[music]
>> Gary Price: Americans love science. Shows
like the new “Cosmos” with Neil deGrasse
Tyson are always popular, as was the earlier
version of the show with scientist Carl Sagan.
We watch “Nova” and “Nature” on PBS;
and the science-themed shows on Discovery
network are always fascinating. Among the
most interesting of the shows are those that
look back at scientific history. It’s amazing
that ancient Greeks and others could even
do science back in those days without telescopes,
microscopes or even much of the mathematics
we have now. Yet, the men and women who make
amazing scientific discoveries today do so
by standing on the shoulders of those scientists
and thinkers who came before. That’s the
idea of the “Ponderables” series of books…
>> Tom Jackson: That’s what we try to do
in the “Ponderables” series. We break
the subject, in this case physics, down into
100 steps. We start way back in the past in
ancient Greek times generally and then you
see how the modern understanding of physics
arose after all of the work of 100 people
who built on each other’s discoveries.
>> Price:That’s Tom Jackson, author of the
“Ponderables” book titled “Physics:
An illustrated history of the foundations
of science.” It’s a tall order to choose
only 100 people out of the entire pantheon
of scientists who contributed to physics…
>> Jackson: There is a set of ideas that I
wanted to be able to explain for the readers,
so they’d understand the basics behind things
like electricity and force and particle physics
and quantum physics, introducing them all
to those subjects. So I chose the figures
that led towards those end points so in the
later part of the book, where we’re getting
into modern times, the reader has the full
idea of those subjects. So there’s a question
of choosing the people who did important stuff.
Fortunately, of course, a lot of people who
feature in the book worked in all of the important
areas so you could cover lots of different
subjects at once.
>> Price: The first person featured in the
book is an ancient Greek philosopher named
Thales who lived in the 7th century BC. But
how could anyone know about physics that far
into the past?
>> Jackson: Well, physics just means nature
in ancient Greek. It was the study of nature.
The interesting thing about Thales was that
he wasn’t going to take anyone else’s
word for it, he wanted to explain things,
have reasons for things that he could see
the evidence for. He’s the first person
we know who behaved in that way, and that’s
why he’s described as the Father of Science.
He didn’t know a great deal about physics,
but he sort of set the ball rolling.
>> Price: Observing things first-hand was
an important step in discovering how the world
worked. So was thinking about how natural
elements behave – even if you couldn’t
see them – by using thought experiments
the way Leucippus did back in the fifth century
BC, when he developed a theory of atoms…
>> Jackson: Leucippus proposed that there
were units in matter that couldn’t be divided
in half, that were uncut-able -- “atoms”
means uncut-able in Greek-- And that once
you got down to this unit, it was impossible
to break it down any smaller.
>> Price: Some of the biggest scientific discoveries
came during the renaissance by names that
we’re all familiar with: Copernicus, Kepler
and Galileo. Jackson says that Copernicus
and Galileo documented some of the same astronomical
events, such as determining that our solar
system didn’t revolve around the earth but
around the sun. But Copernicus was cautious
not to step on the toes of the very politically
powerful Catholic Church by spreading his
theories. Galileo wasn’t …
>> Jackson: He was the first one to contradict
the Church on scientific grounds while he
was alive, really. Copernicus knew well enough
not to do it. He’d come 30 or 40 years before,
he knew well enough not to do it until he
died. So he didn’t publish his book until
he was on his deathbed, and he died about
a week later, so they weren’t going to do
anything to him. What Galileo had done was
he’d contradicted Aristotle, so the Catholic
Church had kind of given Aristotle a sort
of a semi-prophet status because he’d predated
Christ. They assumed that in some way – they’d
gone through some rather convoluted thought
processes – to say that what Aristotle said
was also what God said about the universe.
And so it’s fine you could follow science
as long as all you were doing was just reformulating
Aristotle’s work to better describe the
universe. But if you do what Copernicus did
and then Galileo did and said Aristotle has
got it all wrong, that’s when you got in
trouble.
>> Price: Jackson is quick to point out that
religion didn’t always get in the way of
scientific discoveries. In fact, in the Middle
East, it was a driving force behind them…
>> Jackson: One of the central tenets of Islam
is to read and to study and to learn. Lots
of the traditions that we associate with Western
science – the rigor, and the empiricism,
you know measuring things carefully and recording
your findings so they can be shared – comes
from the Islamic tradition, and then that
comes into Europe during the Renaissance.
Before then, scientists in Europe were very
much almost sort of “wizardy people,”
they kept it all very quiet in there, in their
lairs.
>> Price: How did someone back in, say Isaac
Newton’s time, become a scientist? Were
there university courses of study? Jackson
says that although there were universities
at the time, they didn’t have degree programs
in physics. Scientists came from the ranks
of well-to-do gentlemen who had private incomes
and a talent for science. They did, however,
form organizations where they debated theories
and published papers…
>> Jackson: The scientific revolution of the
17th century, people like Robert Hook, and
Isaac Newton and Renee Descartes, and people
like that, some of worked for universities
like Newton worked at Cambridge University,
he was a math professor. But most of them
formed these informal groups, they would meet
and have discussions, and learn from each
other and disseminate information and frequently
steal it from each other and then argue about
it afterwards. And those traditions come from
France, and London, from Paris and London.
Around the same time in the 1660s, they formed
academies of science that came out of the
informal gatherings and they became these
formal bodies that would disseminate science
and publish journals. And from that point
on to be a scientist meant that you had to
be associated with these groups and get your
discovery printed in their journal and discussed
at their meetings and, hopefully, you’d
become a member yourself.
>> Price: Marie Curie is the only woman featured
in the book, but it’s not surprising. Jackson
says that back in the 1800s, there just weren’t
many women who studied science at the highest
levels. Curie was one of the exceptions. She
found a place at the university of Paris,
and worked hard to scrape the money together
to pay her tuition. And it was in Paris where
she met her husband, Pierre…
>> Jackson: Who was a slightly older and already
established scientist. And then the two of
them became leading figures in the field of
radioactivity, which had only been discovered
a couple of years before. Marie had the talent
and the perseverance and the luck to become
famous and to make great discoveries that
ultimately killed her, actually. The radiation
that she worked with ultimately killed her,
she died from leukemia.
>> Price: She was the first woman to win two
Nobel prizes – one in physics and one in
chemistry – and only one of two people to
win in two different fields. During the 20th
century, discoveries in physics came fast
and furiously. Perhaps the most famous physicist
of the last century is theoretical physicist
Albert Einstein, with his theory of special
relativity. Jackson says that it’s thought
that most discoveries in physics will be made,
if not by the scientists who become famous
for them, then by someone else shortly afterward.
Einstein’s relativity theory, though, was
something altogether different…
>> Jackson: Famous scientists that you can
think of are just the lucky ones that were
in the right place at the right time. If it
wasn’t then, then maybe a year or two later
the conditions were such that someone else
would make that discovery. But what they say
about Einstein is that maybe, even today,
if Einstein hadn’t made his discovery just
over 100 years ago, it was such an amazing
leap of imagination, that maybe even today,
we still wouldn’t have that theory, and
physics would have take a very different course.
>> Price: Author Tom Jackson invites you to
read more about Einstein’s contributions
along with those by scientists from Ancient
Greece to the present day, in the Ponderables
series book “Physics: An illustrated history
of the foundations of science,” available
in stores and online. You can find out more
about all of our guests on our website at
viewpointsonline.net. I’m Gary Price.
[music]
[commercials]
