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ON THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

The following points are made by John Gribbin
(citation below):

1) Scientific history, like much of history, is often
told in
terms of personalities. We learn who made the key
discoveries and
inventions, and when; the implication, though rarely
stated, is
that the course of scientific history might have been
very
different if great individuals like Isaac Newton,
Charles Darwin,
Marie Curie, or Niels Bohr had never lived. But this
is a false
impression.

2) The progress of science is inextricably linked with
the
progress of technology, and in addition scientific
advances build
on what has gone before. It is inconceivable, for
example, that
Isaac Newton could have come up with Albert Einstein's
theory of
relativity, because he had neither the knowledge about
the nature
of light on which Einstein built nor the mathematical
techniques
that were developed in the 19th century and that
provided just
the tools Einstein needed for his description of the
interrelationships between space and time.

3) Scientific advances tend to be products of their
time, and if
one scientist hadn't made a particular discovery, then
almost
certainly another scientist would have done so at
about the same
time. The classic example of this is the theory of
evolution by
natural selection. The great achievement of Charles
Darwin (1808-
1882) is widely regarded as the most important
scientific idea of
all time -- but it was discovered in exactly the same
form,
building on exactly the same body of earlier work, by
another
naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), soon
after Darwin
made his breakthrough. Darwin had kept his ideas
secret, not
least because he worried about their effect on his
wife, a
traditionally devout Christian; he published them only
when
Wallace sent a resume of his own identical theory to
Darwin
asking for his opinion of it. If Darwin had never
lived, we would
probably now regard Wallace's theory of evolution by
natural
selection as arguably the most important scientific
idea of all
time.

Adapted from: John Gribbin (with Mary Gribbin):
Stardust:
Supernovae and Life -- The Cosmic Connection. Yale
University
Press 2000, p.68. More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300084196/scienceweek

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