Alan Lightman - The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-Century Science, Including the Original Papers

On the northwestern shore of africa some 150 miles south of the Canary Islands, the coastline slightly bulges in a pimple known as Cape Bojador. For Europeans in the early fifteenth century, Cape Bojador marked the boundary between the known and the unknown. North of the cape was civilization and the cities of light. South were the mystical lands of Africa and the Mare Tenebrosum, the Sea of Darkness. No sailor since the ancient Carthaginians had ventured south of Cape Bojador and returned. As Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the Portuguese royal reporter, wrote at the time, ancient rumors about this Cape have been cherished by the mariners of Spain from generation to generation beyond this Cape there is no race of men nor place of inhabitants and the sea so shallow that a whole league from land it is only a fathom deep, while the currents are so terrible that no ship having once passed the Cape will ever be able to return. Between 1424 and 1434, Prince Henry of Portugal sent fourteen expeditions of ships to round the perilous cape, with its deadly shallows, whirlpools, and violent storms. None succeeded. Yet the unfathomed beckoned. Undeterred, Prince Henry dispatched explorer Gils Eannes for a fifteenth attempt. On this voyage, Eannes gave Cape Bojador a wide berth, steering far to the west, into the Sea of Darkness. As he turned south, he looked back over his shoulder and was astonished to realize that he had left the dreaded cape behind. On his next trip, in 1435, Eannes again rounded Bojador and landed in a bay 150 miles to the south. There, he saw footprints of humans, camels

In the view of historians, Prince Henry did not send his ships south to Africa to colonize or to open fresh trade routes. Instead, he simply wanted to discover what was to be discovered. As Zurara explained, he had a wish to know the land.

The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it. Eventually, that passionate urge conquers the fear of the foreign, the fear of the gods, even the fear of personal danger and death. What remains is the pure exhilaration of discovery. We feel that exhilaration in Pablo Picasso's new cubism, and in the stream of consciousness of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and in the experiments with pentatonic scales in the jazz of Chick Corea and John Coltranejust as we feel it in the great geographical discoveries of new lands and new seas.

And we feel that exhilaration in the great breakthroughs in science. Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum physics, describes the transcendent moment in May 1925 when he realized what he had discovered: it was almost three o'clock in the morning before the final result of my computations lay before me. I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior, and felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structures that nature had so generously spread out before me. I was far too excited to sleep.

Scientific discoveries tremble with big ideas, not just about science but about human existence as well. Albert Einstein revised our notion of time. Hans Krebs found the universal chemical cycle that provides energy in every cell of every plant and animal on earthstrong evidence for a common origin of life. Jerome Friedman helped discover the quark, believed to be one of the indivisible units of matter. Paul Berg developed the first technique to modify genes and thus to create altered forms of life. Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic, advancing humankind's eternal struggle against mortality and disease. Heisenberg outlined his famous uncertainty principle, showing that the future can never be fully predicted from the past.

Several years ago, I decided to explore some of the great discoveries of science in the twentieth centuryto embark on a discovery of discoveries. Were there common patterns of discovery? How did styles of working and thinking vary from one science to the next, and from one scientist to the next? How did the discoverers compare with each other as people? Were they aware of the significance of their work at the time? As part of my undertaking, I collected the actual papers in which the discoveries were first announced, like the first reports of Gomes Eanes de Zurara. Together, these papers would form an unusual kind of history of twentieth-century science.

There came a moment, in the spring of 2002, when I had finally gathered together the twenty-five papers that I would include in this book. I was at home, in my house in Concord, and the golden forsythia were just starting to bloom. For six months I had been badgering astronomers, physicists, chemists, and biologists for nominations of the greatest discoveries in their fields in the twentieth century. The original publication of the theory of relativity. The first quantum model of the atom. The discovery of how nerves communicate with each other, the discovery of the first human hormone, the discovery of the expansion of the universe, the discovery of the structure and secret code of DNA. Some of the discovery papers had been published in obscure journals. Some required translation into English. Some were smudged and faint after being Xeroxed in distant libraries and sent through the mail. Partly using my own judgment, I winnowed down a list of over a hundred landmark papers to twenty-five. Each of these papers had profoundly changed the way that we fathom the world and our place in it. Here were Einstein, Fleming, Bohr, McClintock, Pauling, Watson and Crick, Heisenbergin their own wordsinventing, creating, discovering. Here were the great novels and symphonies of science. On that day in May, there came a moment when I had finished finding and collecting these original writings. I held the stack of twenty-five papers in my arms, a century of scientific thought. My eyes filled with tears.