Reading Science Stories: Narrative Tales of Science Adventurers

By Joy Hakim

Reading Science Stories is a book meant to celebrate nonfiction reading, especially narrative nonfiction, as a vehicle for understanding the world around us. We live in what is the greatest scientific era in all of human history, it also happens to be an Information Age, and nonfiction is a great medium for explanations, but many of our schools

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stories for Thinkers
• Release date: Apr 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780996272209

Book preview

1. Take a Number, Then Press it into Clay

Asense of number—knowing the difference between 2 and 25—seems to be part of what makes us human. It's like communicating with language or making music; even the most primitive peoples do those things.

When did people first begin to count? Was it when they considered their fingers and toes? Or when they counted their children? Or their sheep?

Whenever it was, counting was the beginning of arithmetic (about adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing), and arithmetic, along with geometry (about shapes, space, and measuring) is the foundation of mathematics.

At first, in order to count, people kept tally sticks, made notches on bones, piled up pebbles, or put knots in a rope. But with the advent of cities and trading, bookkeeping systems and written records were needed. So the earliest writing had to do with recording business transactions; later, writing that expressed language was developed. The first number writing of which we know was done in Sumer (then Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq), it had to do with business transactions.

The modern concept of number came slowly: The symbol for six when it stood for fish was different from six when it stood for sacks of wheat. The abstract idea of number, as separate from the objects counted, took thousands of years to evolve.

The early Greeks pictured numbers by using arrangements of pebbles–like the patterns on dominos. That’s a step toward numerals and abstract math: those pebbles could stand for soldiers or cattle or sacks of grain. By the way, the word calculate comes from the Latin calculus, meaning pebble.

Imagine discovering that one symbol, 5, can stand for five things, whatever they are. The algebra equation x = 5, where x stands for an unknown quantity, takes a further leap into the abstract.

Going from scratch marks and pebbles to a language of mathematics was like turning on a light in a dark room.

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First came words for numbers and then written symbols. In Mesopotamia, there was an abundance of clay soil and river reeds. Clay could be turned into writing tablets. Reeds, cut to have triangular tips, became writing instruments. When pressed into soft clay, those reed tips left wedge-shaped marks. Then the sun baked the tablets until they were hard.

From the shape of the marks in clay comes our name for Sumerian writing, cuneiform (koo-NEE-uh-form), derived from the Latin cuneus, meaning, wedge. It is the earliest known writing and is at least 6,000 years old.

Thousands of cuneiform tablets have survived time. Most of them deal with daily needs, like beer, bread, and barley. One ancient tablet has symbols that denote the daily barley ration for a worker; another shows the amount of barley needed for I800 portions. (Was someone running a big business? Or planning a city's rations?) Those who practiced the art of mathematics seem to have been an elite group of insiders (a guild), who kept their skills a closely guarded secret.

Tablets and murals tell us the very ancients knew more than just how to count and add and subtract: many of them understood ratios and fractions and could do complicated figuring. There were important reasons for that.

The Babylonians used numbers for commercial purposes. Without arithmetic, they would have had a difficult time trading goods or keeping records or dividing up land or work.

The Egyptians found geometry essential for measuring; without it, men and women would have been unable to build pyramids and temples.

The Greeks came to realize that mathematics can be something more than everyday practical. Mathematicians use numbers as a language to reason and understand the world.

Geometry? Why?

We think the Egyptians invented geometry, which is especially helpful in measuring. They needed that help. They had a difficult river to deal with. Each year the Nile overflowed its banks. That flooding deposited rich soil on the farmlands it touched. It also washed out boundary markers. Imagine angry farmers fighting over whose land is whose. It didn't make for good neighbors. The Egyptians took this so seriously that in their Book of the Dead (a religious tome), dead souls had to swear to the gods that they had not cheated their neighbors out of their land.

For the rulers of Egypt there was something even more important than dead souls: taxes. The pharaohs collected taxes based on land usage. They needed to know who was tilling which parcel of land.

To solve the problem, surveyors reset boundaries after each Nile flood. They usually worked in teams of three and were known as rope stretchers because of their long, knotted ropes. They learned to measure plots of land by dividing them into rectangles and triangles. And that, we believe, is how geometry was born.

Herodotus, a Greek historian, wrote about Egyptian mathematics (which was history to him). This is what he said:

Sesostris [king of Egypt] made a division of the soil of Egypt among the inhabitants, assigning square plots of ground of equal size to all, and obtaining his chief revenue from the rent which the holders were required to pay him year by year. If the river carried away any portion of a man's lot, he appeared before the king and related what had happened; upon which the king sent persons to examine and determine by measurement the exact extent of the loss; and thenceforth only such a rent was demanded of him as was proportionate to the reduced size of his land. From this practice, I think, geometry first came to be known in Egypt, whence it passed into Greece.

Egyptian mathematicians were famous in their time. Of course, they influenced the other Mediterranean peoples, especially the Greeks. But the Egyptians never took geometry beyond everyday useful functions. It was the Greeks who made it something to do for its own sake. They thought of geometry as the science of reasoning.

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2. Worshiping Numbers

Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe–which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without which one wanders vainly in a dark labyrinth.

—Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Italian scientist, II Saggiatore ("The Assayer')

But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.

—Albert Einstein (1879-1955), quoted in The Cosmic Code by H. R. Pagels

Why did science succeed so spectacularly in the Western world and not elsewhere? It may be because the Greeks married science and mathematics. They made mathematics the language of science. It is the most important single thing they did to put Western science on a different path from that of the rest of the world.

For a Greek thinker named Pythagoras (pih-THAG-uh-ruhs) numerals were not just symbols; they were very real.

Pythagoras was born in 582 B.C.E. (or thereabouts) and is often called the world's first great mathematician. He was lucky in the time and place of his growing up. His home was on the island of Samos, just a mile's swim in the Aegean Sea from the Ionian coast of Turkey. The Greek islands have a special aura; there, light is clear and vision seems exact.

I have written thus at length of the Samians [people from Samos], because they are the makers of the three greatest building and engineering feats in the Greek world: the first is a tunnel nearly a mile long, eight feet wide and eight feet high, driven clean through the base of a hill nine hundred feet in height. The whole length of it carries a second cutting thirty feet deep and three broad, along which water from an abundant source is led through pipes into town.

—Herodotus, (ca. 484-425 B.C.E.) Greek historian

When Pythagoras was a boy, Samos was a big-time prosperous port. Ships carrying new ideas seemed to blow in on almost every breeze. The Greek historian Herodotus tells us that the people of Samos are responsible for three of the greatest building and engineering feats in the Greek world. If we take ourselves to Samos in the sixth century B.C.E., that’s before Herodotus, we can see those engineering marvels being built: a spectacular tunnel channeling water pipes through a big hill, a man-made harbor, and the largest of all known Greek temples.

It is an age of ferment and genius. Confucius (kuhn-FYOO-shuhs) and Lao-tzu (rhymes with now-duh) are in China, the Pharaoh Necho (NEE-ko) in Egypt, Zoroaster (ZOR-oh-as-ter) in Persia, the Jewish prophets in Israel, and Gautama Buddha in India.

Pythagoras has a mind that can hold its own with any of them.

His story actually begins at Delphi; a small Greek village nested high on a mountainside with spectacular views of valley, sea, and snow-topped mountain peaks. In addition to its wondrous beauty, Delphi sits on a crack in the Earth.

Vapors rise from the Earth's interior. The vapors at Delphi, it is said, cause some people to have visions and claim to see the future. (VAPORS are smoke, steam, fog, mist, or gases. To VAPORIZE means to turn something, like a meteorite or a comic-strip villain, into gas.) And so, from the time before memory or written records, Delphi is a holy place. At first it is Gaea (QEE-uh), the Earth goddess, who is worshiped there. Then, when the god Apollo comes from Mount Olympus in search of a site for his temple, he picks Delphi (or so the Greek tales say). In order to take possession of the place, Apollo has to win it from the awful dragon Python, who, depending on the story you read, is Gaea's son or daughter or grandchild. Python (who takes a serpent's shape) not only attacks humans, he keeps the gods from going freely to Delphi.

Using arrows and cleverness, Apollo kills the terrible Python. But he knows murder is wrong. So to cleanse himself of the sin and to set an example for mortals, he serves as a slave to King Admetus (ad-MEE-tuhs). After that, crowned with a wreath of laurel leaves, Apollo returns to Delphi, pure and worthy of love.

Thus it is Apollo, the god of prophecy, who is worshiped at Delphi. People come there to receive wisdom from the oracle, who is said to speak Apollo's thoughts through a human agent, the Pythia, who is always a woman. Sometimes she speaks words of the dead serpent, Python.

Mouthpiece of the Gods

The oracle at Delphi spoke through a priestess said to be the mouthpiece of the gods. Known as the Pythia, she answered questions and had the power of prophecy. The answers were often puzzling—a bit like riddles—and could be interpreted in more than one way.

The word oracle comes to us by way of Latin; orore means, to speak. So in English we have oral, orate, and orator, as well as oracle, which still means a source of wisdom.

William Shakespeare, in the play The Merchant of Venice, wrote: I am Sir Oracle, And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!

Mnesarchus and Parthenis, a young couple from Samos, make the sea-and-land journey to consult the oracle. It is worth it. She gives them astounding news: They are to have a son who will change the world. Naturally they do what she tells them to do: they go to Sidon in Phoenicia (now Lebanon) for the lad's birth, and then they return to Samos.

And so, even before he is born, Pythagoras is marked as someone special. As a boy, he is sent to nearby Miletus to study with Thales (a Greek sage). After that, he travels widely, as wealthy, educated Greeks do: to Babylon, maybe India, and definitely Egypt, where he spends many years.