스티븐 메이슨 - [과학의 역사](Stephen F. Mason, A History of the Sciences) (011206)

#Stephen F. Mason, A History of the Sciences, Collier Books (011206)

--감상
문학을 전공했고, 문학을 내 필생의 업이라고 생각했던 나이지만, 나의 지적인 호기심은 과학에 대한 관심의 불을 항상 지니게 해서, 몇몇 과학 개론서를 읽었었다. 내가 가장 관심을 가졌던 분야는 우리가 살고 있는 우주를 다룬 천문학인데, 특히 칼 세이건의 [코스모스]를 읽었을 때의 흥분과 경이감은 지금도 생생하다(칼 세이건의 말 중에서 특히 기억이 남는 것은 ‘사람들은 신이 우주를 창조했다고 하는데, 그럼 신은 누가 창조했는가? 만일 그건 알 수 없다고 한다면, 우주도 마찬가지라고 할 수 있지 않은가? 또 신은 다른 존재를 필요치않는 자족적인 존재라고 한다면, 우주에 대해서도 마찬가지 말을 할 수 있지 않는가?’ 하는 부분인데, 이 부분을 나는 대학원에서 존 스튜어트 밀의 [자서전]을 읽으면서, 불가지론자였던 존 스튜어트 밀의 아버지 제임스 밀의 말로 다시 한 번 접하게 되었다). 천문학과 양자역학, 아인쉬타인의 상대성 이론 등에 대한 개론서를 읽어나가다가, 과학사를 전체적으로 한번 훑어보는 것도 의미있는 작업이 아닐까 해서 이 책을 집어 들었다(그러고보니 이 번의 시도가 처음은 아니다. 몇 년전에도 이 책을 집어 들었는데, 영어 원문으로 읽기에는 버거워서 칠팔 십 페이지를 읽다가 포기하고 말았다). 이번에도 이 책을 읽어내는 것은 쉬운 작업은 아니었다. 처음에는 개념을 어느 정도나마 이해하면서 읽어나가려 했으나, 프톨레마이오스(톨레미)의 천동설을 설명한 주전원(epicycle) 부분부터 막히기 시작해서, 그 뒤로부터는 이해가 안 되는 부분은 그냥 글자만 읽어나갔다. 그래도 육 백 페이지가 넘는 방대한 분량이라 시간이 꽤 오래 걸렸지만, 결과적으로는 보람이 있는 작업이었다.
이 책을 다 읽고 난 뒤에 분명하게 느끼는 것은 과학조차도 예전에 생각했던 그런 절대적인 객관성을 확보하기는 힘들다는 것과, 대상(존재)에 못지 않게 그 대상을 보는 시각도 중요하다는 것이다. 이 책의 저자인 스티븐 메이슨도 과학 이론의 변동성을 다음과 같이 책의 끝머리에 지적하고 있다.

If we wish to define what science has been and what it has accomplished historically, we find it difficult to formulate a definition which holds for all times and places. The sciences of the bronze-age civilizations differed markedly in character from those of the ancient Greeks, while Greek science possessed only some of the many-sided attributes displayed by science in the modern world. Behind the changing character of science throughout the ages, there has been an element of continuity, for the men of each period have developed and enlarged some aspects of the science bequeathed to them. Accordingly, we may perhaps say that science is a human activity developing an historically cumulative body of interrelated techniques, empirical knowledge, and theories, referring to the natural world. The American authority upon the history of science, Sarton, indeed considers that in this respect science is 'the only human activity which is truly cumulative and progressive'. But only part of science has been cumulative up to the present time, namely, its practical techniques and its empirical facts and laws. Judged by a long time scale, the theories of science have been ephemeral hitherto. The laws of levers and of the reflection of light, known to the Greeks, have become part of the permanent heritage of science, but the scientific theories of the Greeks are only of historical interest. Similarly, given a continuance of the present tempo of scientific activity, we can hardly suppose that any of the scientific theories of today will remain unmodified for long. (599)

그리고 네이겔(Ernest Nagel)은 이 책을 소개하면서 ‘당대의 철학이나 신학 개념이 과학에 미치는 미치는 영향력을 메이슨은 명백히 보여주고 있’음을 지적하고 있다. 과학의 역사는 인간의 여러 일들과 마찬가지로 시행착오의 역사이다. 그럼에도, 이러한 부정적인 측면에서 벗어나서 인간이 알아낸 것과 가능하게 된 기술을 생각해 볼 때에는 인간 생활에서 과학이 자리를 잡기 시작한 삼천 년 정도 전과 지금은 가히 비교가 되지 않을 정도이다. 물론 과학적 지식과 기술은 그 자체로 우리에게 이로운 것만은 아니다. 과학을 이용해서 우리가 할 수 있는 일의 범위가 커지면 커질수록, 우리가 그 반대급부로 치러야할 대가도 커지기 마련인 것이다. 힘은 그 힘의 사용에 대한 책임도 마찬가지로 수반하는 것이다.
우주를 구성하는 근본 입자와, 우주의 모습이나 기원 등에 대해 우리는 확고한 지식에 근접하고 있다. 생명의 본질에 대해서도 풀리지 않는 신비의 영역들로 우리는 발을 내디디고 있다. 하지만 그러한 지식이 우리 인류에게 어떻게 작용할 지는 미지수로 남아있는 듯하다.

<Part one> Ancient Science
*The widespread use of iron and the alphabetic scripts were solvent forces in the ancient bronze-age civilizations. With the alphabet, men outside of the clerical corporations could read and write, for craftsmen have left their names on their wares. Iron was more plentiful than bronze, and now even ploughshares could be made of iron where formerly they were made of wood. Iron weapons gave the barbarians, like the Greek tribes, the force to conquer the bronze-age cultures and set up new civilizations in their stead. (24)
*In the philosophies of Thales and the other Ionian Greeks nature became more impersonal than it had been in the bronze-age cosmologies. The pre-Socratic Greek philosophers tended to remove the gods from nature, supposing that the heavenly bodies were solid material objects, not powerful personalized beings. In a complementary way, their approximate contemporaries, the Hebrew, Amos, the Persian, Zoroaster, and the Indian, Buddha, separated their gods from nature. These religious reformers minimized the roles assigned to the gods in the bronze-age civilizations, the tasks of making rain and providing a good harvest, and indicated that the gods were concerned primarily with the spiritual welfare of man. (26)
*For the Pythagoreans numbers provided a conceptual model of the universe, quantities and shapes determining the forms of all natural objects. At first they thought of numbers as geometrical, physical, and arithmetical entities made up of unit points or particles. They arranged such unit points at the corners of various geometrical figures and spoke of them as triangular numbers, square numbers, and so on. Thus, for the Pythagoreans, numbers had a geometrical shape as well as a quantitative size, and it was in this sense that they understood numbers to be the forms and images of natural objects. (29)
*They<the Atomists--quoter> believed that everything in the universe was composed of atoms, which were physically indivisible. There were an infinite number of atoms, and they moved perpetually in an infinite void. They had existed from eternity, for they had not been created, and could not be destroyed, Atoms differed as to their size, shape, and perhaps their weight. (32)
*They<the school of Hippocrates--quoter> originated the doctrine that the human body contains four humours, or juices, the melancholic, the sanguineous, the choleric and the phlegmatic, the correct proportions of which were indispensable for health, illness arising from an excess of any one of them. The theory seems to have been based on the observation that four substances may be obtained from blood, a dark clot, representing the melancholic humour, a red fluid, or the choleric humour, and fibrin, which was connected with phlegm. (34)
*Thales had thought that a lodestone possesses a soul because it could move a piece of iron, and Anaxagoras generalized this view, ascribing all motions to the operation of a mind or a soul.
He was of the opinion that the sun was a piece of red-hot stone, not much bigger than Greece. The moon and the planets too were like the earth, the moon possessing mountains and inhabitants. He was the first to suggest that the moon shone by reflected light, and the first to explain eclipses in terms of the moon's shadow falling on the earth, and the earth's shadow falling on the moon. For denying that the heavenly bodies were divine, Anaxagoras was prosecuted for impiety, and he was only saved by the intervention of Pericles. (35-6)
*For Socrates. . . the prime task of the philosopher was the ordering of man and human society, not the understanding or the control of nature. Natural philosophy he rejected, and he concerned himself primarily with problems of an ethical and political character. (36)
*The most important failure of the ordering of the universe from chaos according to Plato, was the formulation of a rational design for the world by the Creator; the mechanics of the process whereby the design was put into practical operation were ignored by Plato. (37) 
*Plato's idea of 'Necessity' was closely akin to the Greek conception of Fate, a kind of superhuman will and purpose, that thwarted lesser human purposes and designs. It was an ｅxpression of the limited degree of control that the Greeks exercised over the world in which they lived. Herodotus expressed this feeling well when he said that, 'Of all the sorrows that afflict mankind, the bitterest is this, that we should have consciousness of much, but control over nothing.' (38)
*It had been observed that the planets, Mercury and Venus, never moved far from the sun, and so Heraclides suggested that these planets moved in circular orbits round the sun, thus accounting for the changes in their apparent brightnesses. He also adopted the view of the Pythagoreans, Hicetas and Ecphantus, that the earth rotated on its axis daily in order to explain the apparent diurnal rotation of the heavens. Heraclides supposed further that the universe was infinite, each star being a world in itself, composed of an earth and other bodies. However, Heraclides found few supporters, the followers of both Plato and Aristotle adopting the Eudoxian system. (41)
*According to Archimedes, he<Aristarchus-quoter> held that the earth rotated on its axis daily, and moved round the sun in a circular orbit once a year, the sun and the fixed stars being stationary, and the planets moving in circular orbits with the sun at the centre. (52)

<Part Two> Science in the Orient and Medieval Europe
*'It might seem as if there were a real Governor, but there is no evidence of his existence. one may believe that he exists, but we do not see his form. The hundred parts of the human body, with its nine orifices, and six viscera, all are complete in their places. Which should one prefer? Is there any true ruler other than themselves?' (82) [Chuang Chou, 369-286 B. C.]
*'one frequently sees on high mountains conches and oyster shells, sometimes embedded in rocks. These rocks in pristine times were earth, and the shell fish and oysters lived in water. Subsequently everything was inverted. Things from the bottom came to the top, and the soft became hard. Careful considerations for these facts will lead to far-reaching conclusions.' (87) [Chu Hsi]
*Such a separation of theoretical and empirical enquiry has been a feature of most civilizations that have had a stratified agricultural character. (88)
*One of the more radical sects of the Sufi was the Qarmati, who held that all men were equal, and who endeavoured to give parity to their fellows through educational activities, such as the founding of schools and the writing of encyclopedias. They were particularly interested in artisans, developing, if not originating, the guilds of Islam, to work for the dissemination of their ideas. (97)
*Printing and firearms at the end of the middle ages had effects similar to the inventions of the alphabet and iron making at the end of the bronze age. Printing, like the alphabet before it, served to increase the literacy of mankind, and made the accumulated records of human civilization more available. It made possible the rise of the vernacular and craft literatures, the artisan for the first time in history recording the experience and values of his tradition. Printing also aided the Protestant Reformation by making the Bible more readily available, so that men could seek religious truth in their own experience of the Scriptures as the Reformers suggested.
Gunpowder and firearms ended the days of the armoured knight and his fortified castle, just as iron weapons had eliminated the bronze-age knights with their chariots and bronze rapiers. (108)

<Part Three> The Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
*His<Corpernicus-quoter> new system of the world placed the sun in the center of the universe, and ascribed three motions to the earth, a daily spin on its axis, and annual orbit round the sun, and a gyration of the earth's axis of spin to account for the precession of the equinoxes. (128)
*The Copernican system was simpler and more elegant than the Ptolemaic scheme. on the old system the heavenly bodies had both east-west motions, and rotations in the opposite direction. Now the earth, and all of the planets, moved round the sun in the same direction with speeds that decreased with distance from the sun, whilst the sun at the centre, and the fixed stars at the periphery of the universe were stationary. (130-1)
*He<Kepler-quoter> sought for mathematical harmonies between the orbits of the planets in the Copernican system, finding that the five regular solids could be fitted between the spheres of the planetary orbits. When he came into possession of Tycho Brahe's observations his work became more conclusive, though for long he was obsessed by the notion that the motions of the heavenly bodies must be circular and uniform. However, he found that such an idea in either the Copernican, Ptolemaic, or Tychonian system failed to give predictions of the same degree of accuracy as Tycho's measurements. Hence he abandoned the idea, and trying out other geometrical figures, he found in 1609 that the ellipse fitted perfectly, giving predictions of the required degree of accuracy. The motions of the planets were now no longer circular nor uniform, for his two laws of planetary motion, published in 1609, stated firstly that each planet describes an ellipse with the sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, Nine years later he discovered his third law, namely, the squares of the times the planets require to completed their orbits are propotional to the cubes of their respective mean distances from the sun. (135-6)
*With Kepler the spatial configuration of the solar system was finally cleared up, and the way was made open for the interpretation of the pattern of the heavens in terms of a dynamic equilibrium of mechanical forces. This was the great achievement of early modern science. (137)
*Galileo published most of his astronomical discoveries in the second decade of the seventeenth century, and they were most effective in securing support for the Copernican theory. Now that evidence for the new astronomy was forthcoming, the opposition to it stiffened, for it could no longer be regarded as an unimportant minority opinion. Neighbouring ecclesiastics denounced Galileo's views as heretical, whilst the scholastic philosophers of Pisa declared his opinions to be false and contrary to the authority of Aristotle. They suggested that the sun spots were only clouds moving around the sun, or that they were due to imperfections in the telescope, and there could be no moons moving round Jupiter for there was no mention of them in the works of the ancients. In 1615 Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition at Rome, and there he was made to abjure the Copernican theory. the propositions that the earth rotated on its axis, and that it moved round the sun, were officially declared to be false and heretical, and in 1616 the work of Copernicus was placed on the Index of prohibited books, not to be removed until 1835. (160-5)
*Before modern times the workings of the natural world were thought to be governed by custom, the principle of retribution, and acts of purpose, will, and design rather than by laws of nature and mechanical force. Descartes supposed that nature was governed in its entirety by laws and he identified the laws of nature with the principles of mechanics. (171-2)
*Descartes supposed that God ruled the universe entirely by 'laws of nature' which had been decided upon at the beginning. once he had created the universe, the Deity had not interfered at all with the self-running machine He had made. The amount of matter and the amount of motion in the world were constant and eternal, and so too were 'the laws which God has put into nature'. During the middle ages it had been thought that God participated in the day-to-day running of the universe, delegating power to the hierachies of angelic beings who propelled the heavenly bodies round their courses and who observed and guided terrestrial events. (172)
*Thomas Wright of Durham, 1711-86, a pioneer of sidereal astronomy, appears to have been the first to suggest that the dwelling place of God lay at the unknown centre of the universe. In 1750 he put forward the hypothesis that the sun and the stars of the Milky Way moved round a common centre, forming a giant sidereal system. At this centre, Wright suggested, 'the Divine Presence or some corporeal agent full of all virtues and perfections more immediately presides over His Creation.' (185)
*'When the heavens were a little blue arch, stuck with stars, methought the universe was too straight and close: I was almost stifled for want of air: but now it is enlarged in height and breadth, and a thousand vortices taken in. I begin to breathe with more freedom, and I think the Universe to be incomparably more magnificent than it was before.' (186) <Fontenelle, 1657-1757>
*the 'first question concerning the Celestial Bodies is whether there be a system, that is whether the world or universe compose together one globe, with a centre, or whether the particular globes of earth and stars be scattered dispersedly, each on its own roots, without any system or common centre.' (193) <Bacon>
*Newton undoubtedly made the most important single contribution to the theory of universal gravitation though, as in the later case of the discovery of the calculus which culminated in the controversy with Leibniz over priorities, Newton was only one of a number of scientists who were working on the same problem and who independently and simultaneously contributed to the solution. (201-2)
*Harvey in fact was the first to ascribe the motion of the blood to a mechanical cause, the muscular contraction of the heart. (224)
*Fracastoro, 1484-1553, put forward a similar theory that diseases were seed-like entities in themselves. Fracastoro was an adherent of the atomic theory and so, to explain the long-known fact that certain diseases were contagious or infectious, he suggested that there were atoms or seeds of disease which reproduced themselves and were transferred from person to person by contact or through the air. In this way Paracelsus and Fracastoro anticipated in a general way the later germ theory of disease, though their views were vague and were quite unsupported by experimental evidence. (230-1)

<Part Four> Eighteenth-Century Science: The Development of National Scientific Traditions
*A French expedition to Cayenne in 1673 had found that the length of a pendulum beating out seconds near the equator was shorter than the seconds pendulum in Paris: they were 990, and 994 mm. respectively. Newton had interpreted this to mean that the force of gravity was smaller at the equator than near the poles, which implies that the earth was an oblated spheroid, flattened at the poles, and bulging at the equator. He suggested that such a shape had resulted from the rotation of the earth on its axis when it was in a plastic condition. (292)
*It appeared from the work of Laplace that the universe had no history: it was a perfectly self-regulating machines which had been working over indefinitely long periods in the past, and which would persist indefinitely in the future. However, Laplace advised another and more qualitative picture of the universe which incorporated the idea of evolution that was lacking in his quantitative model. He noted that all of the planets rotated in the same direction round the sun in orbits which were more or less in the same plane. Moreover, the spins of the sun, the seven planets, and their fourteen satellites, were all in this same direction, and all of these bodies were close together compared with their distances from the nearest stars.
Laplace was of the view that such an arrangement of the bodies in the solar system could not have arisen by chance, and he endeavoured to account for it by assuming that the sun, planets, and their satellites had all originated from a primordial mass of gas. He supposed that the hot mass of original nebulous gas had rotated round its centre from the beginning and that it had gradually cooled and contracted. As the mass contracted its rate of rotation caused a nebulous ring to separate off from the equator of the mass, a process which happened equatorial plane. Each ring broke up and was reformed into a spherical body, namely a planet, whilst the residual central core of the nebula formed the sun. Each planet in turn threw off one or more rings, which condensed to form spherical satellites except in the case of the planet Saturn where the rings still remain. (294-5)
*The world appeared to be entirely comprehensible in terms of the Newtonian type of laws, and completely determinate. Thus Laplace in 1812 put forward his famous conception of a Divine Calculator who, knowing the velocities and positions of all the particles in the world at a particular instant, could calculate all that had happened in the past, and all that would happen in the future. (296)
*Curiously enough it was becoming apparent that observations depended on the observer as well as the object observed about the same time as Laplace propounded the conception of the Divine Calculator. From the seventeenth century on it had been known in astronomy that the observation of the same object by different observers often gave slightly differing results. The British Astronomer Royal, Maskelyne, 1732-1811, dismissed one of his assistants because their observations always differed by the same small amount, and he thought the assistant was wrong, By the end of the eighteenth century it was appreciated that observers as well as instruments had their own errors, and techniques were devised for obtaining the most accurate measurement by averaging several observations. The most notable method was that of least squares, which was developed by Legendre, 1752-1833, in 1806, and Gauss, 1777-1855, in 1809. Gauss and Laplace tried to prove that this method gave truly 'objective' measurements which would be independent of any observer, but they established nothing that was conclusive on the matter. (296-7)
*‘Phlogiston', he is reported to have said, 'is not attracted towards the center of the earth, but tends to rise: thence comes the increase of weight in the formation of metallic calces, and the diminution of weight in their reduction.'

Such an idea illustrates how far chemistry was separated from physics and the mechanical philosophy in the mid-eighteenth century, for in physics it was generally accepted that all bodies on the earth were attracted by the force of gravity towards the earth's center. (304) (Gabriel Venel, 1723-75)
*Earth, water, air, and fire, were no longer regarded as elements as there were many kinds of earths, and fire was resolved into heat, light, and smoke, whilst air was shown to be composed of oxygen and nitrogen, and water of hydrogen and oxygen. (311)
*For all their differences, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, thought that once upon a time isolated individual man had come together, and had contracted to live together with one another in human society for ever after. (318)
*'Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas,' he wrote. 'How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, From experience. (320) (John Locke)
*Molyneux and Berkeley studied case histories of men blind from birth who had recovered their sight, where it was found that the sense of sight was at first confusing, and was only slowly adapted to the determination of shapes, sizes and distances, which previously had been judged by the sense of touch. Thus they concluded that vision was not innately connected with touch, the two becoming linked and blended by experience. (320-1)
*An attempt to solve the third problem of how impressions on the sense organs became transformed into ideas was made by the physician, David Hartley, 1705-57, in his Observations on Man, published in 1749. He held that stimuli applied to the sense organs excited vibrations in the nerves, which travelled up to the brain and there gave rise to ideas. The vibrations continued on in the brain and there gave rise to ideas. The vibrations continued on it the brain long after the stimulus to the sense organ had died away, so that sensations and ideas were remembered. A number of residual vibrations in the brain were associated together if their corresponding sensations habitually came at the same time, or concurrently, so that after a while only one of those sensations was required to set going the residual vibrations of the group with which it was associated. In this way a single sensation could set off a whole train of associated ideas in the brain. Hartley thought that such a doctrine could be applied in everyday life to improve the human race. (322)
*The biologists of modern times inherited from antiquity two rather contradictory views of the organic world, both of which had been elaborated by Aristotle. The one view conceived of the organic species as a hierarchy of creatures with comparatively large discontinuities between their ranks: there were, for example, only eleven classes in Aristotle's hierarchy of animals. The other view saw the various animals and plants as so many links in a great chain of creatures, the gradations between them being insensible and continuous. Philosophically, such conceptions could be reconciled by supposing that the highest creature of one class was directly contingent upon the lowest creature of the order above. In the practice of biological classification, however, the two conceptions could not be reconciled, and they gave rise to two different kinds of classificatory technique, the so-called 'artificial' and 'natural' systems of classification. (331)
*The view that the actions of animals and human beings were governed by impressions and stimuli received from the environment had arisen from the idea that living organisms were machines. Such an idea was justified, Lamarck held, if only account were taken of the driving force of the organism's machinery. In the case of the lowest organisms the driving forces of heat and electricity derived from the environment, so that such creatures were completely governed by external factors. But as the evolutionary scale was ascended the organisms generated their own driving forces to a greater and greater degree, and so they obtained an ever-increasing measure of self-determination which found its fullest ｅxpression in the case of man-kind. The environment was a constant external determinant of organic nature, and thus the psychologists who supposed that man was governed by his world were correct to some degree. But so too, perhaps in a more important sense, were the theorists who suggested that man had dominion over the environment through his intellect, as the self-determination of creatures was a progressive factor in the evolutionary scale.
'If nature had confined herself to her original method,' wrote Lamarck, 'that is, to a force purely external and foreign to the animal, her work would have remained very imperfect: animals would have been simply passive machines, and nature would never have produced in such organisms the wonderful phenomena of sensibility, the intimate feeling of existence, the power of acting, and lastly, ideas, by means of which she created the most astonishing of all, viz., thought or intelligence. (347-8)
*In the beginning, Boehme suggested, the Spirit of nature, or God, by himself was everything and yet also no-thing, for there was nothing set over against God through which He could manifest himself. Hence arose in the Spirit a centrifugal desire towards self-manifestation which generated in turn its contrary and complement, a centripetal will to conscious self-possession. In the movement deriving from the conflict, the will disciplined and assimilated the desire, producing an image of the Spirit which externalized was nature. (351-2)
*Schelling and Oken brought together the main ideas of Boehme and Leibniz, and infused them with the conception that the universe was the product of a historical development, a notion which had appeared earlier in the works of Herder and to some degree in those of Kant. Adopting the view that man was an epitome of the whole universe, an idea which was of considerable force in German thought, Schelling and Oken suggested that man was a completed microcosm because he was the final product of the development of the world and summed up within himself all aspects of the previous development of nature. He was also a complete microcosm, they suggested, because the World Spirit, which had generated nature by manifesting externally its own internal development, had finally found itself fully manifest in the mind of man. (355)
*The nature philosophers recognized three main grades or levels of development in nature. Firstly, there were mechanical entities, like the sun and planets, which formed a system, though they possessed the lowest degree of self-determination: secondly, there were chemical substances which had a greater individuality and self-activity, as many chemical processes were spontaneous and highly specific: and thirdly, there were living organisms which were self-developing individuals with self-contained structures. Each grade of entities possessed the qualities and properties of the lower grades as well as those peculiar to itself, so that chemicals possessed mechanical attributes and living organisms both chemical and mechanical qualities, while man at the top of the scale of living creatures subsumed within himself the properties of all entities in the universe and was a complete microcosm. (357)
*In his earliest work of 1796 Hilaire suggested that nature had formed all creatures on the basis of a single plan. Different animals possessed the same organs, which in some were exaggerated, like the trunk, or prolonged nose, of the elephant, and which in others became vestigial, like the rudimentary side toes of hooved creatures. Hilaire then set out to find the organs which were the same, or homologous, in different animals so that he could uncover the general plan behind the diversity study of animal world. (376)
*'Nature tends to repeat the same organs in the same number and in the same relations and varies to infinity only their form,' wrote Hilaire. 'From this standpoint there are no different animals. one fact alone dominates: it is as if a single being were appearing. It is an abstract being, residing in Animality, which is tangible to our senses under diverse forms.' (377)
*If the environment changed, the animals species either changed their structural forms, and thus their habits and functions, or they were eliminated. Moreover, such changes were not gradual, as Lamarck had supposed, but sudden and mutative. Hilaire argued that reptiles could not have evolved gradually into birds, a comprehensive change must have taken place within a generation or so. As evidence for sudden mutative changes, Hilaire instanced the birth of monsters, and in 1826 he endeavoured to induce the formation of monstruous birds by interfering with the incubation of their eggs. The normal course of embryological development was considered by Hilaire to be good evidence for the evolution of the species, as he thought that the development of the individual organism recapitulated the evolutionary history of its species.

'an amphibian is at first a fish under the name of a tadpole, and then a reptile under that of a frog,' he wrote, 'in this observed fact is realized what we have above represented as a hypothesis, the transformation of one organic stage into the stage immediately superior.'   (379)
*'It is not in the substance that in plants and animals the identity of the species is manifest; it is in the form. There are probably not two men, two oaks, two rose trees, which have the compound elements of their bodies in the same proportion,--and even these elements change without end, they circulated rather than reside in that abstract figured space which we call the form: in a few years probably there is not left one atom of that which constitutes our body today,--only the form is persistent: the form alone perpetuates in multiplying itself, transmitted by the mysterious operation which we call generation to an endless series of individuals.'
In contrast to Hilaire who supposed that the structure of an animal determined its functions and habits, Cuvier held that the habits and functions which an animal possessed shaped the structural form. (380)
*For Hilaire the habits and functions of an animal were determined by its anatomical structure, but for Lamarck and Cuvier the reverse was true, Lamarck emphasizing the structural adaptations of organs caused, through a change of habits, by external conditions, and Cuvier the internal mutual adaptations of organs through their functions within an animal, which depended upon the existence of the animal as a whole in itself. (385)

--Part Five: The Science of the Nineteeth Century: The Agent of Industrial and Intellectual Change
*‘I say that the power of the population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man. . . (for) population when unchecked increases in geometrical ratio, subsistence only increases in an arithmetic ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.'  (413) [Malthus]
*'In February 1858. . . the problem (of evolution) presented itself to me, and something led me to think of the positive checks described by Malthus in his Essay on Population, a work I had read several years before, and which had made a deep and permanent impression on my mind. These checks--war, disease, famine and the like,--must, it occurred to me, act on animals as well as man. Then I thought of the enormously rapid multiplication of animals, causing these checks to be much more effective in them than in the case of man; and while pondering vaguely on this fact, there suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest,--that the individuals removed by these checks must be on the whole inferior to those that survived. I sketched the draft of my paper. . . and sent it by the next post to Mr. Darwin. (416-7) [Wallace]
*When Darwin's Origin of the Species appeared in 1859 Spencer extended the theory of natural selection to human society, viewing the 'survival of the fittest', not only as the mechanism of organic evolution, but also as the mode of progress of mankind. In particular, it exemplified and justified to Spencer's mind the laissez-faire policies of the mid-Victorian period: free trade and economic competition were, so to speak, the social forms of natural selection. To tamper with them would interfere with the process of cosmic evolution, and would throw out of gear the vehicle of human progress. (421)
*'The man who tells us', he affirmed, 'that he loves the Kaffir as he loves his brother is probably deceiving himself. If he is not, then all we can say is that a nation of such men. . . will not stand for many generations: it cannot survive in the struggle of nations.' (423) [Karl Pearson, 1857-1936]
*Nageli was of the opinion that Darwin had not satisfactorily explained how higher organisms with a wider and superior set of characteristics could have originated from lower creatures. A succession of small favourable variations was not enough, he thought; some inner driving force within the organism was necessary to bring about such marked changes. Nageli did not think of this force as a vital spirit, but as a physico-chemical force analogous to the force of inertia mechanics. A ball will keep on rolling until it meets an obstacle, and in the same way an organism will evolve until it meets the obstacle of natural selection, which prunes away the forms that do not follow the predominant line of evolution. If there were no struggle for existence, the inner self-differentiating force within organisms would produce an enormous variety of forms and the earth would be overpopulated, but through the mechanism of natural selection only the viable forms are preserved. Nageli supposed that evolution was not a gradual and continuous process: the inner force moved according to the categories of the Hegelian dialectic, it performed leaps. Evolution, therefore, was discontinuous, it consisted of a series of mutations. In fact it was from Nageli that the Dutch botanist, Hugo de Vries, 1848-1935, obtained the idea of biological mutation at the end of the century. (429-30)
*Count Gobineau was a Frenchman who published an Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in 1853. Houston Stewart Chamberlain was an Englishman, though he was brought up in Germany and wrote in German The Principles of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1899. These men were of the opinion that the various human races were fixed types and differed widely one from the other. They believed that the Aryan races were superior, and that these races alone had built civilized society, being the natural rulers of the rest of mankind. The interbredding of the Aryans with inferior races, they held, would lead to the degeneration of the human species. (433)
*He<Pieter van Musschenbroek-quoter> tried to preserve electrical charge from decay in a bottle of water by leading charge from an electrical machine into the bottle through a wire. He held the outside of the bottle in one hand and touched the wire with the other, when, as he put it, 'the arm and the body was affected in a terrible manner which I cannot express; in a word, I thought it was all up with me.'
With these instruments Benjamin Franklin, 1706-90, of Philadelphia, carried out a series of researches to show that lightning was of an electrical character. In 1749 he pointed out that both the lightning flash and the electric spark were practically instantaneous, producing a similar light and sound; both were able to set fire to bodies and melt metals; both flowed through conductors, notably metals, and concentrated on sharp points; and both were able to destroy magnetism, or reverse the polarity of a magnet, whilst both could kill living creatures. In 1752 he carried out his famous kite experiment, collecting charge from a thunder cloud in a Leiden jar, and showing that it was similar in its effects to the charge produced by an electrical machine. To explain the phenomenal of electricity known to him, Franklin supposed that there was an imponderable electrical fluid which pervaded neutral when the concentration of fluid within them and outside were the same. An excess of the fluid rendered a body positively charged, whilst a deficit rendered it negatively charged. Franklin held that light consisted of vibration in an ether which filled all space, and like other wave theorists, Leonard Euler before him and Thomas Young after him, he thought that the electrical fluid of space might be the same as the luminiferous ether. (475)
*The German nature-philosophers were interested in a different aspect of electricity and magnetism, namely, the phenomenon of polarity, which appeared to exemplify perfectly the dialectical tension they postulated between opposite poles or forces which brought order out of chaos. Since there was only one kind of power behind the development of nature in their philosophy, namely, that of the World Spirit, they held that light, electricity, magnetism, and chemical forces, were all interconnceted: all were different aspects of the same thing. (476)
*'Whether it was not possible that the vibrations which in a certain theory are assumed to account for radiation and radiant phenomena may not occur in the lines of force which connect particles, and consequently masses of matter together: a notion, which as far as it is admitted, will dispense with the ether which, in another view, is supposed to be a medium in which these vibrations take place.'

Faraday's query was the first suggestion towards the electromagnetic theory of light, which was put forward in 1862 by Clerk Maxwell 1831-79. (481)

<Part Six> Twentieth-Century Science: New Fields and New Powers
*While Darwinism has been the theory of organic evolution generally received in the scientific world, Lamarkism has found some supporters. From 1920 to 1937 McDougall trained rats over a number of generations to avoid a route leading to an electric shock in favour of a route leading to food, finding that the number of training runs decreased in successive generations. More striking evidence for the Lamarckian view has been obtained from studies of the growth of bacteria and protozoa. From 1930 Jennings has shown that some protozoa adaptively modify themselves to alien environmental conditions, such as high temperatures and poisonous chemicals, the acquired modifications being inherited, as the organisms adapt back to their old conditions as slowly as they changed over to the new. From 1938 Hishelwood has treated the growth of the bacterial cell as a chemical reaction, studying the kinetics of the process, and has obtained similar results. (540)
*The Deity. . . endures for ever, and is everywhere present, and by existing always and everywhere, He constitutes duration and space. . . . (He is) a Being incorporeal, loving, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to Himself.' (541-2) {Newton]
*The decline of the ether theories dates from 1887 when Michelson, 1852-1931, and Morely, 1838-1923, in America measured the velocity of light along the line of the earth's motion through the ether and at right angles to it. The velocity of light in two cases was found to be the same, a result which seemed to indicate, so Michelson thought, that the ether moved with the earth. However Lodge, 1851-1940, at London found in 1893 that light passed between two massive steel discs rotating at high speed was not altered in velocity, showing that the discs did not drag the ether with them. The aberration of light from the stars also suggested that the ether did not move with the earth, and thus Michelson and Morley's experiment led to the abandonment of the view that there was a material ether pervading space which carried the wave vibrations of light. (542-3)
*Einstein. . . suggested in 1905 that the phenomena of physics could be more economically covered if it were assumed that the laws of nature were the same in all systems moving with uniform relative velocities, and that the velocity of light in empty space was always the same. Ritz in 1908 attempted to account for the Michelson-Morley experiment by supposing that the velocity of light depended upon the speed of its source, be de Sitter, 1872-1934 at Leiden pointed out in 1913 that if this were so then two stars rotating round one another would show an apparently anomalous movement, which was not observed. Einstein's assumption that the velocity of light was constant and independent of the velocities of the source and observe seemed to be justified therefore, and the Newtonian view that such velocities were additive had to be dropped now that there was no stationary ether to carry the wave vibrations of light. (543-4)
*Einstein's teacher, Ninkowski, 1864-1909, showed in 1908 that whilst observers in uniform relative motion would not assign the same time and space separations the interval, a combination of space and time, between the events. Minkowski found that if time were made into a kind of distance by multiplying it by the velocity of light, symbolized as C, then if the difference in time between two events is T for a particular observe, and the distance between them S, the value of S--C.T is the same for all observers. Minkowski termed the square root of S--C.T the space-time interval between two events, and since it is the same of all observers, it is an absolute quantity in four-dimensional space-time, whilst space and time  separately are not. (545)
*Heisenberg in 1927 showed that the momentum and energy of an electron were similarly indeterminate, the product of the momentum and position of an electron being uncertain to a degree that could never be less than h/2π, where h was Planck's constant. This 'Principle of Uncertainty' followed from the wave-particle duality of matter and radiation, and from the fact that the characteristics of objects were usually unavoidably altered during the course of experimentation. If the position of an electron were to be accurately measured, radiations of very small wavelengths would possess quanta of high energy, and would alter the momentum and energy of the electron by impact. (557)
*Perhaps the most spectacular field opened up by the discovery of the fundamental particles in the present century is the study of nuclear reactions. The radioactivity of the heavy elements was recognized to be a case of spontaneous atomic change by Rutherford and Soddy in 1902, and the first case of an artificial atomic transmutation was discovered by Rutherfourd in 1919, when he bombarded nitrogen with alpha particles and produced fast moving protons. (562)
*On the basis of Doppler's principle, Hubble's law indicated that each nebula was receding with a velocity proportional to its distance from our galaxy, the most distant nebulae moving away with enormous velocities of the order of one-seventh of the speed of light. (566)
*The cosmological theories of the twentieth century are as numerous and varied as the ether theories of the nineteenth century, of which they are in a sense the historical heirs. They both belong to a tradition which has sought to explain the phenomena of nature in terms of a cosmic continuum, a geometrical space-time in the first case and a mechanical all-pervading ether in the second. To this tradition belongs the work of Einstein who, putting an end to the invention of ether models with his theory of relativity, constructed the first of the world models of the present century.
In 1917 Einstein considered the problem as to whether the space and matter of the universe, Einstein pointed out that in an infinitude of matter each object would possess infinite mass and inertia. on the other hand, if the universe had a finite boundary in Euclidian space, the matter inside the universe would not be in equilibrium with the empty space outside, and such a world would not constitute a stable system. To overcome these difficulties, Einstein suggested that the universe might possess a finite volume but no finite boundaries, as would be the case if space were the three-dimensional analogue of the two-dimensional surface of a sphere, which has a definite area but no boundaries, that is, no edges to the area. All point areas on the surface of a sphere are symmetrical and equivalent to one another, and so too would be the three-dimensional analogues, the point volumes of spherical space. Thus the unit volumes of matter in spherical space would be all alike, and there would be no special boundary cases, like the particles at the edge of a finite universe in Euclidian space. Because of the absence of special boundary cases, all observers in Einstein's world would be equivalent, observing the same phenomena and obtaining the same information, as the special theory of relativity required. (568)
*Comparing the scientist to a fisherman who caught only those fishes which could not get through the meshes of his net, Eddington suggested that the characteristics of the method of science determined the content and the nature of scientific knowledge. The scientific method was not a mirror which reflected the nature of the world, but a kaleidoscope which determined by its structure the images perceived. Some critics suggested that the net of the scientific method could not determine the qualitative features of the natural phenomena 'caught' and studied, but Eddington countered this argument with the claim that science was concerned only with the quantitative and measurable aspects of phenomena, not the qualitative. (570)
*He<Milne-quoter> pointed out that in observing distant objects, such as the nebulae, we must allow for the fact that the further away they are placed the earlier in the history of the universe the light coming from them started on its journey. The light perceived today started out from the nearer nebulae about a million years ago and that from the distant nebulae some 500 million years ago, and thus we must correct for the time lag more and more the further out we go in order to obtain a contemporaneous picture of the universe. But the correction applied depends upon the time scale employed, so that it is possible to construct different world models using different time scales. (571-2)
*In the 1940's, Einstein in America and de Broglie in France, together with some physicists in the Soviet Union, expressed the view that physical events are fully determinate in principle, and that the Uncertainty Principle is merely indicative of the incompleteness of quantum mechanics in its present form. They argued that quantum mechanics as it stands today is essentially a method of dealing statistically with assemblies containing large numbers of physical systems, notably atoms or subatomic particles, so that it is illegitimate to make final statements concerning individual systems, or single particles, on the basis of that theory. The time taken for half of a given number of radioactive atoms to decompose, for example, can be determined with some precision, but the time at which a particular atom will decompose cannot be determined at all as yet, and it has been shown that this barrier to knowledge must always be unsuperable, in principle, unless some of the essentials of the quantum mechanical theory are abandoned. (597)
*If we wish to define what science has been and what it has accomplished historically, we find it difficult to formulate a definition which holds for all times and places. The sciences of the bronze-age civilizations differed markedly in character from those of the ancient Greeks, while Greek science possessed only some of the many-sided attributes displayed by science in the modern world. Behind the changing character of science throughout the ages, there has been an element of continuity, for the men of each period have developed and enlarged some aspects of the science bequeathed to them. Accordingly, we may perhaps say that science is a human activity developing an historically cumulative body of interrelated techniques, empirical knowledge, and theories, referring to the natural world. The American authority upon the history of science, Sarton, indeed considers that in this respect science is 'the only human activity which is truly cumulative and progressive'. But only part of science has been cumulative up to the present time, namely, its practical techniques and its empirical facts and laws. Judged by a long time scale, the theories of science have been ephemeral hitherto. The laws of levers and of the reflection of light, known to the Greeks, have become part of the permanent heritage of science, but the scientific theories of the Greeks are only of historical interest. Similarly, given a continuance of the present tempo of scientific activity, we can hardly suppose that any of the scientific theories of today will remain unmodified for long. (599)