Scientists
03/20/2009 16:05
John Gribbin, The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors (New York: Random House, 2002).
This is a conflicted book. The first thing the author tells us in the Introduction is that “the most important thing that Science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special.” Of course, he then goes on for 647 pages telling us all about the special people who proved this fact. He tells us that “what is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution ‘coincides’ with the development of the telescope and the microscope.” But technology is also developed by intelligent people – some might call them geniuses. And he repeatedly argues against rapid change, believing instead that “we see science progressing by evolution, not revolution.” (561) He reminds us that catastrophism was connected with religious arguments like the story of the Great Flood (314), which may explain some of his dislike for theories of rapid change. But the reader gets the impression he's arguing against Thomas Kuhn (an Amazon reviewer picked this up, too. Is Gribbin known for this? I haven't read anything else by him), even though he never mentions Kuhn.
The best feature of The Scientists is its focus on the wider cast of characters surrounding the well-known names, and on the families of the famous scientists and the environments they lived and worked in. This provides a basis for Gribbin’s argument that science advances through the contributions of many. The story of evolution is richer when Darwin is surrounded by Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, not to mention his grandfather Erasmus (who in addition to his original theories of evolution translated Linnaeus into English -- and who I’ve been interested in for a while, so I ordered Desmond King-Hele’s book on him) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Gribbin doesn’t mention Robert Chambers’ Vestiges). Similarly, Gribbin explains the connection between chemistry (molecular bonding and especially Linus Pauling’s discovery of hydrogen bonds), X-ray crystallography, and Watson & Crick’s elaboration of the DNA molecule. It’s interesting that Pauling (originally a quantum physicist) was quite close to solving the puzzle, and that Rosalind Franklin’s “crucial X-ray data” played a “vital role” in the building of the double-helix model, for which she never received proper credit. (565)
This is a conflicted book. The first thing the author tells us in the Introduction is that “the most important thing that Science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special.” Of course, he then goes on for 647 pages telling us all about the special people who proved this fact. He tells us that “what is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution ‘coincides’ with the development of the telescope and the microscope.” But technology is also developed by intelligent people – some might call them geniuses. And he repeatedly argues against rapid change, believing instead that “we see science progressing by evolution, not revolution.” (561) He reminds us that catastrophism was connected with religious arguments like the story of the Great Flood (314), which may explain some of his dislike for theories of rapid change. But the reader gets the impression he's arguing against Thomas Kuhn (an Amazon reviewer picked this up, too. Is Gribbin known for this? I haven't read anything else by him), even though he never mentions Kuhn.
The best feature of The Scientists is its focus on the wider cast of characters surrounding the well-known names, and on the families of the famous scientists and the environments they lived and worked in. This provides a basis for Gribbin’s argument that science advances through the contributions of many. The story of evolution is richer when Darwin is surrounded by Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, not to mention his grandfather Erasmus (who in addition to his original theories of evolution translated Linnaeus into English -- and who I’ve been interested in for a while, so I ordered Desmond King-Hele’s book on him) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Gribbin doesn’t mention Robert Chambers’ Vestiges). Similarly, Gribbin explains the connection between chemistry (molecular bonding and especially Linus Pauling’s discovery of hydrogen bonds), X-ray crystallography, and Watson & Crick’s elaboration of the DNA molecule. It’s interesting that Pauling (originally a quantum physicist) was quite close to solving the puzzle, and that Rosalind Franklin’s “crucial X-ray data” played a “vital role” in the building of the double-helix model, for which she never received proper credit. (565)
