John Farndon - The Great Scientists: From Euclid to Stephen Hawking

SCIENCE HAS BEEN AROUND A LONG TIME, since at least the days of the ancient Greeks. In addition, it is clear from consulting the archaeological record that the older Babylonian and Sumerian civilisations had rather more than a rudimentary grasp of medicine, astronomy and applied mathematics, not to mention engineering.

From around the sixth century BC, however, we see signs in the ancient Greek world of what could perhaps be called the first scientific revolution. No longer satisfied with the gods as the ultimate answer to why the world is the way it is, Greek thinkers began to search for an underlying principle which would form the basis of a more satisfactory explanation. The great Thales of Miletus proposed that this prime substance was water; Anaxagoras believed it to be air; Xenophanes proposed the rather less glamorous option of mud. Democritus, astonishingly, proposed the first atomic theory the word atom comes from the Greek atomon, literally translatable as indivisible (just how inappropriate the word was would not be recognized until demonstrated in spectacular fashion by Ernest Rutherford in the twentieth century). What we read in the works of these pre-Socratic philosophers we would not perhaps recognize as science, but we can see the glimmerings of the scientific method in the rejection of truth by authority, and the search for causes and principles based on observation and reason: truth as the province of thinkers, rather than of priests.

With the advent of Euclid and Archimedes, whose monumental works on geometry and trigonometry among others are still required reading on mathematics courses today, we find ourselves on the terra cognita of recognizable science.

The progress of science from then to the present day has not always been straightforward, however. Science has frequently been in conflict with organized religion, and on these occasions, scientists have often seemed to come off worst, not least because the practitioners of religion have often been prepared to resort to threats, intimidation and even assassination in order to preserve religions privileged position of sole arbiter of the truth. At certain periods in history, established churches have detected the odour of heresy in scientific accounts of the cosmos, the origin and structure of the earth and especially the origins of humanity.

Battered and bruised though it may at times have been, at the end of the twentieth century science has emerged the victor, as the key intellectual discipline for the twenty-first century and beyond. The reason for this success can be stated in two words: Science works. The whole laborious scientific process, the testing, revising and discarding of hypotheses; the diligent construction of theories which fit the known facts, and the modification or abandonment of these as and when new facts emerge: the scientific method, in short, produces results, results which are testable, verifiable, falsifiable, and from which predictions can be made. Astrology, cheiromancy, creation-science, divination, oneiromancy, parapsychology, telepathy, UFO-logy and forecasting the weather from the entrails of sacrificial animals produce no such results. As has been remarked elsewhere, it is no accident that those societies which have actively embraced the scientific method have flourished, while those societies which have preferred instead to rely on superstition, witchcraft and religion have failed.

The men and women whose biographies make up this volume have all made outstanding contributions to their own fields of scientific endeavour, have all shed light onto more or less baffling phenomena, and have all contributed to the ever-expanding pool of human knowledge.

This book makes no claim, however, to be a comprehensive list: there are many more scientists who could have been included; by the same token, this book could run to many hundreds of pages and still be incomplete. Still less does it aim to spark a discussion on the nature of greatness such discussion can safely be left to others. What it does hope to do is to give the reader an insight into some of historys most influential scientific discoveries and discoverers, and to encourage him or her to take their interest further. Whether or not it succeeds in this aim, then, must be up to each indiviual reader to decide for themselves.