More Than a Reference

By Mark M. Peyton

Science education today focuses upon dates, names, and facts needed to answer questions on college entry exams. Forgotten in the effort to memorize the information are the stories about the people behind those dates and facts.

The greatest of our scientists were also people with their strengths and weaknesses. Presented in More Than a Reference are short essays in the style of Paul Harvey’s Rest of the Story. These essays are about the people involved in world-changing discoveries. How did seasickness play a role in Darwin’s theory of natural selection? Why did Joseph Meister, the young man who was the first person to survive rabies, commit suicide? Why did Mendeleev go up in a hot air balloon without knowing how to control it? Who was Clara Louise Maass?

These stories capture the interest of the reader by showing the human side of science not usually presented in textbooks or classrooms. These are the stories in More Than a Reference, a series of essays on the people who played a integral role in discoveries that have changed the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662446856

Book preview

Chapter 1

River of Science

Sir Isaac Newton understood that his work would have been impossible had it not been for all the work done by others before him. It doesn’t matter which branch of science you choose; you can construct a never-ending thread that ties one discovery to another over time. Like a river, the knowledge gained through science continues from its headwaters to its mouth—from the past, forward to the future.

Take the study of astronomy as an example. When we look back into time and note the astronomers we have a record of, you can see an (almost) unbroken thread linking one discovery to the next.

Who was the first astronomer? Who knows? The first that we have a record of as being in the academic pursuit of knowledge about the heavens was Thales. Thales lived from 624 BC to 548 BC. His life overlapped that of Pythagoras whose life overlapped that of Eudosus, who overlapped Aristotle, who was followed by Aristarchus, who overlapped Eratosthenes followed by Hipparchus, and finally Ptolemy. Almost seven hundred years of unbroken discoveries as one scientist used the discoveries of his predecessor in order to make better discoveries.

Pythagoras made mathematical discoveries that Euclid, two hundred years later, used to develop the math, geometry. Hipparchus, another two hundred years later, used Euclid’s geometry to develop trigonometry. Newton, 1,700 years later found both inadequate for his needs, so he developed calculus. One builds upon another.

The lineage of science reads like the begets in the Bible. Just as those begets are designed to show the family lineage that leads from Adam to Jesus, the overlaps and follows of scientists show the development of astronomy over a seven-hundred-year period of time—Thales to Ptolemy.

We know of the lineage of astronomy because of Ptolemy. He did a variety of things, but probably the most important was his encyclopedia on astronomy called the Almagest. This was a thirteen-volume review of all the astronomers that came before him and what they did. It, however, was more.

Ptolemy lived in AD 100. Something happened about that same time. It happened in astronomy, math, medicine, biology, poetry, literature, you name it. Due to disease, war, and other troubles, scientific learning and discovery in Western civilization stopped. The Dark Ages began.

All these areas of academia continued…in Arabia and the Far East; but in Europe study, pursuit of knowledge, writing, philosophy, and all the things that lead to new discoveries came to a close. For almost 1,300 years, things came to a close.

Then the awakening. The Reformation. The Renaissance. The Crusades. The Crusades? Yep. The Crusaders brought back books from the Middle East: books by Homer, various books of medicine, Plato’s works, Aristotle’s works, and a copy of the Almagest.

Ptolemy’s Almagest not only compiled the works of the early great astronomers, it preserved those works for 1,400 years until the western world was once again ready to advance academically.

After 1,400 years, there were glaring errors in some of these works, so questions not asked in AD 100 were asked; and once again, the lineage began. Copernicus died in 1543, Tycho was born in 1546, and eight years later, Galileo was born, followed seven years later by Kepler. Galileo and Kepler both died in 1642, the same year that Newton was born.

Then, of course, come Herschel, Galle, Lowell, Tombauch, and Hubble, but lineages become really confused as you get closer and closer to present day. Only time will tell if these men belong in this lineage or, like so many others, are simply tributaries to the main river of astronomy.

What amazes me about this river, however, is not who makes it up or why. Like a real river, to me, it is amazing that water that falls as snow on a mountain in Colorado makes its way down the mountain across the plains, by Gothenburg, Nebraska, where I live, to the Missouri and then the Mississippi and then down to the ocean. The very same drop of water—no different on the mountain than in the ocean.

The river of science, to me, is the same. The knowledge accumulates, and the river gets bigger and bigger, but the individual idea that Thales had 2,650 years ago that the earth was a sphere, it is still the same idea today. That idea was formed by a mind that surpasses mine. That is the amazement. Humans 2,650 years ago were as smart as we are today! Pythagoras would have had no trouble understanding Euclid’s geometry, and the two of them would not have struggled with Hipparchus’s trigonometry, and all three would probably get A’s in calculus today. To me, that’s cool!

This book is a series of essays about some of these outstanding scientists of our past. All were human. All were fallible. All were people of amazing minds. More than just a reference in the back of the book, or a footnote at the bottom of the page, these are the people that made life as we know it today. They deserve to be known by more than just a date and a citation. They are the giants upon whose shoulders we now stand, but they are more. They are each an individual just like you and me.

Chapter 2

Judging Others (Critical Review and Its Place in Science)

I held the letter from the editor in my hand. Finally! Finally, all the pieces were in place. The last step in the process was completed, and my paper was accepted.

For years I’ve taught students the basics of science. Science is a process, not a product. Science is the process of trying to solve problems. It is not the actual solving of the problem because you can do excellent science and never find a single solution. With the acceptance of my paper, the science process had reached an end point. The end point was that step in the scientific method where you communicate the results of your work to the rest of the world.

As every science student knows, the scientific method starts with the identification of a problem. You then gather existing information, and with the aid of that information, and maybe some of your own observations, you develop a hypothesis, or educated guess, as to the solution to the problem.

You then test that hypothesis, that solution, with a rigorous sampling method or pattern of observations, and/or you conduct a controlled experiment. Based upon the sampling, the observations, or the outcome of the experiment, you accept or reject your hypothesis. You then communicate the results to the rest of the scientific world.

The origins of this process, like so much in science, dates back to Aristotle. He has been called the first scientist by some because he supported the processes of observation and measurement as being absolutely fundamental to understanding nature.

The idea that after you’ve made those observations and measurements, you develop a thought or idea, and then you test that idea through experimentation, was the invention of Muslim scientists from AD 1100 to 1500. This was the time of the Dark Ages in the western world, but it was the Golden Age of Islam. The Muslim scholar al-Haytham is credited with organizing the process I explained above. He even insisted that the results of your experiment should be verified through repetition and that anyone else, following the process you followed, should come up with the same conclusion. He also insisted that those results be communicated to other scientists…to educate them so they then could take the next step, but there is more to it.

You don’t just send out an explanation of your hypothesis, the tests you ran, and the results along with your conclusions. You first submit your hypothesis, tests, results, and conclusions for peer review.

Peer review is a process where other scientists, whose names are unknown to you, evaluate your work. They take a critical look at the processes you used to test the hypothesis, the way you gathered your information, the way you evaluated that information, and whether your conclusions can be supported by the results of that work. They tell you the work is bad if it’s bad and okay if it’s good. They give suggestions ranging from editorial comments pertaining to your grammar to suggestions for a complete overhaul of the work. It’s a painful and frustrating process for you as a scientist, but a necessary one and a tradition in science dating back to the 1500s.

You might say that critical peer review got its start with a man known as Paracelsus. Paracelsus was born in Switzerland in 1493, and his given name was Philippus Aureolus. He was extremely intelligent and graduated at the age of seventeen with a medical degree from the University of Vienna. From there he traveled throughout Europe and as far as Turkey and India, studying all that was known of medicine.

It wasn’t uncommon at the time for people to adopt different names they felt better defined them, so upon returning to the University of Basel, Aureolus changed his name to Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. The name, roughly translated, means the great speech maker who makes god-like phrases…from the town of Hohenheim. He obviously considered himself a great speaker and teacher.

In some ways he was and did many things that were unheard of in his day. He wrote and lectured in his native German instead of the intellectual language of Latin. This allowed the common person to understand his work. He also broke tradition and allowed lowly barber-surgeons into his medical classes. In 1500 there were two classes of healers. There were the physicians, those who studied and had knowledge in medicine; and there were the surgeons, those who did the dirty work of surgery. At the time, many physicians had never even done a dissection, and they knew human anatomy only from drawings in an old textbook written in AD 100!

von Hohenheim believed that those who dirtied their hands by actually working on people should have a much better educational background in medicine than was the common practice. He also believed physicians should do dissections and such. Given that most physicians felt surgery was below them, this was not a popular position.

He also alienated what we would call pharmacists of his day. He recognized that these medicine makers were charging outrageous prices for medicine. He tried to get the government to come in and regulate the pharmacies. He failed, so he learned to make the medicines himself, thus his patients didn’t have to go to the pharmacy.

Later von Hohenheim once again changed his name, this time to Paracelsus which translates to better than Celsus. Celsus was a Greek scientist that lived about the same time as Jesus Christ. Though we don’t know of any original work that he himself did, he wrote an eight-book encyclopedia of science that covered much of what was known at the time. One of the books, the book on medicine, survived the one thousand years of Dark Ages and was rediscovered in Italy in 1426. It created a huge stir in Renaissance Europe, and Celsus was immediately considered the final authority on any number of medical questions; thus, naming himself better than Celsus was quite a statement!

In retrospect, Paracelsus was well named. He had accomplished a great deal as an individual, far more than Celsus. He found you could successfully treat syphilis with mercury, which became the standard treatment for the disease for five hundred years until the development of penicillin. The treatment gave rise to the saying an evening with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury. He studied lung disease in coal miners and was the first to associate the disease with the coal dust. He was the first European doctor to use a tincture of opium to relieve a number of ailments; he worked with the mentally ill and was the first to associate a mental and physical retardation condition called cretinism with thyroid problems. In the field of chemistry, he was the first to discover and describe elemental zinc even though zinc as a component of bronze had been used for thousands of years.

However, it was his habit of disagreeing with other scientists for which he is most remembered. Paracelsus traveled extensively and studied medicine all over Europe and the Middle East. Based upon what he learned through his travels, he was in disagreement with many of the things he read in the books of Celsus, Galen, and Avicenna, the Greek and Muslim medical doctors whose works survived the Dark Ages and were considered to be the best medical references at the time. He would gather around him students and townspeople in the middle of the town square and, while giving critical review of some aspect of the works of these ancient doctors, burn their books.

His protests were not confined to the long-dead scientists of ancient Greece. He would treat his contemporary scientists in the same way. Paracelsus was of great intellect, and he could not abide anyone of lesser intelligence. He would take the work done by others and, with no pity shown, publicly point out all that was wrong with that work.

Without doubt, this made him very unpopular with fellow scientists. However, they did recognize his great abilities and,