselves and the world they found themselves in.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that Figs. 2.1, 2.2 and 4.1 are only indicative and undoubtedly incomplete, but the major features are unlikely to be due to selection effects, in particular the declines following the peaks, as more recent scientists are more likely to be known to us than earlier scientists.
Fig.2.2 
Normalized numbers of philosophers and scientists as a function of time in the Greek, Islamic and medieval periods: Greek natural philosophers (black line), other Greek philosophers (blue line), Islamic scientists (green line), and medieval scientists (brown line). The total numbers are 61 (Greek natural philosophers), 397 (other Greek philosophers), 75 (Islamic scientists) and 51 (medieval scientists). Refs: Greek philosophers as in Fig. 2.1; Islamic philosophers (Al-Khalili 2012); medieval scientists (Freely 2012; Grant 1996)
- 2.
The modern meaning of the world ‘revolutionary’ derives from the title of this book.
- 3.
The ancient Greek philosophers wouldn’t have stooped to anything as banal as repeatedly rolling balls down an inclined plane, but Galileo ’s experiments provided crucial information for Newton’s law of universal gravitation.
- 4.
The modern concept of ‘laws of nature ’ arose primarily in the seventeenth century. In ancient Greece ‘laws’ almost always referred to human conduct. The regularity of the movements of the heavenly bodies obviously inspired the Greek word ‘astronomos’ (whence ‘astronomy’), combining ‘astron’ (meaning ‘star’) and ‘nomos’ (meaning ‘law’), but that was a special case; Aristotle wrote about causes, not laws. There were various hints of the idea of laws of nature in medieval discussions involving providential theology, but it was René Descartes (1596–1650) who explicitly introduced the modern concept of laws of nature as we know it. It was truly innovative, and he struggled with it. In the end, he felt compelled to invoke God as underwriting these laws, both to provide forceful causal efficacy and to deflect any religious opposition (knowing what happened to Galileo ), but soon the concept was able to stand on its own. It had a huge impact. When Kepler and Galileo produced their results (before Descartes ’ work) the word ‘law’ was not yet in use. But Newton came after Descartes, and he made full use of it: in the opening pages of his Principia are his three famous “Axioms, or Laws of Motion”. In this he was certainly standing on the shoulders of Descartes .
- 5.
The first articulation of this view, called scientific determinism, was actually published much later, in 1814, by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827).
- 6.
It should be noted that these short histories are written with the benefit of ‘20–20 hindsight’, looking back into the past and including just some of the scientific work that we now know led to our present knowledge in these four areas. They are therefore selective, and over-simplify the actual history of science to some extent. At any time in the past there were different avenues to follow, and it would not have been clear at that time what they would lead to, including detours and dead-ends. Science is as complex as any human endeavour, as stressed in the next chapter. This is also made clear in the many excellent and comprehensive books in the vast literature on the history of science. Finally, it should be noted that, while a large fraction of the developments after 1900 were honoured with Nobel Prizes, these awards are not mentioned here as they would clutter and interrupt the story lines; prizes such as these are discussed in Chap. 4.
- 7.
The speed of light is 300,000 km/s. It is a universal constant, and nothing travels faster than light in vacuo. Astronomical distances are often expressed as multiples of a ‘light-year’, the distance that light travels in one year; that distance is 9 trillion km.
- 8.
In spectroscopy we spread out the spectrum of light into its component colours (wavelengths), from blue to red, using a prism or spectroscope. Different sources of light can produce narrow, bright (emission) or dark (absorption) features at specific wavelengths in the spectrum. These are due to atoms and molecules in the source of the light, and are referred to as emission and absorption ‘lines’ (a ‘line’ is just an image of the spectroscope’s slit). Their relative strengths tell us the chemical composition of the source. The lines can also be shifted along the spectrum by the motion of the source. If the source is moving towards us, the lines are shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum, and if the source is moving away from us the lines are shifted towards the red. These are called blueshifts and redshifts, and this well-known phenomenon is referred to as the ‘Doppler effect’.
- 9.
(Gamow added the name of Hans Bethe as a joke, to make the paper Alpher-Bethe-Gamow as in α-β-γ; neither Alpher nor Bethe were amused)
- 10.
Radio, millimetre, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma-ray emissions are all part of one vast and continuous ‘electromagnetic spectrum’. What we normally call ‘light’ is just the very narrow optical range in the middle of the spectrum.
- 11.
In fact, Darwin was one of the biologists to whom Mendel had sent his paper; that copy (with its double pages still uncut, indicating that it had not been read) was found years later in Darwin’s vast library of books and papers.
- 12.
Beyret et al. (2018) Elixir of Life: Thwarting Aging with Regenerative Reprogramming.
Further Reading
Bertman S (2010) The Genesis of Science: The Story of Greek Imagination. Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York
Beyret et al. (2018) Elixir of Life: Thwarting Aging with Regenerative Reprogramming. Circulation Research 122, 128-141
Freely J (2012) Before Galileo: The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe. Overlook Duckworth, London, UK
Grant E (1996) The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK
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Shaver, P. (2018). A Brief History. In: The Rise of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91812-9_2
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