VOLUME VII: The Nature of the Universe
The mind of the most rational among us may be compared to a stormy ocean of passionate convictions based upon desire, upon which float perilously a few tiny boats carrying a cargo of scientifically tested beliefs. Nor is this to be altogether deplored: life has to be lived, and there is no time to test rationally all the beliefs by which our conduct is regulated. Without a certain wholesome rashness, no one could long survive. Scientific method, therefore, must in its very nature, be conned to the more solemn and official of our opinions.
Bertrand Russell
Human beings are an inquisitive lot. From the beginning of understanding, we have struggled to know our place in the cosmos—the universe in which we live and which in some mysterious way defines our being. The need to know, to understand, even to control our universe, provided the driving force for the particular way of knowing the world which we call science. Although the immediate appearance of nature as manifested in the position of a planet, the shape of a continent, the elusiveness of a breeze, or the violence of a black hole is temporal, scientists believe to the point of faith that the physical laws governing each of these are unchanging and are the same throughout the universe. Scientists believe that these laws are knowable and that they are called to ferret them out. What they learn provides an organizing framework for understanding who and what we are. Science has been incredibly successful in applying its understanding to the creation of new knowledge and understanding. For a wide range of questions dealing with aspects of the external world, no other way of knowing matches its success. But it is not the only way of knowing, and an important part of becoming an educated person is to be able to distinguish the questions which science can possibly answer from those which must be answered through other realms of knowledge.
The readings in this volume were selected because in some important way, each illustrates a particular aspect of the endeavor we call science. The selections may be used in a variety of ways. Many are appropriate for introductory courses in the history of Western civilization. All of the readings can be used to supplement textbooks in introductory science courses. Most of the readings are taken from physical science, because mathematics and astronomy, and their offspring physics, are prior. They are prior in the historical sense; they are also prior because they are arguably the most successful, in that they deal with the simplest systems, systems which readily lend themselves to mathematical analysis. The origins of what we recognize as science arise from the fusion of mathematics and astronomy which led to Newton’s Principia. Several of the selections treat mathematics; one treats statistics, and three are taken from biology. A variety of sources from psychology can be found in Volume X of the series, Human Nature, and readings which discuss the impact of science and technology on society can be found in Volume VIII, Science, Technology and Society.
In some sense, any anthology is essentially a history of the subject. The readings in this volume are arranged roughly in chronological order and for that reason they may provide some crude idea of the history of thought in the sciences. However, the reader should not assume that this collection provides adequate insight into the history of physical thought. The selection of Greek writings is altogether too short to be of real use in a historical sense. The collection provides no sense of the important work done in Europe during the Medieval period, of the importance of translation of Greek texts into Latin, of the importance of the rise of the great European universities, or even of the importance of the Judeo-Christian idea that nature is ordered and knowable.
In the first section, Greek Origins, the reader will be able to glimpse the origins of modern science through the eyes of the Greeks. The Greek emphasis on rational thought led to the idea that order exists in the world and that humans can learn about that order by thinking carefully about it. These selections primarily treat Greek mathematics and astronomy, including speculations on the nature and causes of motion—speculations which were to dominate western views of motion for more than a millennium and which would later be rejected by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.
The next section, The Scientific Revolution, contains selections from the 16th and 17th centuries, readings which illustrate the origins of the Scientific Revolution. Copernicus argued for a sun-centered universe instead of an earth-centered universe; Galileo trained his new telescope on the heavens and became the first person to see the moon, the sun, planets and other heavenly objects with anything other than the unaided human eye. His discovery of the moons of Jupiter further eroded the previous belief that everything in the universe orbited the earth. Descartes believed that all of nature was subject to precise mathematical laws and his works were important to the development of mathematics and to the use of mathematics in attempts to describe nature. He tried mightily to develop a coherent method by which to study the world around us. Newton provided the great synthesis, connecting the falling of objects on earth to the motion of the moon about the earth, providing a simple explanation of such diverse phenomena as Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, the orbit of Halley’s comet and the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. Newton’s work was so successful that it fostered the idea that dominated the 18th century—the enlightenment idea that science could solve all of humankind’s problems. Francis Bacon refined the notion of "scientific method," as he articulated the primacy for science of inductive reasoning—reasoning from the particular of experiment to the general theory.
A variety of selections from the 19th and early 20th century provide glimpses of the growing maturity and complexity of scientific thought in the section entitled The Growth and Maturation of Scientific Knowledge. Darwin clearly had the greatest intellectual impact on the larger society and, like Galileo, his work fertilized a contentious and ongoing friction between science and religion. Louis Agassiz, a renowned teacher, also provided many of the seminal ideas of classical biology. Rudolph Clausius was among the first to articulate the trick which nature plays on those who would use heat as a source of energy. Researchers struggled for a century to understand why they could not build heat engines which would convert most of the heat energy to work. The answer rests in The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which describes the constraints nature places on the conversion of heat into other forms of energy. Louis Pasteur writes in an extraordinarily clear manner of the implications of his discovery of "germs" and the application of that discovery to medical practices. In a remarkable way, Michael Faraday illustrates one of the genuine fascinations which science holds for those who love it, the full and complex description of what appears to be a simple process. The reading, which describes the scientist’s understanding of the burning of a candle, is actually one of Faraday’s annual Christmas lectures for young people.
Albert Einstein shook the scientific world to its very foundations in 1905, when he published several papers in Annalen der Physick. One of the papers offered by the then unknown German outlined the two simple assumptions underlying the special theory of relativity. Despite the aura of difficulty which surrounds this writing, it is a clear and fully comprehensible treatment of Einstein’s understanding of space and time. Relativity provided one of the main streams of physical thought during the 20th century, especially in the area of cosmology. Concurrently, the Curies were doing their painstaking research into the mystery of radioactivity. A second paper by Einstein in 1905 provided much of the thrust which led to the modern understanding of the quantum nature of nature. Werner Heisenberg provides some insight into this second stream of thought which has dominated the 20th-century world of the very small. James Jeans and Siv Cedering provide additional perspective with their more recent commentaries on astronomy and astronomers.
The six readings in the next section, entitled Science as a Way of Knowing, along with Descartes, Newton, Bacon, and Einstein, can provide the reader with substantial insight into the heart of scientific methodology—how science differs from other ways of knowing the world. Most people who think about it believe that science as a way of knowing differs principally through its use of the so-called “scientific method.” While philosophers study science and try to distill its “method,” scientists go about their business, blithely unaware of the details of the “philosophy of science.” Only the writings of Descartes, Peirce and Kuhn would likely be included in an anthology of the philosophy of science [and Peirce is rarely regarded as a philosopher of science]. Each of these readings illustrates how science is done and how scientists think about the bases of their theories. Peirce’s pragmatism probably comes closest to the way most scientists actually proceed with their work. Poincaré touches on many aspects of scientific thought, and especially on the way in which mathematics joins with science. His “Mathematical Creation” describes in a wonderful way the creativity necessary to reach new insights in mathematics. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is probably the most widely read and most influential book on the philosophical underpinnings of science. Evelyn Fox-Keller argues the importance of the language which actually describes science, particularly gender-based language. G.H. Hardy writes with great pride about his understanding of the joy of “pure” mathematics and Sir Ronald Fischer discusses the statistical nature of experimentation.
Finally, no collection of readings which purports to provide insight into human understanding of the universe would be in any way complete without some reference to the manner in which science has affected religion and vice versa. Prior to Copernicus and Galileo, most Western Europeans believed, as Aristotle had argued, that the Earth was the center of the universe. They also believed, as Genesis stated, that God created humans to inhabit that center. The Scientific Revolution removed humanity from that center and ultimately placed us orbiting an unremarkable [yellow dwarf] star two-thirds of the way along one arm of a galaxy which is itself ordinary and unremarkable. Darwin’s theory allowed the possibility that the appearance of human life, or any life at all, on this planet may have been accidental. Whatever one believes about religion, one cannot avoid confronting the impact of evolutionary theory on those beliefs. Also, religious faith is based on ideas of the absolute, while science can change its beliefs at will, based on the experimental evidence. So it is not difficult to understand the tension between science and religion. One can argue, as many writers have, that Galileo, through his insistence on observation and objectivity drove the first wedge between science and religion, which prior to Galileo were not regarded as antithetical. Galileo’s somewhat polemical “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” articulates his understanding of the separation of the two realms, as does Einstein’s well-known essay, “Science and Religion.” They, like Darwin, see no real conflict between science and religion.
Julius A. Sigler
