The following material once appeared in a late issue of an early Web-
based publication, whose owners have since gone out of business. I
don't think anyone will mind its resurrection in the present context!

Dr. Ron Feigenblatt

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Q. "What was the most important invention of the past two thousand
years?"

A. (Richard Dawkins)

"The telescope resolves light from very far away. The spectroscope
analyses and diagnoses it. It is through spectroscopy that we know
what the stars are made of. The spectroscope shows us that the
universe is expanding and the galaxies receding; that time had a
beginning, and when; that other stars are like the sun in having
planets where life might evolve.

"In 1835, Auguste Comte, the French philosopher and founder of
sociology, said of the stars: 'We shall never be able to study, by
any method, their chemical composition or their mineralogical
structure... Our positive knowledge of stars is necessarily limited
to their geometric and mechanical phenomena.'

"Even as he wrote, the Fraunhofer lines had been discovered: those
exquisitely fine barcodes precisely positioned across the spectrum;
those telltale fingerprints of the elements. The spectroscopic
barcodes enable us to do a chemical analysis of a distant star when,
paradoxically (because it is so much closer), we cannot do the same
for the moon -- its light is all reflected sunlight and its barcodes
those of the sun. The Hubble red shift, majestic signature of the
expanding universe and the hot birth of time, is calibrated by the
same Fraunhofer barcodes. Rhythmic recedings and approachings by
stars, which betray the presence of planets, are detected by the
spectroscope as oscillating red and blue shifts. The spectroscopic
discovery that other stars have planets makes it much more likely
that there is life elsewhere in the universe.

"For me, the spectroscope has a poetic significance. Romantic poets
saw the rainbow as a symbol of pure beauty, which could only be
spoiled by scientific understanding. This thought famously prompted
Keats in 1817 to toast 'Newton's health and confusion to
mathematics,' and in 1820 inspired his well known lines: 'Philosophy
will clip an Angel's wings/Conquer all mysteries by rule and
line/Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -/Unweave a rainbow...'
Humanity's eyes have now been widened to see that the rainbow of
visible light is only an infinitesimal slice of the full
electromagnetic spectrum. Spectroscopy is unweaving the rainbow on a
grand scale. If Keats had known what Newton's unweaving would lead
to -- the expansion of our human vision, inspired by the expanding
universe -- he could not have drunk that toast.

RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi
Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University;
Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene, The Extended
Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River out of Eden (Science Masters
Series), Climbing Mount Improbable, and the recently published
Unweaving the Rainbow.