Brief Lives

By Alistair MacFarlane

Over the past five centuries, scientific imagination and technological ingenuity have created a deep understanding of the physical world. This has enabled an exploration of the outermost limits of the universe, the innermost recesses of the atom, and the mechanisms that reproduce and sustain life. From this understanding technologies have developed that impact on and fundamentally change every aspect of our lives – practical, social and intellectual. How did the scientific method develop and how did it spin off technology? What can we learn from the lives and work of the people who created them, exploited them and opposed them? Can this astonishing rate of progress be sustained? These are the questions that have inspired this collection of essays. In a wide-ranging set of closely interrelated brief biographies of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, philosophers, artists and an economist they give a comprehensive overview of how the modern world emerged.

Sir Alistair MacFarlane is a former Vice-President of the Royal Society, and a retired university Vice-Chancellor. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and an Honorary Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alistair MacFarlane
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311582225

Book preview

What makes our lives so very different from those of our ancestors who lived during the past three millennia? In what specific way do we differ from ancient Egyptians, Romans and Greeks, and from medieval courtiers, peasants and artisans? What has propelled us from a life of manual labour, from a use of animals for transport and haulage, and from sailing ships and candles to factories, trains, automobiles, and aircraft; and to electric light, telephones, television and computers? If we imagine meeting some of our ancestors and observing their behaviour, or read some of their written records, then we can soon conclude that as people they were much the same as us: as physically adept, as intelligent, and as emotionally adjusted to life in families and communities. The answer soon emerges: it is our scientific understanding and technical knowledge that is radically different. The difference is that we understand so much more than they did about the physical world, and we have developed the technology to manipulate it. Our artefacts, which would amaze them, come from an application of scientific understanding and technical knowledge which they did not possess, and which they could never imagine. How was this knowledge obtained? What can we learn from the lives of those who made and applied it; and from the lives of those affected by it? What possible side effects of technology might cause acute social problems? These are the questions that have inspired this collection of essays about some of the people who have made the modern world.

The impact of the scientific method was immediate, widespread and lasting. It awoke the sleeping giant of technology, and so began to transform society. New technologists emerged, and with them new entrepreneurs. Economic activity developed dramatically. A new middle class challenged long held beliefs about society. The hegemony of the ancient universities was overthrown, and old institutions shaken from their torpor. The success and impact of science’s challenge to long-established beliefs about the physical world ensured that no knowledge-system escaped scrutiny. Logic, philosophy, mathematics and art were all subjected to remorseless examination as the modern world continued to develop. Taken together, the life stories recounted here support the philosophical view that understanding and knowledge are forged in people’s struggle to understand the world and to change it, and are not merely revealed by the discovery of facts. It is these struggles which change our world.

Of all the people described here many were unarguably geniuses, whereas others, in retrospect, seem to have been incredibly lucky. Some had easy starts in life; others had to overcome great hardship. Some were timid, some were brave, and one was reckless to the point of foolhardiness. Some, one would dearly like to have known and worked for; some are better admired from a distance. All were incredibly persistent, some to the point of obsession. Many made hugely original contributions to knowledge, while others helped us to understand it, and others vigorously opposed them. All, in their varying ways, overturned existing belief systems. All, in very different ways, led interesting and instructive lives. Many were not fully understood in their own time. For some, given our lofty viewpoint, their ideas nowadays may seem obvious or even simple. Others generated ideas that defied common sense and still generate fierce controversy.

The success of the scientific method in creating an understanding of the physical world has been astounding. It has enabled us to explore the furthest reaches of the universe, the innermost structure of atoms, and the mechanisms which sustain and reproduce life. Its key concepts have emerged as energy, matter and information, and all of them are quantised. The more we know, the more we realise how little we know. For us there will never be such a thing as absolute certainty. Not in logic, mathematics, language, philosophy, art or science. But this means that there will always be more for experimenters to find, theorists to explain, technologists to use, and all of us to marvel at. Science is a never ending quest, a journey and not an arrival.

1.

Nicolaus Copernicus

(1473-1543)

In 1900 an astonishing object, the Antikythera mechanism, was found in a shipwreck on the Mediterranean seabed. It was a heavily encrusted and badly corroded assembly of bronze gears. As there were around 30 of them, intricately meshed together, it was a fairly complex mechanism. What could it have been for? After a careful inspection, and the creation of a working replica, it was concluded by archaeologists, aided by astronomers, that it was a device for reproducing the motions of the planets. Further study showed that it could also function as a sextant for observing the position of stars and planets. It was a sophisticated navigational instrument, and the first computer.

The computing scheme embodied in this marvellous mechanism had been devised by Ptolemy around 400BC. It was based on a geocentric model of celestial phenomena, in which everything revolved around the Earth. The wandering motion of the planets among the stars was handled by an ingenious scheme of meshed gears. At around the same time, an alternative model, a heliocentric one in which the Earth and planets revolved around the Sun, had been proposed by Aristarchus of Samos. His scheme was not taken up because it contradicted common-sense experience. Ptolemy claimed to have derived his geometric model from observations made by Babylonian astronomers. He presented the results in the form of tables that could be used to compute the future, or past, positions of the planets. These were published in his Almagest, which also contained a catalogue of 48 constellations that could be seen by Greek astronomers. This became the definitive text on astronomy for nearly two millennia. The Almagest survived so long because, like much of classical Greek science, it was translated into Arabic, then re-translated into Latin in the 12th century. A new Latin edition was brought out in 1515.

Early life

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in the city of Toruń in Poland. His father, also called Nicolaus, was a wealthy merchant who came from Craków and his mother Barbara (née Watzenrode) was the daughter of a wealthy Toruń merchant. He had three siblings. The surname comes from a copper mining area where his father’s original family lived. His father died when Nicolaus was 10 years old, and the youngster was adopted by his maternal uncle Lucas Watzenrode, later Bishop of Warmia, who ensured that Copernicus had a good education to prepare him for a career in the church.

Copernicus came from a wealthy family, and his adoptive uncle supported him and worked to secure his preferment throughout his ecclesiastical career. He was, despite all this support, a diligent and conscientious man. Copernicus took the financial aspects of his church work seriously, mastering it to the extent that he put forward an early version of Gresham’s Law (that counterfeit money will displace true currency). Between 1491 and 1503 Copernicus studied in the Universities of Craków, Bologna, Padua and Ferrara. He left the first three without taking a degree (because he did not need to qualify as a teacher), and was awarded a doctorate in canon law by Ferrara in 1503. After holding some minor church appointments, Copernicus became Chancellor of the Cathedral Chapter in Frombork, Poland, in 1511. He stayed there for the rest of his life. His church work left him plenty of time for astronomy, which became a consuming passion.

The Copernican Revolution

The Copernican Revolution replaced Ptolemy’s astronomical model by another that, in the long run, proved an increasingly better explanation of the observational facts. It was a revolution because:

it overturned a way of looking at the heavens that had been accepted for nearly one and a half thousand years;

it was totally counter-intuitive to any common-sense interpretation of the facts;

and it challenged established authority.

When the ancient Babylonians and, later, the Greeks had looked at the night sky some things seemed simple and some just didn’t fit. What was simple was that the stars at night, and the Sun by day, rose, travelled at a uniform angular speed across the vault of the sky, set, and repeated this pattern of behaviour day and night. What didn’t fit was the behaviour of the planets (so called after the Greek for wanderer). Mostly, the planets followed the behaviour of the Sun and the stars, but with significant and regularly repeating irregularities in their motion. In particular, they could move backwards for brief periods; their motion slowed, then reversed, and then resumed forward. Hence the key problem facing ancient astronomers was to find an appropriate description of planetary motions. The Greeks solved this problem by ingenious geometrical constructions, devising an extension of a circular-motion description of Sun and star behaviour that could reproduce the more complicated movements of the planets. This they achieved by using combinations of circular motions. They used cycles and epicycles, with a point on an epicycle representing the location of the planet while that epicycle rolled round on another supporting circle. In this way they could reproduce all the key features of planetary behaviour, including retrograde motion. By using enough circles, by creating ingenious combinations, and by adjusting parameters carefully, they could reproduce a vast range of motions. In their view they had solved the problem. This system, carefully refined to fit available observational data, and used to produce tables describing planetary motion throughout the year, was the one used by Ptolemy. The Antikythera mechanism had turned out to be a mechanical computing device for generating planetary motion using ingenious arrangements of cycles and epicycles. It instantiated Ptolemy’s theory for the facts, but provided no explanation of these facts.

Copernicus began keeping his own detailed astronomical records in 1493, and spent the year 1497 with the professor of astronomy in Bologna. Copernicus’s passion was computational astronomy. Initially he simply wanted to make a bigger and better Almagest, and so sought better computational procedures to do this. Ptolemy’s scheme used two or more circles per planet. After using it for a while Copernicus asked himself an interesting question: in what other ways could combinations of circles be used? Specifically, could the scheme be vastly simplified by using only one circle per planet? This he found was possible if and only if he arranged things so that all the planets moved in concentric circular orbits around the Sun. He had created a heliocentric model and found that it gave a better explanation of planetary motion. The Earth was itself now a planet, spinning on an axis, and no longer stationary at the centre of the cosmos. He now had a workable computational scheme which he proceeded to use enthusiastically. Copernicus postulated that:

The Earth is a planet.

Rotation of the Earth is what creates the daily motion of the Sun and the stars around the heavens.

Annual variations of the Sun’s movement in the sky are created by the Earth’s movement around the Sun.

The complexities in the motions of the other planets are caused by the movement of the Earth.

The stars are immensely far away, do not move, and the motion of the Earth does not affect their observed position.

The Ptolomaic scheme had provided a theory that could be used to compute the motion of the planets, but the heliocentric scheme could explain how to understand their motions.

He was so enthused by his ideas that he wrote: The motion of the Earth alone, therefore, suffices to explain so many irregularities in the heavens.

Copernicus set this all out in the early 1500s in a short document known as his Commentariolus (Little Commentary), which he completed in 1510. It was circulated among friends and fellow astronomers, but never published during his lifetime. As Copernicus began increasingly to admire its power and elegance when compared with the Ptolemaic scheme, a deep philosophical question arose in his mind: If two computational models of the cosmos give the same result, but one is simpler and more elegant than the other, which is to be considered true? He eventually made a huge philosophical leap and concluded that the one with the greater explanatory power was the true one. Thus emboldened he set out to produce his great book that would replace the Almagest. He was further encouraged in his efforts by the appearance of a new Latin translation of the Almagest in 1511. Copernicus’s new book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which he completed in 1532, was not published until just before his death in 1543.

Once the principle of the heliocentric model was accepted then a complete astronomical model of the solar system could be assembled and successively refined by:

Galileo (Essay 2), who introduced the use of the telescope to astronomy, was a powerful advocate of heliocentrism, and ensured that it replaced the geocentric model.

The wealthy Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) who made huge strides in observation and record keeping.

Kepler (1571-1630) who inherited Brahe’s thorough and precise astronomical records of planetary motion and devised laws for planetary motion along elliptical orbits.

Newton (Essay 3) who introduced new and immensely powerful mathematical tools for the precise description of planetary motion.

By the end of the 17th century a comprehensive astronomical theory of the solar system had been assembled and the Copernican Revolution in astronomy was complete.

Last days

Copernicus’s scheme was sceptical of established theory. Moreover it challenged a theory that had been endorsed by the authority of the Catholic Church. It was heresy. From 1532 onwards, Copernicus’s closest friends and astronomical colleagues had access to, or knowledge of, his great book. Despite their encouragement, he resisted all attempts to have it published, saying that he feared that its new ideas would prove incomprehensible. With his detailed knowledge of the way the Church worked to suppress anything which could be construed as heresy he surely feared for his life. Despite his concerns, rumours were spreading all over Europe. His difficulties were exacerbated when, in 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter gave a series of lectures in Rome outlining Copernicus’s new ideas.

Then, when he was putting the finishing touches to his book, in 1539 he received a visit from Georg Joachim Rheticus, a mathematician from Wittenberg. Rheticus became Copernicus’s pupil and disciple, staying with him for two years and writing a short book Narratio Prima (First Account) which described the heliocentric theory in detail. Rheticus then began to exert intense pressure on Copernicus to publish. Eventually Copernicus agreed, and Rheticus took a copy of the manuscript to the German publisher Johannes Petreius in Nuremberg. Rheticus had undertaken to be responsible for supervising publication, before he had to leave Nuremberg. Unfortunately he handed over this responsibility to a Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander. Osiander seized the opportunity to add an unauthorised and unsigned preface which said that while it contained a hypothesis which enabled reliable calculations to be made, it did not seek to present the truth. That it was unsigned made it appear that the disclaimer came from Copernicus himself.

By the end of 1542 Copernicus’s health was declining badly. He was seized with apoplexy, became partially paralysed and partially blind. Copernicus died in Frombork on 24 May 1543, just after his great book was finally published. Legend has it that he was given a copy on his deathbed and died soon after holding it in his hands. If this is true then his blindness would, mercifully, have prevented him from seeing the deceitful preface. True or not, nothing can detract from the drama of his immense achievement.

He was buried in Frombork Cathedral with little ceremony, but his reputation grew steadily after his death until his true stature became indisputable. In August 2005 a team of archaeologists discovered what they believed were Copernicus’s remains under the cathedral floor. On 3 November 2008, after an extensive investigation, this discovery was confirmed. (The DNA from hair samples matched samples taken from a book that it was known he had handled, and facial reconstructions from the skull tallied with a Copernicus self-portrait.) On 22 May 2010 Copernicus was given a second funeral in Frombork Cathedral, and his remains were re-buried beneath a black granite memorial which bears a representation of his model of the solar system. As an ordained priest, Copernicus never married and there are no direct descendants.

Legacy

Before Copernicus we were at the centre of the universe. After Copernicus we were inhabitants of one of several planets circling a star. Copernicus had shown how to apply the fundamental principle of the scientific method: the application of hypotheses to facts in order to create new explanations for these facts. His work created a seismic shock, overthrowing a theory that had been unquestioned for centuries. It was to prove the first of many such shocks. Subsequently Galileo showed that our Sun was but one among myriads of other suns in a huge galaxy. Then Hubble showed that our galaxy was merely one among many billions in a vast cosmos. He had started our quest for better explanations.

2.

Galileo Galilei

(1564-1642)

At the age of 45, Galileo, then an obscure mathematician in the University of Padua, had an epiphany. Using a telescope, which he had made himself, he looked at the night sky and saw that the Milky Way, which appears to the naked eye as a nebulous band of light, was a staggeringly vast array of individual stars. He became the first modern astronomer and, ever since, astronomy has been a telescope-based enterprise. Within a few years he was famous but, as his fame grew, so did the number of his enemies. His enthusiastic support for Copernican theory provoked the Catholic Church to accuse him of heresy. When he was 68 he suffered a tragic injustice. The Inquisition sentenced him to a lifetime of house arrest. Prevented by this harsh verdict from pursuing his astronomical career, Galileo returned to the mathematical work he had been focusing on 40 years earlier. Over the course of the following five years he wrote a book Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences that, in the long view of history, established him as the first modern scientist.

Early life

Galileo Gallilei (Galileo descendant of Galileo) was born on 15 February 1564 in Pisa, then part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and under the rule of the House of Medici. The patronymic is usually dropped, and he is simply called Galileo. He was the first of six children of Vincenzo Galilei, a well-known musician and composer, and Guilia (née Ammanati) who came from a family of cloth merchants. It was a tempestuous marriage, and nobody seems to have a good word to say about his mother. Galileo fought a running battle with her until her death in 1620. At one point she even denounced him to the Inquisition for describing her in scandalous and abusive terms. When Galileo was eight the family moved to Florence, leaving the youngster behind to be educated in the monastery at Vallambrosa. He learned early to look after himself and acquired a lifelong dislike for priests. Initially supported by his father, Galileo enrolled in the University of Pisa to study medicine. When it became clear that his father was no longer able, or willing, to support him, Galileo decided to pursue his own interests and switched to the study of mathematics. Despite showing a clear aptitude for the subject he was forced to find employment and dropped out of the university. Following some very successful years as a mathematical tutor, Galileo became a professor of mathematics, first in Pisa and then, in 1592, in Padua. After he became a famous astronomer in 1610 he entered service with the Medici family. Galileo, perhaps because of his unhappy early experience, never married. He lived with Marina Gamba (born in Venice) in a stable, loving partnership. They had three children – two daughters, Virginia and Livia, who became nuns, and a son Vincenzo, who became a musician. Vincenzo became Galileo’s legal heir and was at his bedside when he died.

Astronomy

In May 1609 Galileo received a letter from Paolo Sarpi, a friend and lawyer at the University of Padua. In it Sarpi described a spyglass by means of which visible objects, though very far from the eye of the observer, were distinctly seen as though nearby. Sarpi was describing primitive telescopes then being made by Flemish opticians. Galileo, intrigued, decided to make one himself. Using available optical lenses, he first assembled a telescope with an approximately 4x magnification. Excited by the possibilities it opened up, he worked out the basic principles of refraction and taught himself how to grind and polish lenses. Soon he could make telescopes with magnifications of 8x and higher. He could now make the best telescopes in the world, and he immediately grasped their military and commercial uses. Sarpi arranged for him to give a demonstration to the Venetian Senate. As a result, in return for a large increase in his salary, he gave them sole rights for the manufacture of his telescopes. Towards the end of 1609 Galileo began to use his telescope on the night sky and immediately made a series of remarkable discoveries. He published these in 1610 in Siderius Nuncius (usually called The Starry Messenger). It caused a sensation and made him famous. In it he described how the Milky Way is a vast collection of stars; how he had seen mountains and valleys on the Moon; seen moons revolving around Jupiter; and how Saturn had curious objects associated with it (later, with higher magnification, shown to be its rings). He had made more astronomical discoveries in a few weeks than had been made in the previous few centuries.

Shrewdly, he presented Cosimo de Medici with an excellent telescope for his own personal use, and named Jupiter’s moons the Medici Stars. As a result he was made Philosopher and Chief Mathematician to the Duke of Tuscany, and Chief Mathematician at the University of Pisa. In further observational work, Galileo discovered sunspots, new nebulae, and the phases of Venus. Modern astronomy had arrived.

Inquisition

In 1621 and 1623 two popes died in quick succession, and in August 1623 Cardinal Barberini was elected Pope Urban VIII. Galileo, although not at first aware of any possible personal danger, realised that he had better try to secure good relations with the new power structure emerging in the Vatican. He was certainly aware of a groundswell of complaints, criticism and resentment building up against him. These were due to his outspokenness, his increasingly strong advocacy of the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system and, not least, of resentment against his sudden rise to fame and fortune. He had neglected some friends and made many powerful enemies. Galileo hastened to Rome, spent six weeks there, and prematurely assumed that it was safe to continue his advocacy of the Copernican system combined with ridicule of the geocentric system. Between 1624 and 1625 the Vatican received a number of formal complaints about Galileo, and the slow, but deadly, machinery of the Inquisition lumbered into operation. In 1632, the Pope decided to exert his authority and Galileo was summoned to Rome to stand trial before the Inquisition. The proceedings concluded in the spring of 1633. In the later stages of his trial, Galileo realised how serious his position was becoming when he was subjected to trial under the threat of torture. The trial transcript records that Galileo declared that he was willing to undergo torture rather than admit to a malicious intention of heresy. At an earlier stage of the proceedings he had refused the offer of an easy way out, in the form of agreeing that the Copernican model was a hypothesis, taken to mean a method of calculation, rather than to be true.

The trial resulted in a much harsher sentence than Galileo had expected. He was found guilty of vehement suspicion of heresy and sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. All discussion of Copernicanism was forbidden, and Galileo was forced to read out a humiliating confession, and to plead for forgiveness. He was lucky to escape with his life; straight heresy would have resulted in a death sentence. (The apostate Dominican friar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600.) To challenge the Vatican was, literally, to take your life in your hands. To refuse to renounce his belief, and to state his willingness to submit to torture rather than deny what he considered to be true, makes Galileo a hero by any standards.

Last years and final vindication

The prison sentence was immediately commuted to house arrest for the rest of his life. After some months confined to the house of the Archbishop of Siena, Galileo was allowed to live in his villa in Arceti, near Florence. To re-assert control over his life, and indeed to remain sane, Galileo resumed his early work on motion and mechanics. Over the following five years he re-organised, extended and refined it into what became the first mathematically-based physics textbook. He discussed the motion of free-falling bodies; the pendulum; levers and pulleys; motion and uniform acceleration; and the parabolic path of projectiles. He emphasised that mathematics was the language of science, the primacy of observation and experiment, and produced a masterpiece. The Dialogue on Two New Sciences was published in Leiden, Holland in 1638. In its original preface Galileo ingenuously pretended that it was published without his consent. Ironically, if he had never been subjected to his ordeal at the hands of the Inquisition, he would never have produced his masterpiece. He would have remained one of the greatest of astronomers, but he also became the first great modern scientist. Galileo became blind in 1637. Despite failing health he continued to receive visitors until late 1641. After developing a fever and suffering violent heart palpitations, Galileo died at Arcati on 8 January 1642, his son Vincenzo at his bedside. The Grand Duke of Tuscany proposed that Galileo be buried in the main aisle of the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, beside Michelangelo. Pope Urban VIII protested vehemently, and the Duke quickly withdrew his proposal. Galileo’s family, acutely aware of the shadow of the Pope’s disfavour, quietly buried Galileo in an unmarked grave beneath the sacristy and under the bell tower of Santa Croce. Galileo’s reputation steadily grew, and the pressure that he be given a decent burial increased to the point that the church authorities had to agree. In 1737 the body was exhumed and moved to a mausoleum on the main aisle of Santa Croce and, as the Duke had originally wished, located across from Michelangelo.

There, one would have thought, the whole sad business of his trial and conviction could have been left. But the Catholic Church, fearful of a loss of authority, refused to admit that it might, conceivably, have been on the wrong side of this particular argument. It began an extraordinary, centuries-long attempt to retain and vindicate its position. Not all clichés are wrong: Knowledge is power, and the Catholic Church was fighting to maintain