John Grant - Eureka!: 50 Scientists Who Shaped Human History

O nce upon a timenot so very long ago, reallythe world was flat and at the center of all things. The Sun and the Moon and the stars went round it, as did, in a more complicated way, the planets. All the treasures of the world had been set in place to serve human beings, more particularly male human beings, who were the pinnacle of creation. All was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Except that, of course, it wasnt.

Weve come a long way since those days, and especially in the past few centuries. The universe that seemed so small and stable has been revealed in its vast and dynamic magnificence, with the promise that it still has plenty more secrets waiting for us. But its not just the universe we know so much more about; its also ourselves. We have a far clearer idea of how we function, what makes us sick, what can cure us, and how were a part of the enormously complicated web of relationships that constitutes the environment in which we live. We recognize, too, problems our ancestors could never have dreamed of.

What has brought us out of the dark cave of ignorance into the sunshine of knowledge is science.

Technically speaking, science didnt really exist as such until the early seventeenth century, when people like Francis BACON began to systematize the best ways in which human reason could be used to acquire knowledge. We now refer to those various schemes collectively as the Scientific Method. But the scientific impulse dates back thousands of years before that, as people did their best to explain what was going on around them. Even though a lot of their efforts were misguided, it seems reasonable to refer to them as scientists.

Most of the names of those scientists have been forgotten, as is the way of things, or at most survive as footnotes in scholarly histories. In fact, one of the curiosities of the story of science is how often the work of scientists who were enormously prestigious in their own day has proven later to have had little or no lasting effect. The converse is true, too. There are plenty of examples of people whose ideas have been dismissed at the time but whom we now recognize as true groundbreakersIgnaz SEMMELWEIS is one, Alfred WEGENER another.

Theres a different reason, sadly, why some peoples ideas were ignored. Science, as a human activity, is as vulnerable to social biases as any other part of society. Youll notice that men significantly outnumber women as the subjects of the essays in this book. This is because, tragically, until very recentlyand, many would argue, stillboth women and predominantly men have assumed the sciences arent a fit subject for the gentler sex. A striking example of a female scientist wrongfully ignored is milie DU CHTELET, who for two and a half centuries was widely regarded as just some mistress of Voltaire whod done a translation job for him. Rosalind FRANKLIN was depicted as a mere hanger-on in the endeavor to decipher the structure of DNAand as a ferocious harpy, too, just to make her seem even more peripheral.

So how do you decide whether or not a particular scientist has shaped history? Its as easy as deciding whether or not a rock band is any goodin other words, while you can bring a fair number of objective criteria to the decision (they play in tune, for example), in the end it becomes a matter of personal judgment. Although I think everyone would agree on such figures as COPERNICUS, GALILEO, NEWTON, MENDEL, DARWIN, CURIE, and, of course, EINSTEIN as history-shapers, Im only too well aware that some of my fifty choices for inclusion and omission here might startle a few readers. a va.

All of the people Ive included have helped us better understand our universe. Some have done so in very obvious ways, some far more subtly. If you removed any of them from the story of science, itd be a different story.