ON GIANTS’ SHOULDERS

Great Scientists and Their Discoveries from Archimedes to DNA

Melvyn Bragg

with

Ruth Gardiner

www.sceptrebooks.com

Copyright © 1998 Melvyn Bragg
By arrangement with the BBC
Based on the BBC Radio series

First published in Great Britain in
1998 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company

The right of Melvyn Bragg to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 265 3
Book ISBN 978 0 34071 260 3

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
An Hachette UK company
338 Euston Road
London NWl 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

To my son Tom
Good luck with the Science.

Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

JOHN OF SALISBURY, 1159

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

SIR ISAAC NEWTON, 1675

INTRODUCTION

ON GIANTS’ SHOULDERS focuses on twelve scientists who, in the last two thousand five hundred years, changed the world both as we perceive it and as we live in it. From Archimedes in Ancient Greece to Francis Crick and James Watson in mid-twentieth-century England, these landmark minds, their lives, their struggles, their colleagues and rivals are explored and unravelled by some of today’s leading scientists. In combination, their stories and discoveries constitute a guide to the history of science.

There are many different ways to write history. Using the lives of those who were truly great has a long and honourable tradition. The advantages are many, particularly in the history of ideas and especially given that those ideas often crystallised in a single mind, whatever tributary contributions there might have been. A central figure can arouse an interest which leads us into ideas: an individual can typify as well as exemplify a sudden breakthrough in thought, a single figure can allow the context – the time, the culture, the place – to be brought to bear. The Greek historian Plutarch, who used this method, is still read today, and whatever the strength of the argument about the mass of interrelated movement which, like a broad tide, carries history forward, the attraction and sometimes the centrality of individuals remain.

Here the cast is formidable. Whether you look at Faraday apparently stumbling into science from the humblest and most unlikely beginnings, a bookbinder’s apprentice becomes a man who commanded the intellectual society of London, or the heroic Marie Curie, arriving in Paris from Poland with little but the determination and brilliance which was to net her two Nobel Prizes and a place, literally, in the Pantheon; whether it is the impenetrable Newton of deep vengeance, even deeper religion and a force of invention all subsequent scientists look on with awe; or Galileo, the feisty Medician courtier, successful bringer of new worlds and unsuccessful intriguer in old ones; whether Poincaré, whose absent-mindedness co-existed with outstanding clarity over such a wide range, or Lavoisier, his countryman, guillotined for tax collecting yet reinstated as ‘The Father of Chemistry’, whether Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Crick, Watson or the man thought of by some to be the first mathematician and physicist, Archimedes – these are people with rare and often thrilling minds, as well as the makers of discoveries which changed the world.

Certainly there are very few of the two dozen and more contemporary contributors to this book who doubt the impact, the transfiguring force of intellect and often the sheer breathtaking originality of those discussed here. Several have reservations about the ‘genius’ theory of science and this is given full play throughout; but even those with the keenest reservations were unstinting in their appreciation of what a tremendous contribution each of these figures made.

The involvement of scientists who are alive now is fundamental to the book, and I found their contributions invaluable. When, in the Darwin chapter, for instance, you bring to bear the combined though often opposing forces of Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Janet Browne, Richard Darwin Keynes and John Maynard Smith, a great range of points can be made with comparative brevity.

First, they get to the heart of Darwin’s achievement rapidly, accurately and reliably. What he brought to the expanding universe of thought is described surely and succinctly. Second, they comment on the context out of which he grew – not only his personal background but also the intellectual and general cultural context of the day. Finally, they bring Darwin and his ideas into the 1990s and show how they have developed and been developed since Darwin’s day: what the main thrust has been; what the chief disputes are; what potency has endured and, in Darwin’s case, as in so many others, grown. It is a rich and an uncommon mix.

The technique of interviewing has a part to play here. By asking simple but, I hope, central questions, the essentials are described and the main points made. Because those interviewed are invariably so able, what is given in a fairly brief answer is often a brilliant encapsulation, and because the contributors carry such authority, these encapsulations are solid stones which rapidly build up the structure of the key ideas in question. Certainly in the shaping and linking and cross-cutting of these interviews, the aim has been to create in each case a portrait, a case study and a commentary all combined.

My own interest in science is, I would guess, fairly typical of my generation. I was bought a chemistry set one Christmas and mixed and bubbled as best I could, secretly hoping to bring about a fantastic transformation of matter or, at the very least, a creditable explosion. I was blessed with neither. Although I greatly enjoyed maths at school and at one stage wanted to take it in the sixth form, I was never enticed into physics. This is not to blame the teachers, for, soon after World War II and in a small Northern grammar school, teachers, especially it seemed in physics, came and went at some speed. Biology was fascinating but something about the class did not fire me. I ended up studying History, Latin and English in the sixth form and went to university to read History.

Science for me as a boy was the science of wonder. It was Dan Dare in the comic The Eagle with the massively brainy Mekon, his so much cleverer opponent. It was fascinating facts, and figures, also usually in comics or tucked away in popular magazines or newspapers. On the darker side, there was the Atom Bomb and the fears it provoked about Armageddon and, by extension, fears that scientists could destroy the world in so many ways every bit as easily as they could illuminate or improve it. Then, about ten years ago, I became aware that I was missing a great deal about the times in which I lived. Science was almost entirely off my radar. Yet there was a buzz about science which had not been there in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Perhaps it had been there, but I had simply not recognised it.

I began reading reviews and articles about genetics, about cosmology, about the mind, about matter, about, literally, universal questions and, equally literally, molecular questions, and I saw that I was missing out on a great deal. For a while I did no more than peep through the keyhole, sure that my lack of any serious science training denied me entrance to what increasingly seemed the most dazzling intellectual pleasure-garden of the late twentieth century. The world was being reinvented, reshaped, reunderstood in there. Was I to be for ever forbidden entrance just because I had dropped physics? It seemed a poor excuse to miss out on what, more and more clearly, seemed to me to be the defining and by far the most exciting thoughts in my time. To live through a period of intellectual ferment and not to be allowed to know what was going on seemed unjust! More to the point, it was silly.

Fortunately – or perhaps as a consequence of the increasing fervour in the sciences – books began to emerge which unashamedly sought to engage the general reader. We might not understand the maths, or the physics, or the chemistry, or the statistics, but this did not matter. The explanations were often clear enough for us to hang on to something of the substance. By ‘us’, I mean non-scientists, like myself – and there proved to be many of us. Of course none of us could have tackled an A Level paper in the sciences, even after a couple of years of steady reading of those books, but at least we – or at least I – no longer felt left out. The chief way in which the later twentieth century described itself was at least approachable. I am sure that quantum physics can be simplified out of all real meaning and that the chemistry of DNA still requires more than is in all my knowledge of biology, that chaos theory is much easier to get wrong than right after however many books and articles and that the Big Bang, facile now as a phrase, conceals a continent of numbers way beyond me. But, despite all of that, I was somehow present, I thought; I was not a player and never would and never could be. But I was at the game.

So what was the game? It seemed to me that over the last century science has gathered together the forces of the last two hundred and fifty years and put itself into the command position in our intellectual and perhaps even our imaginative economy. Ideas are flung out, sprayed out like sparks from a welder’s torch. Ideas which not only take us on trips to the beginning of time but which take us on trips to essential matter and everything in between. New patterns, relations, synergies, analyses and symmetries, new worlds, new words, newness swarming in at every pore: this was the world humankind had arrived at and this was the world gathering force, ever more sure of itself, it seemed, ever more dominating, with science turning into technology like magic and technology turning the earth into a new planet. Better? Worse? Doomed? Released? Who really knew? But the speed and the whoosh of the enterprise is wonderful.

Learning about science, for me, had the effect of transforming the world. Sometimes the brain seemed out of control as it sped to the edge of the universe and then suggested, quite calmly, a parallel universe, or dwelt on knowledge which was hair-raising – such as that physicists were within the merest fraction of a second of identifying the first moment of time and space. Equally, where was this probing of mind taking us, this mapping of the genes and the penetration of the micro-world every bit as astonishing as those essays in space? Outside all of this, the absorbing, mundane, diurnal world of bringing up a family, forging friendships, falling in and out of love, seemed to go on unaffected by the sound of science; but how long before that too was touched by its influences?

An advantage I had was that I present a weekly one-hour discussion programme, Start The Week, on BBC Radio 4. Over the last eight years in conjunction with producers, principally Marina Salandy Brown, Ruth Gardiner and Olivia Seligman, I have been able to meet and interview many of those – British and American in particular – who write the books, who do the work, who know the field, who can and, thankfully, want to reach out to all those interested, even if those who are interested are ignorant. It would not be too strong to speak of many of today’s scientists having something of an apostolic mission. They want to explain, at least, the wonders of their worlds – and if they make converts, so much the better.

Scientists began to appear on Start The Week in greater and greater numbers until they formed the most numerous ‘block’ of guests on the programme. Coincidentally, but not, I think, at all accidentally, the audiences grew, as did their response to the scientists. There were always many more phone calls asking for the titles of the science books discussed than any other, more letters, more comment in the press and more anecdotal evidence that some sort of need was being met. My assumption was that many of the Start The Week listeners were rather like myself – thirsty for information in huge territories of knowledge from which they thought they had been excluded. They were grateful to be let in, especially when the gates were opened by men and women at the forefront of present research.

After several years, the notion of a science series on Radio 4 came up, one in which I would play the part I played in Start The Week, that is to interview leading scientists from the perspective of a non-scientist with a serious interest in what was happening. We sought an overall idea which could be written and assembled to produce a story rather than just a cluster of interviews.

I went for the simplest notion – homing in on a dozen great figures and assembling the programmes around them. Obviously others could have been included and many are mentioned in passing – like Kepler, Maxwell and Copernicus – as well as scores of co-workers and equal labourers in the field. All could have been brought more firmly into the foreground. But we stuck to our original idea and, by enlisting the generous help of so many fine contemporary scientists, enriched it far more than I had ever thought possible.

This, then, is On Giants’ Shoulders – a modest enterprise but one which seeks to reach out to the deep past of science and also pin it to the present day. The giants are as clear as pylons striding down the landscape of history. Supported by them and discoursing on them are many current scientists who themselves could be called to gianthood. Supported by them is this non-scientist.

There are several acknowledgments which must be made.

The first is to all the scientists whose generosity in time and patience gives the book whatever qualities it has.

The second is to the BBC, especially Radio 4, and particularly Ian Gardhouse, who took on the radio series that was the begetter of the book.

The third is to Ruth Gardiner, the producer. Very properly, she shares the title page but I would like here to pay tribute to her tremendous skill and persistence in organising and meshing together a series on which we both learned a great deal. That she did it while producing a more important work (since arrived and called James), makes me admire her even more. Helping her over the year were researchers Karen Holden, Jeanette Thomas and Alice Cooper. It was a dedicated and first-rate team.

I am also grateful to lan and Margaret Millar for reading the typescript, to Claire Squires at Hodder & Stoughton, and to Carole Welch my editor, who has taken on this sweep of work new to both of us with her usual scrupulous zest.

I have added to my comments and reorganised the material for book form. The book differs from the radio series principally in the ampler amount of material contained in the book. It has been possible for me to return to the original transcripts of the interviews, mercilessly pruned for the thirty-minute radio programmes, and include much more.

It has been a marvellous enterprise.

Archimedes

(c. 287 BC–212 BC)

c. 287 BC  Born Syracuse, Sicily.

Archimedes’ extant works, published in the form of correspondence with mathematicians of his time, are On the Sphere and the Cylinder, On the Measurement of the Circle, On Conoids and Spheroids, On Spirals, On the Quadrature of the Parabola, On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, On the Method of Mechanical Theorems and The Sand-Reckoner. Many other works by Archimedes referred to by later mathematicians such as On Spheremaking are now lost.

c. 212 BC  Killed by a Roman soldier during the siege of Syracuse.

   75    BC  Cicero finds and restores his tomb.