An Illustrated History of Science: From Agriculture to Artificial Intelligence

By Mary Cruse

To be human is to wonder. The impulse to ask questions is hardwired into our DNA, and for three hundred millennia people have been searching for answers.

In An Illustrated History of Science, Mary Cruse takes readers on a fascinating journey through the evolution of this discipline in its many strands. Throughout the centuries, our conception of what constitutes 'science' has developed hugely - from ancient natural philosophers and medieval alchemists to Renaissance scholars and Enlightenment reformers. Modern science evokes images of bubbling test tubes and spotless lab coats, but this limited perception inhibits us in truly understanding the progress of science throughout history. Cruse does not fall into this trap.

Learn about the development of agricultural tools, the study of weather patterns, mapmaking, mathematics and modern geology. Delve into the cutting-edge science of the 21st century - genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, sustainable energy projects. Cruse even speculates on which breakthroughs are yet to come...

Filled with useful timelines, fun facts and profiles of key characters, Illustrated History of Science is a fascinating read that the whole family can enjoy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: Dec 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781838577339

Book preview

PREFACE

LET’S START WITH THE SIMPLE STUFF: what is the history of science?

Well, as it turns out, that’s not actually such a simple question after all. In its most basic terms, the history of science is the study of how human beings have developed scientific theories, disciplines and knowledge over time. But, of course, what science is – the wider context and understanding of its purpose – has also shifted over time. Throughout the centuries, our conception of what constitutes ‘science’ has developed; from ancient natural philosophers and medieval alchemists to Renaissance scholars and Enlightenment reformers, we have travelled a long way to arrive at the modern conception of science and scientists that we recognise today.

Given that science is a fluid concept, it’s not so surprising that the history of science is also a tricky topic to pin down. In his seminal 1962 text On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the American physicist Thomas Kuhn established the idea of the history of science as a series of paradigm shifts. Under Kuhn’s model, scientific history is the process through which new theories gradually rise to prominence until they take over and replace the previous scientific paradigm; for example, quantum physics overtook Newtonian mechanics in the early 20th century. With this notion, Kuhn did away with the idea that the history of science represents a steady, cumulative march towards progress. In reality, the history of science is messy, plagued by flawed ideas and long periods of stagnation.

As we’ll see, science itself is as complex and multifaceted as the problems it seeks to unpick. To make sense of it, we’ll be looking at the process of knowledge-making chronologically and in the context of specific disciplines. But in order to talk in any broad sense about the history of science, it is necessary to omit large parts of the story, and there are many important and worthy topics and events that we’re not able to cover within these pages.

The slipperiness of the subject matter, the vastness of the story – there are many considerations to bear in mind when exploring the history of science. But, perhaps most importantly of all, we must acknowledge that the history of science is not a static product; it is constantly shifting and evolving. This book would look very different if it were written in a few decades’ time, and indeed, we’ll be exploring some of the ways in which future historians of science might look back on the era we are currently experiencing.

Ultimately, the period in which we currently live is just another stop on the long timeline of scientific enquiry. As you read this book, you experience it amid a history that is still being created all around us, every day. To commandeer the words of the great American writer William Faulkner, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’

And so the story continues.

Introduction

‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.’ – ALBERT EINSTEIN 1879–1955, THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

OUR STORY BEGINS WITH A BANG. It begins with the entirety of the universe clustered together; a hot, dense mass many times smaller than a pinhead. A fraction of a second passes, and the universe bursts free, expanding outwards into immensity. It continues to grow. Stars develop and die; entire galaxies are formed; solar systems spring up, and from the grand chaos that is the cosmos, our own little corner of the universe is born.

And that is where our story truly begins. On a little blue planet nestled in the Milky Way galaxy, a complex set of chemical phenomena align in just the right way so as to create something miraculous: life. Fast forward a couple of billion years, and one group of creatures splits into two. A succession of animals follow, each one looking more like the face you see in the mirror – homo habilis, the handy man; homo erectus, the upright man – until finally, around 300,000 years ago, homo sapiens, the wise man, is born.

We homo sapiens live up to our name. We are defined by our capacity for wonder, and for the short time that we have been on the planet we have stared up at the vast, infinite expanse of darkness above and have been filled with questions.

To be human is to wonder. This is our legacy as members of the human race. The impulse to ask questions is hardwired into our DNA, and for three hundred millennia our people have been searching for answers. Carl Sagan, the great American astronomer and science communicator, famously said that we are all made of star stuff, because the atoms that make up the human brain also make up the stars. And so, in a sense, the human brain is the universe attempting to understand itself, and humanity’s way of understanding the universe is science.

The history of science is the history of human endeavour; a testament to our will to discover and our determination to uncover truth and meaning amidst the multitude of unknowns. Of course, that history is by no means neat. There are rapid accelerations and sudden stops, there are periods of silence, wrong turns and disagreements. But over the course of our journey, the wise man has slowly chipped away at the vast mysteries that surround us.

In the early days of our story, we did this by painting what we saw around us onto cave walls; these days, we do it by splicing genomes, sending rovers to Mars and smashing particles together in giant colliders. We still don’t have all the answers; there is still so much left to discover. But if there is a common thread that runs through the entire history of science, it is this: all that we know about the world is the product of humanity’s capacity for wonder.

You are part of this story, because you share in the spirit of curiosity that drives scientific progress. Our innate sense of wonder is what makes us human, and it is what makes us – all of us – scientists. And so, before you delve into the history of science, know this: the story is not over yet. It continues with all of us; it continues with you.

Part One

ANCIENT HISTORY

3000 BC–5TH CENTURY

WHEN WE THINK ABOUT SCIENCE, we tend to turn to familiar tropes: futuristic machines, complex experimental set-ups, people in lab coats. But science has existed for far longer than any of that; in fact, you could say that human beings have been doing science in some form or another for thousands of years.

If we understand science to mean the pursuit of evidence-based knowledge, then it’s clear that humanity and science go back well before historical records began. So let’s take a look at the early days of civilisation and the years leading up to it. In place of what we call science, another belief system prevailed. Early civilisations perceived a universe in which events were made to happen by deities, or in which spirits and energies governed the natural world. While they might not have understood the scientific method, they probably still questioned the world around them and created theories for how things worked. So what were some of the earliest examples of ‘science’ as we understand it today, and what part did the scientific method play in the important developments and transitions that underpinned human progress?

We’ve established that humanity has been asking questions for as long as our species has existed. Now, let’s look at how we began using science to find answers.

The era of ancient history begins with the advent of writing in 3200 BC, and ends around 476 BC with the fall of the western Roman Empire. We tend to associate science in this period with Ancient Greece, but it was actually a global endeavour. From India to Egypt to Mesoamerica, the ancient period saw different groups of people begin making scientific progress in different areas and in different ways. One quality that united the early scientists – whether they were philosophers in Ancient Greece or medics in Aryuvedic India – was their desire to seek order in nature, and it was around this time that the first scientists began looking for consistent laws and structures that could explain the phenomena they observed around them. This wasn’t science as we imagine it today. Protoscientific ideas were frequently – though not always – intermingled with religion and mysticism. But this type of thinking did represent an important shift away from the use of observation and logic solely to achieve practical goals, towards the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. People were no longer content to merely observe and exploit the natural environment and physical phenomena; they wanted to understand them. And as they began to acquire a deeper understanding of the world, they became better able to manipulate the environment around them, contributing to the rise of larger and more powerful civilisations. Science is fundamental to the story of human civilisations, and it always has been, right from the very start.

An asteroid falling through the night sky on its way to Earth. Since the dawn of time, humans have looked to the sky to unlock the mysteries of life.

Chapter 1

Mathematics

‘Wherever there is number, there is beauty.’ – PROCLUS DIADOCHUS, GREEK PHILOSOPHER

Mathematics is the science of numbers, quantities, measurement and shapes. But it’s not a science in the way that biology or physics are sciences. Rather than using the scientific method, which is based on observation, theories and evidence, maths is based purely on logic; so its findings are abstract, not tied to the physical world. But while maths isn’t quite like the other sciences, it is fundamental to scientific enquiry. From microbiologists to astrophysicists, all sorts of different scientists use maths as a tool to explore the world. Mathematics has supported and strengthened civilisations around the globe. From its origins as a tool in Mesopotamia and Egypt to its maturation into a scientific discipline in Ancient Greece, the history of maths is long and complex, but its impact on our daily lives is completely clear. When we think of maths, we might initially envisage fractions and long division, but there’s so much more to it than that. Mathematics has helped researchers to better understand the world around us, and has played a part in a whole host of innovations – from architecture, to aeroplanes, to androids. And none of that would have been possible without the ingenuity of ancient peoples who, thousands of years ago, imagined mathematics into existence.

Ancient Mathematics

Although it has since become a discipline of study, mathematics was originally born out of necessity. The first written evidence comes from the Sumerian peoples of Mesopotamia, in what is now mostly modern-day Iraq. This civilisation – which lasted from around 4500 to 1900 BC – used maths as a tool to support their emerging agricultural society. Around the third millennium BC, the Sumerians began practising geometry and multiplication, carving their calculations into wet clay. From taxing harvests to measuring plots of land, mathematics helped the Sumerians to quantify and organise material.

Did You Know?

The Sumerian, Mayan and Indian civilisations all independently invented the concept of zero.

Sumerian cuneiform tablet, c.2300 BC, concerning commercial matters. Cuneiform was not a language; instead it used a system of characters to record words, syllables, signs and an early form of numbers.

The Bakhshali manuscript contains the oldest recorded use of the zero symbol, and is believed to have been written in 3rd or 4th-century India.

A later Mesopotamian civilisation, the Babylonians, further developed mathematics. They were the first to design a positional number system, in which the position of the number denotes its meaning. We still use a positional number system today – the number 5 written alone denotes only 5, but when it precedes another number, it comes to signify 50; when it precedes another two numbers, it comes to mean 500. The Babylonians used their sophisticated mathematical knowledge to help chart the stars, allowing them to predict lunar eclipses and planetary cycles, and to create their own 12-month calendar. Having a calendar enabled better control over agricultural seasons and supported the growth of religious occasions and feast days.

Did You Know?

An abacus is an ancient calculating device that was probably invented by the Babylonians. Modern abacuses mostly work by sliding counters across rods on a frame, but the humble abacus has seen many different iterations in various cultures over the centuries.

The Ancient Egyptians’ grasp of mathematics was less advanced than the Babylonians, but still left a mark on its history. Mathematical activity in this region was largely concentrated around the activity of scribes: young men who were among the few Egyptians trained to read and write. The scribes were the civil servants of their time, practising accountancy, note and letter writing, and many other administrative activities that required mathematical knowledge. Scribes used hieroglyphs to represent numbers, employing a decimal scheme that revolved around the number 10. However, the Egyptians didn’t have a positional system, which meant that they had to count each number individually. So 600 would be represented by drawing the sign for 100 six times. This method was laborious and inefficient, but it did provide a uniform system for calculating large numbers. It’s likely that the Egyptian system of mathematics influenced Ancient Greeks – like Thales and Plato – who visited Egypt and brought ideas back home with them. This impact is important, because the Greeks would go on to embrace the science of mathematics like never before.

While the Greeks were by no means the first thinkers to explore mathematical concepts, it was in Ancient Greece that mathematics became a discipline in its own right. The Greeks were also the inventors of the word ‘mathematics’, from the ancient Greek word máthẽma, meaning ‘that which is learnt’.

Thinkers were interested in mathematical concepts rather than what maths could be used for. They devised the concept of ‘proofs’: logical formulae which demonstrate that a mathematical rule – such as a² + b² = c² – is always true. By proving the existence of solid mathematical laws, the Ancient Greeks established maths as an independent field of study and a way of understanding the world.

The abacus was invented between 2700 and 2300 BC.

The Rhind papyrus is one of the best-known examples of Ancient Egyptian mathematics.

Pythagoras and his followers were among the first philosophers to fully embrace mathematics in the 6th century BC. The motto of the Pythagoreans is said to have been ‘all is number’, and they believed that numbers were not only important but also sacred. They ascribed religious meaning to certain numbers, and held unusual beliefs – for instance, it’s claimed that Pythagoreans would never gather in groups of more than 10, because they considered 10 the perfect number. Despite these quirks, the Pythagoreans are credited with some genuine mathematical contributions, including Pythagoras’ Theorem: a formula that can be used to work out the length of one side of a triangle based on the length of its other two sides.

By the dawn of the 3rd century BC, mathematics had become a central field of study in Ancient Greece. It was around this time that the great mathematician Euclid published his seminal work The Elements, a series of books which laid out the fundamental mathematical rules that were understood at the time. While these rules were already known, Euclid was the first to organise and share them, and his treatise went on to become one of the most influential mathematical works in history.

However, the title of ‘greatest mathematician of all time’ is generally bestowed upon one of Euclid’s successors, Archimedes. Born around 287 BC, Archimedes is famed for his extensive knowledge of geometry and mechanics. Over the course of his life, Archimedes proved theoretical methods for calculating the area and volume of various shapes, accurately calculated the value of pi, and established the laws of buoyancy.

Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Whatever the size of the circle, pi remains the same: 3.14159265… and so on. It wasn’t called ‘pi’ until the 18th century, when Welsh