Pioneers of Science Part 1

Pioneers of Science.

by Oliver Lodge.

PREFACE

This book takes its origin in a course of lectures on the history and progress of Astronomy arranged for me in the year 1887 by three of my colleagues (A.C.B., J.M., G.H.R.), one of whom gave the course its name.

The lectures having been found interesting, it was natural to write them out in full and publish.

If I may claim for them any merit, I should say it consists in their simple statement and explanation of scientific facts and laws. The biographical details are compiled from all readily available sources, there is no novelty or originality about them; though it is hoped that there may be some vividness. I have simply tried to present a living figure of each Pioneer in turn, and to trace his influence on the progress of thought.

I am indebted to many biographers and writers, among others to Mr.

E.J.C. Morton, whose excellent set of lives published by the S.P.C.K.

saved me much trouble in the early part of the course.

As we approach recent times the subject grows more complex, and the men more nearly contemporaries; hence the biographical aspect diminishes and the scientific treatment becomes fuller, but in no case has it been allowed to become technical and generally unreadable.

To the friends (C.C.C., F.W.H.M., E.F.R.) who with great kindness have revised the proofs, and have indicated places where the facts could be made more readily intelligible by a clearer statement, I express my genuine grat.i.tude.

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LIVERPOOL, _November, 1892_.

PIONEERS OF SCIENCE

PART I

_FROM DUSK TO DAYLIGHT_

DATES AND SUMMARY OF FACTS FOR LECTURE I

_Physical Science of the Ancients._ Thales 640 B.C., Anaximander 610 B.C., PYTHAGORAS 600 B.C., Anaxagoras 500 B.C., Eudoxus 400 B.C., ARISTOTLE 384 B.C., Aristarchus 300 B.C., ARCHIMEDES 287 B.C., Eratosthenes 276 B.C., HIPPARCHUS 160 B.C., Ptolemy 100 A.D.

_Science of the Middle Ages._ Cultivated only among the Arabs; largely in the forms of astrology, alchemy, and algebra.

_Return of Science to Europe._ Roger Bacon 1240, Leonardo da Vinci 1480, (Printing 1455), Columbus 1492, Copernicus 1543.

_A sketch of Copernik's life and work._ Born 1473 at Thorn in Poland.

Studied mathematics at Bologna. Became an ecclesiastic. Lived at Frauenburg near mouth of Vistula. Subst.i.tuted for the apparent motion of the heavens the real motion of the earth. Published tables of planetary motions. Motion still supposed to be in epicycles. Worked out his ideas for 36 years, and finally dedicated his work to the Pope. Died just as his book was printed, aged 72, a century before the birth of Newton. A colossal statue by Thorwaldsen erected at Warsaw in 1830.

PIONEERS OF SCIENCE

LECTURE I

COPERNICUS AND THE MOTION OF THE EARTH

The ordinary run of men live among phenomena of which they know nothing and care less. They see bodies fall to the earth, they hear sounds, they kindle fires, they see the heavens roll above them, but of the causes and inner working of the whole they are ignorant, and with their ignorance they are content.

"Understand the structure of a soap-bubble?" said a cultivated literary man whom I know; "I wouldn't cross the street to know it!"

And if this is a prevalent att.i.tude now, what must have been the att.i.tude in ancient times, when mankind was emerging from savagery, and when history seems composed of hara.s.sments by wars abroad and revolutions at home? In the most violently disturbed times indeed, those with which ordinary history is mainly occupied, science is quite impossible. It needs as its condition, in order to flourish, a fairly quiet, untroubled state, or else a cloister or university removed from the din and bustle of the political and commercial world. In such places it has taken its rise, and in such peaceful places and quiet times true science will continue to be cultivated.

The great bulk of mankind must always remain, I suppose, more or less careless of scientific research and scientific result, except in so far as it affects their modes of locomotion, their health and pleasure, or their purse.

But among a people hurried and busy and preoccupied, some in the pursuit of riches, some in the pursuit of pleasure, and some, the majority, in the struggle for existence, there arise in every generation, here and there, one or two great souls--men who seem of another age and country, who look upon the bustle and feverish activity and are not infected by it, who watch others achieving prizes of riches and pleasure and are not disturbed, who look on the world and the universe they are born in with quite other eyes. To them it appears not as a bazaar to buy and to sell in; not as a ladder to scramble up (or down) helter-skelter without knowing whither or why; but as a fact--a great and mysterious fact--to be pondered over, studied, and perchance in some small measure understood. By the mult.i.tude these men were sneered at as eccentric or feared as supernatural. Their calm, clear, contemplative att.i.tude seemed either insane or diabolic; and accordingly they have been pitied as enthusiasts or killed as blasphemers. One of these great souls may have been a prophet or preacher, and have called to his generation to bethink them of why and what they were, to struggle less and meditate more, to search for things of true value and not for dross. Another has been a poet or musician, and has uttered in words or in song thoughts dimly possible to many men, but by them unutterable and left inarticulate.

Another has been influenced still more _directly_ by the universe around him, has felt at times overpowered by the mystery and solemnity of it all, and has been impelled by a force stronger than himself to study it, patiently, slowly, diligently; content if he could gather a few crumbs of the great harvest of knowledge, happy if he could grasp some great generalization or wide-embracing law, and so in some small measure enter into the mind and thought of the Designer of all this wondrous frame of things.

These last have been the men of science, the great and heaven-born men of science; and they are few. In our own day, amid the throng of inventions, there are a mult.i.tude of small men using the name of science but working for their own ends, jostling and scrambling just as they would jostle and scramble in any other trade or profession. These may be workers, they may and do advance knowledge, but they are never pioneers.

Not to them is it given to open out great tracts of unexplored territory, or to view the promised land as from a mountain-top. Of them we shall not speak; we will concern ourselves only with the greatest, the epoch-making men, to whose life and work we and all who come after them owe so much. Such a man was Thales. Such was Archimedes, Hipparchus, Copernicus. Such pre-eminently was Newton.

Now I am not going to attempt a history of science. Such a work in ten lectures would be absurd. I intend to pick out a few salient names here and there, and to study these in some detail, rather than by attempting to deal with too many to lose individuality and distinctness.

We know so little of the great names of antiquity, that they are for this purpose scarcely suitable. In some departments the science of the Greeks was remarkable, though it is completely overshadowed by their philosophy; yet it was largely based on what has proved to be a wrong method of procedure, viz the introspective and conjectural, rather than the inductive and experimental methods. They investigated Nature by studying their own minds, by considering the meanings of words, rather than by studying things and recording phenomena. This wrong (though by no means, on the face of it, absurd) method was not pursued exclusively, else would their science have been valueless, but the influence it had was such as materially to detract from the value of their speculations and discoveries. For when truth and falsehood are inextricably woven into a statement, the truth is as hopelessly hidden as if it had never been stated, for we have no criterion to distinguish the false from the true.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 1.--Archimedes.]

Besides this, however, many of their discoveries were ultimately lost to the world, some, as at Alexandria, by fire--the bigoted work of a Mohammedan conqueror--some by irruption of barbarians; and all were buried so long and so completely by the night of the dark ages, that they had to be rediscovered almost as absolutely and completely as though they had never been. Some of the names of antiquity we shall have occasion to refer to; so I have arranged some of them in chronological order on page 4, and as a representative one I may specially emphasize Archimedes, one of the greatest men of science there has ever been, and the father of physics.

The only effective link between the old and the new science is afforded by the Arabs. The dark ages come as an utter gap in the scientific history of Europe, and for more than a thousand years there was not a scientific man of note except in Arabia; and with the Arabs knowledge was so mixed up with magic and enchantment that one cannot contemplate it with any degree of satisfaction, and little real progress was made.

In some of the _Waverley Novels_ you can realize the state of matters in these times; and you know how the only approach to science is through some Arab sorcerer or astrologer, maintained usually by a monarch, and consulted upon all great occasions, as the oracles were of old.

In the thirteenth century, however, a really great scientific man appeared, who may be said to herald the dawn of modern science in Europe. This man was Roger Bacon. He cannot be said to do more than herald it, however, for we must wait two hundred years for the next name of great magnitude; moreover he was isolated, and so far in advance of his time that he left no followers. His own work suffered from the prevailing ignorance, for he was persecuted and imprisoned, not for the commonplace and natural reason that he frightened the Church, but merely because he was eccentric in his habits and knew too much.

The man I spoke of as coming two hundred years later is Leonardo da Vinci. True he is best known as an artist, but if you read his works you will come to the conclusion that he was the most scientific artist who ever lived. He teaches the laws of perspective (then new), of light and shade, of colour, of the equilibrium of bodies, and of a mult.i.tude of other matters where science touches on art--not always quite correctly according to modern ideas, but in beautiful and precise language. For clear and conscious power, for wide-embracing knowledge and skill, Leonardo is one of the most remarkable men that ever lived.

About this time the tremendous invention of printing was achieved, and Columbus unwittingly discovered the New World. The middle of the next century must be taken as the real dawn of modern science; for the year 1543 marks the publication of the life-work of Copernicus.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 2.--Leonardo da Vinci.]

Nicolas Copernik was his proper name. Copernicus is merely the Latinized form of it, according to the then prevailing fashion. He was born at Thorn, in Polish Prussia, in 1473. His father is believed to have been a German. He graduated at Cracow as doctor in arts and medicine, and was destined for the ecclesiastical profession. The details of his life are few; it seems to have been quiet and uneventful, and we know very little about it. He was instructed in astronomy at Cracow, and learnt mathematics at Bologna. Thence he went to Rome, where he was made Professor of Mathematics; and soon afterwards he went into orders. On his return home, he took charge of the princ.i.p.al church in his native place, and became a canon. At Frauenburg, near the mouth of the Vistula, he lived the remainder of his life. We find him reporting on coinage for the Government, but otherwise he does not appear as having entered into the life of the times.

He was a quiet, scholarly monk of studious habits, and with a reputation which drew to him several earnest students, who received _viva voce_ instruction from him; so, in study and meditation, his life pa.s.sed.

He compiled tables of the planetary motions which were far more correct than any which had hitherto appeared, and which remained serviceable for long afterwards. The Ptolemaic system of the heavens, which had been the orthodox system all through the Christian era, he endeavoured to improve and simplify by the hypothesis that the sun was the centre of the system instead of the earth; and the first consequences of this change he worked out for many years, producing in the end a great book: his one life-work. This famous work, "De Revolutionibus...o...b..um Coelestium,"

embodied all his painstaking calculations, applied his new system to each of the bodies in the solar system in succession, and treated besides of much other recondite matter. Towards the close of his life it was put into type. He can scarcely be said to have lived to see it appear, for he was stricken with paralysis before its completion; but a printed copy was brought to his bedside and put into his hands, so that he might just feel it before he died.