The pleasure of finding things out

The universe seems mysterious, yet it can be explained by physical laws that can be tested objectively. It is both interesting and joyful to learn about how our understanding of the world and ourselves evolved and shaped human civilization through the study of science history. John Gribbin, a renowned astrophysicist, brilliantly portrayed the story of Western science and scientists in his book ‘Science: A History.’ It should be noted that his book did not mention ancient Indian or Chinese contributions to science and confines itself to Western scientific development since the Renaissance movement started in Europe, which believed in the superiority of reason over religious beliefs.

Gribbin provided biographies of scientists to show what makes them tick and revealed how one scientific advance led to another. He rejected the idea of revolutions in science and showed that it is essentially an incremental, step-by-step advancement. Gribbin emphasises that there will never be a truthful description of the universe without a scientific approach and rightly rejects historians or sociologists who have no training in or experience of scientific research, sometimes suggesting that scientific truth is no more valid than artistic truth. He also warned that scientific truth cannot be distorted to suit one’s ideology, giving an example of T.D. Lysenko, of the Stalinist regime in the erstwhile Soviet Union, who rejected Mendelian principles of genetics because he regarded them as incompatible with the principles of dialectical materialism.

Gribbin states that Darwin’s theory of evolution tells us that we are part of the animal kingdom, with no evidence of a uniquely human ‘soul’; chemistry tells us that animals and plants are part of the physical world, with no evidence of a special ‘life force.’ Nicolaus Copernicus proved that neither man nor the earth is the centre of the universe. In fact, man is living on a tiny blue dot like planet called Earth revolving around a medium-sized star called the Sun, which is a part of millions of star clusters called galaxies, and there are billions of such galaxies in the universe.

Geography tells us that the age of the Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years according to radiometric dating, and anthropology tell us that homosapians evolved on the Earth roughly around 3,00,000 years ago, and the age of the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years from the initial Big Bang, which was found on the basis of the redshift effect of light from the stars, which is proportional to distance between stars, and the Doppler effect which is caused by the space between the galaxies stretching as time passes. Alpher and Herman proved that the universe had a beginning at the Big Bang by finding the background radiation lingering from the time of the Big Bang, which was confirmed to be perfect black-body radiation with a temperature of just 2.725 K by the experiment of the famous COBE satellite. By comparing the age of the universe, the age of the Earth, and the timeline of the evolution of the ‘conscious’ human being, it is clear that the role and place of man in the cosmos are insignificant. But, there are some unscientific interpretations extrapolating the role of ‘consciousness’ into the realm of physics in the name of quantum physics. Biological science has achieved a complete mapping of the human genome, which spells out the laws of inheritance of human physical and mental characteristics in maintaining, developing, and reproducing life.

He brings to light the fact that “We will increasingly find that discoveries are made more or less simultaneously by different people working independently and largely in ignorance of one another,” giving the example of Darwin and Wallace, who came up with the same idea of natural selection and evolution. Mendeleyev and three other scientists came up with the idea of the periodic table of elements independently and at the same time.

He also illuminates the lives of scientists and their conflict with the Church, and how they avoided persecution by using the pretext of presenting their views as mere ‘philosophical speculation’, such as Buffon, who estimated the age of the Earth, Galileo, who advocated a heliocentric planetary system, and Charles Darwin for his evolutionary theory. Some scientists like Laplace boldly replied to Napoleon when asked why God did not appear in his discussion of the solar system by saying that, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

We can learn how scientific models evolve from one possible idea to a more precise and accurate idea by studying various discoveries on one subject. Newton liked the corpuscular theory of light as a stream of particles. Leonhard Euler proposed in 1746 that light is a wave, with each colour corresponding to a different wavelength. Paul Dirac states that both of the particle-wave approaches were contained within that formalism, and were mathematically equivalent to one another, just as whether you choose to measure a distance in miles or in kilometres doesn’t change the distance you are measuring. Gribbin warns that quantum mechanics “should never be seen as implying that the wave version of quantum reality contains any deeper truth than the particle version. They are simply different facets of a whole, which is something unlike anything in our everyday world.”

Isaac Asimov rightly said that, “Initiation into the magnificent world of science brings great aesthetic satisfaction, inspiration to youth, fulfilment of the desire to know, and a deeper appreciation of the wonderful potentialities and achievements of the human mind.”