Transcriber’s Note
The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
This text contains a few phrases in Greek, with English transliterations given as mouse hover pop-ups: φενόμενα
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PIONEERS OF SCIENCE
NEWTON
From the picture by Kneller, 1689, now at Cambridge
PIONEERS OF SCIENCE
BY
OLIVER LODGE, F.R.S.
PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS IN VICTORIA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LIVERPOOL
WITH PORTRAITS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1893
Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,
LONDON AND BUNGAY.
PREFACE
This book takes its origin in a course of lectures on the history and progress of Astronomy arranged for me in the year 1887 by three of my colleagues (A.C.B., J.M., G.H.R.), one of whom gave the course its name.
The lectures having been found interesting, it was natural to write them out in full and publish.
If I may claim for them any merit, I should say it consists in their simple statement and explanation of scientific facts and laws. The biographical details are compiled from all readily available sources, there is no novelty or originality about them; though it is hoped that there may be some vividness. I have simply tried to present a living figure of each Pioneer in turn, and to trace his influence on the progress of thought.
I am indebted to many biographers and writers, among others to Mr. E.J.C. Morton, whose excellent set of lives published by the S.P.C.K. saved me much trouble in the early part of the course.
As we approach recent times the subject grows more complex, and the men more nearly contemporaries; hence the biographical aspect diminishes and the scientific treatment becomes fuller, but in no case has it been allowed to become technical and generally unreadable.
To the friends (C.C.C., F.W.H.M., E.F.R.) who with great kindness have revised the proofs, and have indicated places where the facts could be made more readily intelligible by a clearer statement, I express my genuine gratitude.
University College, Liverpool,
November, 1892.
CONTENTS
PART II LECTURE X ROEMER AND BRADLEY AND THE VELOCITY OF LIGHT 232 LECTURE XI LAGRANGE AND LAPLACE—THE STABILITY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM, AND THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS 254 LECTURE XII
ILLUSTRATIONS
PIONEERS OF SCIENCE
PART I
FROM DUSK TO DAYLIGHT
DATES AND SUMMARY OF FACTS FOR LECTURE I
Physical Science of the Ancients. Thales 640 B.C., Anaximander 610 B.C., Pythagoras 600 B.C., Anaxagoras 500 B.C., Eudoxus 400 B.C., Aristotle 384 B.C., Aristarchus 300 B.C., Archimedes 287 B.C., Eratosthenes 276 B.C., Hipparchus 160 B.C., Ptolemy 100 A.D.
Science of the Middle Ages. Cultivated only among the Arabs; largely in the forms of astrology, alchemy, and algebra.
Return of Science to Europe. Roger Bacon 1240, Leonardo da Vinci 1480, (Printing 1455), Columbus 1492, Copernicus 1543.
A sketch of Copernik's life and work. Born 1473 at Thorn in Poland. Studied mathematics at Bologna. Became an ecclesiastic. Lived at Frauenburg near mouth of Vistula. Substituted for the apparent motion of the heavens the real motion of the earth. Published tables of planetary motions. Motion still supposed to be in epicycles. Worked out his ideas for 36 years, and finally dedicated his work to the Pope. Died just as his book was printed, aged 72, a century before the birth of Newton. A colossal statue by Thorwaldsen erected at Warsaw in 1830.
PIONEERS OF SCIENCE
LECTURE I
COPERNICUS AND THE MOTION OF THE EARTH
The ordinary run of men live among phenomena of which they know nothing and care less. They see bodies fall to the earth, they hear sounds, they kindle fires, they see the heavens roll above them, but of the causes and inner working of the whole they are ignorant, and with their ignorance they are content.
"Understand the structure of a soap-bubble?" said a cultivated literary man whom I know; "I wouldn't cross the street to know it!"
And if this is a prevalent attitude now, what must have been the attitude in ancient times, when mankind was emerging from savagery, and when history seems composed of harassments by wars abroad and revolutions at home? In the most violently disturbed times indeed, those with which ordinary history is mainly occupied, science is quite impossible. It needs as its condition, in order to flourish, a fairly quiet, untroubled state, or else a cloister or university removed from the din and bustle of the political and commercial world. In such places it has taken its rise, and in such peaceful places and quiet times true science will continue to be cultivated.
The great bulk of mankind must always remain, I suppose, more or less careless of scientific research and scientific result, except in so far as it affects their modes of locomotion, their health and pleasure, or their purse.
But among a people hurried and busy and preoccupied, some in the pursuit of riches, some in the pursuit of pleasure, and some, the majority, in the struggle for existence, there arise in every generation, here and there, one or two great
These last have been the men of science, the great and heaven-born men of science; and they are few. In our own day, amid the throng of inventions, there are a multitude of small men using the name of science but working for their own ends, jostling and scrambling just as they would jostle and scramble in any other trade or profession. These may be workers, they may and do advance knowledge, but they are never pioneers. Not to them is it given to open out great tracts of unexplored territory, or to view the promised land as from a mountain-top. Of them we shall not speak; we will concern ourselves only with the greatest, the epoch-making men, to whose life and work we and all who come after them owe so much. Such a man was Thales. Such was Archimedes, Hipparchus, Copernicus. Such pre-eminently was Newton.
Now I am not going to attempt a history of science. Such a work in ten lectures would be absurd. I intend to pick out a few salient names here and there, and to study these in some detail, rather than by attempting to deal with too many to lose individuality and distinctness.
We know so little of the great names of antiquity, that they are for this purpose scarcely suitable. In some departments the science of the Greeks was remarkable, though it is completely overshadowed by their philosophy; yet it was largely based on what has proved to be a wrong method of procedure, viz the introspective and conjectural, rather than the inductive and experimental methods. They investigated Nature by studying their own minds, by considering the meanings of words, rather than by studying things and recording phenomena. This wrong (though by no means, on the face of it, absurd) method was not pursued exclusively, else would their science have been valueless, but the influence it had was such as materially to detract from the value of their speculations and discoveries. For when truth and falsehood are inextricably woven into a statement, the truth is as hopelessly hidden as if it had never been stated, for we have no criterion to distinguish the false from the true.