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

By Robert E. Adler

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: May 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9780471463139

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1

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 well 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. Its 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.

2

Anaximander Orders the Cosmos

Anaximander of Miletus, the pupil of Thales, was the first to depict the inhabited Earth on a chart. After him Hecataeus of Miletus, a much traveled man, made it more precise so as to be a thing of wonder.

—The geographer Agathemerus

What the system of Anaximander represents for us is nothing less than the advent, in the West at any rate, of a rational outlook on the natural world.

—Charles H. Kahn

Anaximander (c. 610 B.C.—c. 546 B.C.) was an incredibly bold thinker. With great expansiveness of mind he asked, and answered, one of the prototypical questions of early Greek science—how did the world come to be? Realizing that the substances and qualities we perceive inevitably change and pass away, he postulated the existence of the apeiron, the boundless. The apeiron was material, but with no beginning or end in time or space. It served as both the source and fate of everything we see. The enormity of that concept forced him to drastically revise the status of the Earth. To Anaximander the Earth, in fact our whole cosmos, is not only finite in size and limited in duration, but is just one of an infinite number of worlds. What an amazing—and chilling—degree of objectivity to be achieved more than 2,500 years ago.

Who was this remarkably imaginative man? Like his mentor, Thales, we know little about him. Anaximander, son of Praxiades, was born in Miletus. One source tells us he was sixty-four years old around 546 B.C. He is said to have led a political delegation to Sparta, where he presented the Spartans with two of his great innovations—a sundial and his map of the world. He may have founded a new Milesian colony in Apollonia, near the Black Sea. There’s a tradition that he was something of a showman, dressing and speaking dramatically. He was the first philosopher to write his ideas down in prose rather than in the poetic tradition of Homer or Hesiod. It’s a measure of how long ago he lived, and how many layers of history separate us from him, that only one cryptic sentence survives of all he wrote:

That from which all things are born is also the cause of their coming to an end, as is meet, for they pay reparations and atonement unto each other for their mutual injustice in the order of time.

Anaximander created the first coherent naturalistic system of the world. He believed that a primordial undifferentiated substance, the Boundless, has always existed and is always in motion. Just as flowing water can spontaneously spawn a whirlpool, the boundless spontaneously generated the rotating germ or seed of the world. Once formed, the qualities of hot and cold, and later of dry and wet, separated out and began to interact. The hottest material moved outward, leaving a cool, wet interior surrounded by a fiery shell. The intense heat caused moisture to evaporate, building up pressure and eventually blasting the shell apart. Its remnants coalesced into rotating rings of fire surrounded by opaque tubes of mist. Eventually the heat evaporated enough water to expose dry land, creating the Earth on which life eventually emerged. Light blazing out through openings in the fiery tubes appears to us as the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. Rhythmic changes in the openings cause the phases of the Moon as well as eclipses of the Sun and Moon.

One of Anaximander’s remarkable accomplishments was to propose an evolutionary theory twenty-three centuries before Darwin. Anaximander argued that all land animals, including humans, evolved from fishlike ancestors. He thought that the earliest forms of life arose spontaneously through the interaction of primordial warmth and moisture. Those first creatures, protected by barklike shells, lived in the seas. As dry land appeared, some were faced with the problem of adapting to new conditions. Again Anaximander shows the remarkable extent to which he was able to free himself from any trace of anthropocentrism. Humans evolved from water creatures just as did all other land animals, with one difference. Because human infants are so helpless at birth, he surmised that they must have been nurtured by some other kind of sea creature before they could survive on land.

Clearly, Anaximander did not create a full-blown theory of evolution capable of explaining the descent of all creatures. That would be left for Darwin to accomplish. Still, Anaximander caught at least a glimpse of evolution. As in Darwin’s day and our own, its an idea that many people found disturbing. Writing 150 years after Anaximander, Plato chose to believe in the transmigration of souls, first taught by Pythagoras. Plato turned the idea into a kind of reverse evolution, arguing that immoral or stupid men were reborn as animals (or as women). It’s not difficult to guess whom Plato was skewering when he said, The fourth kind of animal, whose habitat is water, came from the most utterly mindless men.

Mindless or not, Anaximander understood and utilized one of the basic assumptions of science—that the same processes that take place on Earth must occur throughout the universe. This belief led Newton, twenty-two centuries later, to propose the law of universal gravitation, which explains both the fall of an apple and the orbit of the moon. Anaximander realized that the same sequence of events that spawned the Earth and the bodies around it must occur over and over within the boundless, at many other places and times. So he boldly proclaimed that there must be an infinite number of worlds that, like our own, are born, exist for a time, and, paying reparations, cycle back into nothingness.

Anaximander’s conceptualization of the boundless allowed him to solve a problem that had bedeviled his mentor, Thales, and would stymie his successor, Anaximenes. In their attempt to give a satisfactory answer to the question of what kept the Earth in place, Thales had it floating on water and Anaximenes saw it cushioned on air, but neither of them explained what held up the supporting substance. Anaximander, with his characteristic incisiveness, divorced himself completely from the earthbound sensory evidence of up and down. He envisioned the Earth at rest within an infinite, symmetrical universe. Why should it fall? It was in equilibrium, not dominated by anything, and therefore had no more reason to move in one direction than another. In this, as in many other of his ideas, he was far ahead of his time.

Once he had freed the Earth from its supports and could visualize it floating freely within the cosmos, Anaximander could also surmise that it had another, potentially habitable side. He pictured the Earth as a short, drum-shaped cylinder. The flat surfaces, he thought, are three times larger in diameter than the distance between them. The inhabited world forms one of the flat surfaces. We don’t know if he believed that people lived on the opposite surface. However, someone who could envision an infinite number of worlds almost certainly would not have balked at picturing humans on the other side of the Earth.

Anaximander reduced the Earth to an infinitesimal dot in a boundless universe, but he also made it a worthy object of study in its own right. Later geographers identified him as the first to draw a map of the world. Since there are surviving examples of extremely simple world maps from Babylonia from about the same time, he may well have been inspired by examples he had seen or heard described. His map has not survived, but it most likely showed the inhabited surface of the Earth as a circle completely ringed by an ocean. The known landmasses may have been shown surrounding what we now know as the Mediterranean Sea. It probably stretched as far west as the Pillars of Hercules—our Gibraltar—east to Babylonia, north into Europe, and south into Libya. Inspired by Anaximander, mapmaking progressed rapidly. A few decades later another Milesian, Hecataeus, would improve Anaximander’s map based in part on his own extensive travels, making it a thing of wonder. Writing just a century after Anaximander’s death, the historian Herodotus found the old circular maps laughably out of date.

Anaximander’s interest in mapping was not limited to the Earth. He is also said to have produced a map of the heavens in the form of a sphere. He appears to have divided up the heavenly sphere into bands, some of which crossed the others. This may be why he is said to have discovered the obliquity of the ecliptic. We don’t know the details, but if in fact he mapped the heavens as a sphere, it would have been an extremely significant step. The Babylonians and Egyptians, with whom the ancient Greeks had contact, had accumulated centuries of astronomical observations. They had noticed patterns within them, which they used to keep their calendars in order and to make predictions. But they had not come up with a physical model of the heavens. Anaximander may have been the first to wed Eastern astronomy to Greek geometry, in the process creating a powerful unifying system.

The details of Anaximander’s cosmology, like his sketchy map, may now seem laughable. But by envisioning the cosmos as an understandable whole, and by insisting that its origin, development, observable phenomena, and fate can all be explained as the dynamic interaction of basic and universal laws in the order of time, he set in place the conceptual foundation of science.

3

Pythagoras Numbers the Cosmos

All things are number.

—Pythagoras

And indeed all the things that are known have number. For it is not possible that anything whatsoever be understood or known without them.

—Philolaus of Croton

Both the unity and structure of the whole world and the specific nature of each thing are expressed by simple numerical ratios, and this is what makes them knowable. This is as far as we can go in recapturing the central doctrine of Pythagorean philosophy.

—Charles H. Kahn

Trying to understand Pythagoras (c. 570 B.C.—c. 490 B.C.) is like studying the remains of an ancient supernova. All that we can see today is an expanding cloud of incandescent gas and obscuring dust. We infer that only a titanic explosion could have produced this phenomenon. But when we try to look into the center to make out the explosion’s source, the very brilliance of the fireball makes it impossible.

What we do know is that around the year 530 B.C. Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, left his native Samos in Ionia and traveled to Croton in what is now southern Italy. He was forty to fifty years old at the time. Earlier, he is said to have consulted with the aging Anaximander, and on his advice lived and studied in Egypt and Babylonia for many years. Historians say that all we know for sure about Pythagoras is that he founded a religious sect that quickly spread from Croton throughout southern Italy, becoming more controversial as its influence grew. The Brotherhood was a mystical sect, and Pythagoras was its unquestioned leader. He taught that the human soul is immortal, imprisoned in the body, and that on its journey toward perfection the soul is reborn within people or animals. He attracted hundreds of disciples who gave up their possessions, lived communally and simply, and tried to purify themselves through carefully prescribed practices in order to grasp the mysteries the Master taught.

What distinguishes the Pythagoreans from hundreds of other cults throughout history is that the core of their beliefs, the object of their devotion, was number. To Pythagoras and his followers, numbers were divine; they saw in them nothing less than the ultimate source and organizing principle of the cosmos. Today, with 2,500 years to insulate us, we can coolly say that Pythagoras shifted the focus of scientific thought from matter to form. His Ionian predecessors—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes—had tried to understand the universe in terms of substance. Pythagoras’s searing insight, his encounter with the divine, was that without form, pattern, organization, relationship—most purely expressed in numbers—nothing could exist. Anaximander’s Boundless, or Unlimited, required a limiting principle in order to differentiate into a structured whole, a cosmos. By emphasizing form, Pythagoras began an essential dialogue that continues to pervade science today. One example is quantum theory, which replaces entities with probabilities, substance blurs into pure information.

We may never know if it was Pythagoras or one of his disciples who discovered the elegant relationship between the length of a plucked string and the musical note it produces. For the first time a subjective human experience—the harmonies we hear when chords such as the octave, fifth and fourth are played—was shown to have a purely mathematical basis. The substance of the vibrating string didn’t matter; the numerical relationships did. Lengths in the ratio of 2:1 always produced an octave, 3:2 a fifth, and 4:3 a fourth. It was the first successful reduction of quality to quantity, writes Arthur Koestler, and therefore the beginning of Science.

It was a magical discovery to Pythagoras and his followers, as surprising as if the stars had arranged themselves into legible words across the sky. They found the metaphor for creation in those humming strings and integral ratios. The unbounded range of pitch paralleled the primordial Unlimited. Number was the limiting principle that created notes and the harmonious relationships between them, that created form and pattern and determined what humans saw and heard.

It was in Pythagoras’s fiery mind that this observation exploded into a universal law. If the first four numbers governed sound and music, then numbers and their relationships must be everywhere. More than that, numbers reigned—substance was not important, as long as it could be divided according to these divine ratios. To Pythagoras, number was the eternal First Principle sought by his Ionian predecessors.

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