Brian Clegg - Scientifica Historica: How the World’s Great Science Books Chart the History of Knowledge

How the worlds great science books chart the history of knowledge

BRIAN CLEGG

T HE LATIN WORD scientifica describes something that produces knowledge; from this broad scope, science has come to describe our understanding of the universe and the objects in it. One invention has been central to the development of science. Its not an incredibly complex piece of hardware like the Large Hadron Collider, nor a sophisticated concept like Einsteins general theory of relativity, but something far more familiar. Without this technology, we would be left with little more than folk tales and mysteries, because the invention is writing.

The importance of writing gives us the historica of the title, which defines something based on research or producing an account the fundamental requirement for science to benefit from the written word. In conceptual terms, writing is the technology that frees up communication from the limits of time and space, destroying the shackles of the here and now.

Most animals and even some plants communicate at some level, but usually that communication is immediate and local, after which it is gone forever. Writing transcends that limitation. I can take a book off the shelf and read words that were written thousands of miles away and hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago. There are probably more communications on my bookshelves from dead people than there are from the living and certainly very few of the books I own were written by authors who live near to me. Writing takes care of time and space. And that is its significance in making science possible.

The power of writing for science is that books act as a storage medium for ideas and discoveries; we dont have to reinvent the wheel every time. Science can only work as it does by building on the discoveries and theories of others. Isaac Newton famously said (probably paraphrasing Robert Burton), If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. Newtons ability to make use of others ideas was only possible thanks to the written word. And books have been central to the spread of science in this manner ever since humanity began to look for rational explanations of what they observed around them over 2,500 years ago.

The role of books in transcending time and space is illustrated well in the complex web of written works that ties together the ancient Greek world, Islamic scientists of the latter part of the first millennium and medieval European scientists. The ancient Greeks wrote many books on scientific topics following the revolutionary ideas of Thales of Miletus, who seems to have been amongst the first to make the shift from mythological explanations of the natural world to ones that came closer to a scientific view, from around 600 BCE.

THALES OF MILETUS, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

A representation of the sixth-century BCE ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Thales of Miletus.

Many of the books of the ancient Greek period were lost as their civilisation fell and their libraries were ransacked. Just one example gives a poignant reminder of this. In a strange little book called The Sand-Reckoner, the remarkable third-century BCE mathematician and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse attempted to work out how many grains of sand it would take to fill the universe. (By universe he had in mind roughly what we would think of as the solar system.) This was not quite as useless a task as it sounds. The Greek number system of the time was very limited. The largest named number was a myriad 10,000 which meant that the largest number usually considered was a myriad myriads, or 100 million. But Archimedes wanted to show that it was possible to go far beyond this limitation by devising a new type of number that could easily handle any required value. He demonstrated its flexibility by attempting the remarkable calculation with grains of sand.

Ab Jafar Muammad ibn Ms al-Khwrizm

AL-KITB AL-MUKHTAAR F ISB AL-ABR WAL-MUQBALA, COPY, 1342

Covering algebra, calendars, inheritance and more, this was one of the principal mathematics textbooks from its first publication circa 820 CE to the sixteenth century.

The Sand-Reckoner has survived the ravages of time, but in it, Archimedes referred to another volume that otherwise we would not have known existed. To work out the number of sand grains required, Archimedes first used geometry to estimate the size of the universe. He based his calculation on the accepted astronomical model of the time, where the Earth was at the centre of the universe with everything orbiting around it. But he also noted:

Aristarchus of Samos brought out a book consisting of some hypotheses, in which the premises lead to the result that the universe is many times greater than that now so called. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the Sun remain unmoved, that the Earth revolves around the Sun in the circumference of a circle, the Sun lying in the middle of the orbit

This lost book by Aristarchus, referenced only by Archimedes, is the first known suggestion of what would become the heliocentric Copernican theory. As is the case for so many other titles from the period, we will never know exactly what Aristarchus wrote.

The books of ancient Greece were largely forgotten in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, but as the interest in science grew in the flourishing Islamic world, surviving Greek titles were translated into Arabic and supplemented a growing body of new work, notably in mathematics, physics and medicine. A good example of the new life being brought into the books of the period was Al-kitb al-mukhtaar f isb al-abr wal-muqbala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completing and Balancing) by Ab Jafar Muammad ibn Ms al-Khwrizm, born around 780 CE, possibly in Baghdad in modern-day Iraq. This title was not just influential in the Islamic world. Although some Greek works did start to filter directly back into European awareness in the thirteenth century, Arabic works were first translated a century earlier both Arabic translations of Greek titles and the original work of scholars such as al-Khwrizm. Al-kitb al-mukhtaar led the way in introducing practical algebra to the West (the word algebra comes from al-abr in the title). Al-Khwrizm tells the reader that the book would be useful for inheritance, legacies, partition, lawsuits, and trade.