My Reality: As It Appears at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

Copyright © 2012 by Stan Green

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-5090-8 (sc)

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iUniverse rev. date: 11/12/2012

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1:   Who Are We?

Chapter 2:   Where Did We Come From?

Chapter 3:   Where Did We Come From?

Chapter 4:   Where Did We Come From?

Chapter 5:   Where Did We Come From?

Chapter 6:   Where Did We Come From?

Chapter 7:   Where Did We Come From?

Chapter 8:   Where Did We Come From?

Chapter 9:   Where Are We Going?

Epilogue

Endnotes

References

PREFACE

This book can be regarded as a message to my grandchildren and their peers about how someone of my generation looks at reality. It attempts to document how a person, who might be considered representative of the generation that lived through much of the twentieth century and a good chunk of the beginning of the twenty-first century, would attempt to answer the three basic questions confronting humanity:

Who are we?

Where did we come from?

Where are we going?

The answers to these questions are based on our accumulated knowledge, which changes with time, and it is important that, as we learn more and as new facts develop, we modify our answers to these questions accordingly. At the beginning of the twentieth century, science would have told us that we live in a static Universe consisting of one enormous galaxy, that the passage of time and the physical attributes of an object are the same for all observers, and that given all the information about the Universe at any instant in time, one could determine the future evolution of every detail of the Universe. As you read these pages, you will become aware that, based on what we know today, all of these premises appear to be false.

We might want to ask, Who are we? But we might be better served if we ask, What do we know? I say this because I believe how we look at the Universe determines who we are. Therefore, chapter 1—Who Are We?—deals with the development of science and how this development has changed our accumulated knowledge—our knowledge base—and, in turn, what we believe regarding the state of everything.

Chapters 2 through 8—Where Did We Come From?—begin with what science currently refers to as the big bang and traces the development of the Universe, life, and the history of humanity over the next thirteen billion, seven hundred million years. Obviously, the scope of this cannot be covered adequately in two hundred or so pages, and it is not meant to do so. Rather, I write these chapters in an attempt to give the reader a snapshot of what I think were the factors that placed my extended family here, in this reality. The history of the evolution of the Universe is what placed our species at this time and place, and the history of our species, in turn, is what defines our current culture. Minute changes in the timeline of the evolution of the Universe would have resulted in our species not existing, and minute changes in the history of our species would result in us living in an entirely different culture.

Chapter 9—Where Are We Going?—encompasses a much more subjective topic, which contains an infinite number of random events and branch points that result in an infinite number of outcomes. Based on where I see our cultural systems, science, and our technology today, I have attempted to outline a few of these scenarios with the caveat that all of them may be obsolete before this book is published.

Because of the sheer volume of material presented, it was impractical to footnote all the factual information contained in My Reality. I have, however, attempted to footnote those items that I feel would be of immediate interest to the reader. The reference section does list the sources of all the material presented.

It is my hope that my grandchildren and their peers, when they reach an appropriate age, will read this book and learn something from it. I also hope that, as the twenty-first century nears an end, one or more of them write a similar book showing how much of our species’ knowledge of the state of everything has changed during their lifetime.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A number of people have encouraged and/or enabled me to write this book. First and foremost among these is the current generation, most of whom have opted to educate themselves in narrow and specific fields rather than obtain the type of education that would give them a conversational knowledge of the subjects that define human culture. Hopefully, those who read this book will find some of the topics covered interesting and will desire to delve more deeply into those subjects that stimulate their curiosity.

I was on my own at an early age. My close friend, Alfred Dolnick, who is several years older than I, acted as a role model and kept me from turning into someone I would not have been proud of. I am certain that I would not have been in the position to become an engineer, start a business, or write this book if he had not been present during those critical years of my life.

When I was thirty years old, I was hired by Phil Epstein, who subsequently became my close friend and business partner. Over the next thirty years, we had lunch together almost every working day. It was the conversations we had during these lunches that made me aware that there was a plethora of information outside of engineering that any citizen who is going to participate in a democracy should know. Phil inspired me to broaden my interests and change my reading habits so that I learned something about the world that existed outside of business and science. Phil has also offered commentary to portions of this book.

I must credit my wife, Sue, for contributing a number of comments and suggestions that were used in the final version. More importantly, she was willing to put off many activities that she would have liked for us to have shared in order to allow me to complete this project.

Several other individuals have read early drafts of this book and have offered comments and suggestions to improve it. Among these were my cousin, Julian Laderman, and my friend and former business partner, Allen Rosenfeld, who both contributed a number of facts that I incorporated into the text. Our daughter, Sharon Czeresko, helped with the creation of the reference list and the index. I wish to especially mention my close friend, Barbara Dolnick, who performed two edits and contributed many facts that ended up in the final version. Without her efforts, it is quite possible that this book would never have been published.

I chose the title My Reality because the reality portrayed is derived from my specific understanding of what has occurred in science and history. While each of these two subjects might be covered better by an academic who has studied in either area, I believe that we have to understand both science and the history of our species in order to determine how our current reality came into being. Because of my background in science and mathematics as well as my interest in history, I feel I have the capability to tie these two disciplines together.

This book is dedicated to our grandchildren.

PROLOGUE

It is approximately the year 400 BC. A Greek philosopher, Plato, writes in his seventh book of The Republic about a number of people imprisoned and forced to continuously face a cave wall. They are able to view events that are occurring behind them only by observing the shadows the events cast on the wall. He contrasts reality—what actually exists—with the prisoners’ impressions of reality as derived from what their senses tell them as they look at these shadows. He postulates that the reality that is perceived by man is dependent on his sensory data, which in this case is incomplete, misleading, and faulty.

It is the year AD 1687. Science and knowledge have improved greatly since Plato’s time. Our species now knows that Earth is round and orbits the Sun. Kepler has determined a set of rules that describe the motion of the planets around the Sun, and Galileo has proposed that all objects fall toward Earth at the same rate regardless of what they consist of. Realizing that these two propositions could be manifestations of the same phenomenon, a physicist formulates a set of mathematical equations to describe it. The physicist is Newton, and the phenomenon is gravity. Newton’s law of gravitation and laws of motion will govern the development of Western science well into the twentieth century. Based on these laws, most physicists of his time will conclude that the world is deterministic, and that, given correct data, man can describe the future behavior of the cosmos.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a natural scientist, during a long sea voyage, makes a number of observations that lead him to realize that life adapts to the conditions surrounding it, and it is this adaptation that leads to the formation of new species. This theory contradicts many of the accepted scientific and religious beliefs of the time, and the scientist hesitates in publishing it. Once he does publish, the data he has meticulously recorded, as well as the existing fossil record, cause his ideas to slowly be accepted by his peers. The scientist is Darwin, and the resulting science is named the theory of evolution.

It is the early twentieth century, and some scientists are beginning to question the certainty of Newton’s world. A number of experiments take place to determine the velocity of light, which lead to paradoxical conclusions when viewed from the perspective of Newtonian physics. A physicist resolves these paradoxes by doing away with Newtonian concepts like simultaneity and the invariance of time to different observers, and derives a theory that completely contradicts what an observer’s senses seem to be telling him. He subsequently develops a theory of gravity that is based on geometry and can describe the birth and expansion of the cosmos. The name of this physicist is Einstein, and his theory becomes known as the theory of relativity.

During this same period, another group of physicists begin to look at the behavior of very small objects, such as photons and electrons. Led by Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Bohr, they postulate a world where causality does not seem to exist and where the very act of an observer making a measurement changes the essence of the object being observed and measured. The resulting science is known as quantum theory, and many of the new technologies of the late twentieth century will be based on it.

The new millennium is starting. We have sent objects outside our solar system and have generated electromagnetic signals, which have reached the nearest stars. We have begun to decipher the genetic code of life and will soon have the capability to modify this code at will. Our species can look out to the edge of the observable Universe and can also see within the boundaries of an atom.

The science and technology we possess are increasing at an exponential rate and rest on the pillars of relativity theory, quantum theory, and the theory of evolution. Our understanding of the Universe we inhabit and our place in it is, in turn, based on these pillars and what our senses tell us. It is therefore appropriate that we examine in more detail where these theories came from, the relationship of our senses to them, how our species evolved to the point where we are capable of proposing and understanding them, and what they predict for our species’ future.

CHAPTER 1

Who Are We?

What is science? A simple answer is that it is the development of a set of rules and laws based on our sensory input, or alternatively, the verification of a set of rules and laws by comparing these against our sensory data, both human and machine. The sensory data used is checked rigorously, using a procedure known as the scientific method, in order to minimize the errors caused by our senses or those of our machines. Science continuously questions its own premises. Note that the three pillars of modern science—the theory of evolution, relativity theory, and quantum theory—all contain the word theory. These propositions are labeled as theories even though there has been no significant credible challenge to or conflict with these concepts since they were proposed. All scientists are always trying to find exceptions and contradictions to these theories, since this would ensure that they would become one of the significant scientists of their generation. Thousands of scientists have attempted to topple these pillars; however, not one has succeeded, although new generations are continuously devising experiments or checking data with the hope that they will be able to level one of them.

Western science had its beginnings in ancient Greece. Greek scientists were among the first to question the world around them and use their sensory information in an attempt to determine the workings of nature.

Thales of Miletus, who lived in the seventh century BC, and whom many consider as the progenitor of Greek science, was active in mathematics and astronomy. In mathematics he postulated that:

•   An isosceles triangle is defined as a triangle that has two equal base angles.

•   Alternate interior angles of intersecting lines are equal.

•   A right triangle can be completely expressed by the length of one side and the acute angle that it forms with its adjacent side.

Based on these simple postulates, Thales was able to determine the distance of a ship from the shore and, by using the length of their shadows, the heights of various structures on land. His main contribution to astronomy was in realizing that eclipses of the Sun were a natural and not a supernatural occurrence. He, however, was not aware that the Earth was a sphere.

Anaximander expanded on Thales’s work by inventing and/or popularizing the sundial. This would at first glance seem to be a trivial occurrence in Western science; however, it should be pointed out that science cannot exist without an accurate means of measuring the passage of time, since this is the only way that events can be placed in a precise chronological order.

The concept that the Earth was round and moves through space was first proposed by Pythagoras (570-495 BC). He may have been led to this idea partially by his belief that a sphere was the perfect geometric object. Pythagoras is best known for the Pythagorean theorem, which states that the square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the two remaining sides.

The Greek astronomer Anaxagoras realized that the Moon was illuminated by the light from the Sun and proposed that eclipses of the Sun were caused by the Moon’s shadow on the Earth. He also proposed that the Sun was a conglomeration of burning iron and conjectured that all animals breathe and that fish respire by extracting air from water using their gills. Not the first and certainly not the last scientist to be misled by his senses, he assumed the Earth was flat and calculated its distance to the Sun at four thousand miles, and the Sun’s diameter at thirty-five miles. Ignored by Anaxagoras was the suggestion by Pythagoras, made a hundred years earlier, postulating that the surface of the Earth was shaped like a sphere.

Empedocles, who was born around 494 BC, observed that the pressure of air supported the weight of water contained in an inverted tube and also theorized that light actually moved through space. He could also be looked on as the first evolutionist as he is said to have stated: Hair and leaves, and thick feathers of birds, are the same in origin, and scales too on strong limbs… . But on hedgehogs sharp-pointed hair bristles on their backs.¹

Democritus, who was born in the year 460 BC, postulated that all matter was built up from unique single entities, which he called atoms. Unfortunately, most subsequent ancient Greek scientists did not pursue this line of thought further.

Hippocrates (460-370 BC) is considered to be the father of medical practice. He was the founder of the Hippocratic School of Medicine, which established medical practice as a separate discipline from other areas of science and philosophy. He is best known for being the author of the Hippocratic Oath, which serves as the basis for the practice of Western medicine.

Socrates (469-399 BC) is considered to be the gadfly of Ancient Greece. While being primarily a moralist and an ethicist, he contributed to science by his probing questioning and thinking, which he passed on to his most outstanding disciple, Plato.

Plato (about 429-347 BC), considered by many to be the world’s greatest philosopher, contributed to ethics, political systems, morality, and metaphysics. He is also known for mentioning in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias that a huge island empire, Atlantis, existed around 10,000 BC. Plato noted that Atlantis was a naval power beyond the Pillars of Hercules that had dominated a large part of the known world. (The Pillars of Hercules were rock formations that marked the entrance to the Straight of Gibraltar on the Mediterranean side.)

However, and most importantly, his writings in the seventh book, The Republic, form the basis of modern science, for it is his allegory of prisoners chained in a cave and determining reality from shadows cast on a wall that indicates that the data we are capable of accumulating using our senses or our machines must always be suspect. Unfortunately, many scientists throughout history have ignored or forgotten this basic fact.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) became the symbol for Greek science. He accepted the fact, as postulated by Pythagoras, that the shape of the Earth was spherical and gathered observational evidence to support this. He stated: As to the figure of the Earth it must necessarily be spherical. If this were not so, the eclipses of the Moon would not have such sections as they have…²

He noted that the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets seemed to circle the Earth. Based on this observation, he proposed that these objects were mounted on concentric spheres rotating around the Earth, which was, of course, located at the center of the Cosmos. This concept roughly described the motion of the objects that Aristotle could see in the sky. Unfortunately, it was incorrect, as have been all proposals that have tried to give our species a unique and special place in the Universe. An expanded version of this line of thought, using the concept of epicenters, was subsequently proposed by Hipparchus and popularized by Ptolemy to remove some of the discrepancies between Aristotle’s theories and observations. An epicenter was defined as a circle on whose circumference an observed heavenly body orbited. The epicenter, in turn, circled the Earth. This concept was considered correct until Copernicus challenged it more than 1,000 years later.

Why was this proposal, which postulated the Earth as the center of the Universe, accepted for over one thousand years? The reasons were:

•   Humans were placed at the center of the Universe, which played to our ego.

•   Telescopes and accurate timing devices did not exist.

•   The theory seemed to roughly explain what was observed.

•   It seemed compatible with major Western religious beliefs and myths.

Herophilos (335-280 BC) was a Greek physician who is thought to be the first anatomist who performed dissections on human cadavers to increase his knowledge of human anatomy. He meticulously recorded his findings, but unfortunately all of these writings have been lost. Because he dissected human cadavers to learn his field, he is considered to be one of the first medical practitioners who used scientific methodology.

Euclid, who lived around 300 BC, took the basic mathematical ideas of Thales and Pythagoras and expanded them into the mathematical branch we define as geometry. Students in secondary school today, when they study plane geometry, learn this branch of mathematics in almost the same form as created by Euclid.

The founder of the science of mechanics, Archimedes, who is best remembered for the Archimedes principle, was born in 287 BC. His work with levers and his principle, which states that submerged objects displace their own volume in water while floating objects displace their own weight in water, insured him a primary place in the history and evolution of science.

The first reasonable calculation of the length of the circumference of the Earth was made by Eratosthenes (276-195 BC) using concepts postulated by Thales, Pythagoras, Euclid, and Aristotle. He compared the noon shadow at midsummer between Alexandria and Aswan (at that time named Syene) and, using these measurements, calculated the circumference. Depending on the value of his unit of measurement when compared to our modern unit of measurement, he may have been as close as 1 percent to the accepted circumference today. Eratosthenes also was involved in the preliminary development of prime number theory.

Hipparchus (190-120 BC) is considered by many to be the greatest astronomer of antiquity. He created trigonometry and generated its first tables. He also solved several problems in spherical geometry. His main claim to fame was his work on the theory of epicenters, which was subsequently documented and popularized by Ptolemy.

The ancient Greeks developed a science that, for all its inaccuracies and errors, gave them a way to make predictions about the world around them, even though their ability to make measurements was primitive and they lacked any way to measure time accurately. Because of their inability to measure time accurately, their science of objects in motion was flawed. However, their science of statics, or objects at rest, was close to what we accept today. The Greeks developed the mathematics of geometry and postulated the existence of the atom.

The Romans expanded on this and developed a technology that made use of these new concepts.

Strabo (63 BC-AD 24) was a geographer. It is our good fortune that many of his works have been preserved to modern time. In his works, he summarized the state of geography in his time and criticized the work of his predecessors. This criticism serves to give later generations more knowledge about how science was progressing. For instance, he criticized Eratosthenes for spending so much time in his discussions that prove that the world is round and states that this aspect of his work should have been disposed of in the compass of a few words.³ What this indicates is that, during the time span between Eratosthenes and Strabo, the fact that the Earth was spherical had moved from a contentious idea to an accepted fact. He comments that Plato’s Atlantis may have actually existed and points out that it had also been described independently by Egyptian priests.

Ptolemy, whose last recorded observation was made in AD 151, is probably the best-known astronomer of antiquity, specifically due to his work on detailing and expanding much of the work originally done by Hipparchus. His writings as they appear in his work Almagest became the standard for astronomy for the next thousand years. Ptolemy was also very active in geography, and his works in this field were used throughout the Middle Ages. He may have invented latitude and longitude; he certainly popularized these concepts and calculated a plethora of locations using them—on land. Determining longitude at sea was not easy until inventions made it possible to keep accurate track of time while at sea. The grid system employed on modern maps is attributed to Ptolemy.

One of the great physicians and physiologists of his period was Galen (Claudius Galenus), who lived at the same time as Ptolemy. He divided the vertebrae into groups and named them and postulated that nerves are responsible for sending impulses between the brain and the spinal cord. He was an advocate that diet and exercise were responsible for maintaining a healthy body, a premise that we in the modern world should probably pay more attention to.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages descended on the Western world. The science developed by the Greeks and Romans was preserved in the West by monks in monasteries through the copying and recopying of manuscripts. Thus, the Catholic Church was largely responsible for saving the concepts of the science of antiquity, even though it would be these concepts that would lead to ideas that challenged the fundamental premises of Judean Christian beliefs to their core.

Meanwhile, the advancement of science was continuing in the East.

Aryabhata (AD 476-550) was an Indian mathematician who proposed a number of trigonometric functions such as sine and cosine and generated the first-known rudimentary trigonometric tables.

Another Indian mathematician and astronomer, Brahmagupta (AD 598-668), was the first to define zero as a number. He applied his knowledge of mathematics to calculate the times of future lunar and solar eclipses and realized the fact that objects fall toward the Earth because of a law of nature. His work is considered by some to form the basis for subsequent developments in astronomy by the Arabs, who also took the works of Brahmagupta and Aryabhata to popularize what would become known as Arabic numerals.

In the mid-seventh century AD, an Islamic lunar calendar was proposed that consisted of twelve months, which are defined by sightings of the crescent moon. The need for accuracy in these sightings and the resultant calculations that they entail caused mathematics, especially in the area of spherical geometry, to advance from Greek and Roman mathematical techniques. This calendar is still the basis for calculating Muslim holy days.

Subsequently, Abu Abdullah Al-Battani, who lived between approximately AD 850 and 930, while confirming the measurements made by Ptolemy, noticed that the Sun’s position in relation to the stars during its apogee seemed to have shifted from its previous measured position. The simple explanation for this is that the Sun moves through the cosmos; however, because of all the previous conclusions by Aristotle, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy, this explanation hadn’t been considered.

Al-Battani determined the length of the calendar year to an accuracy that approaches our current calculations, and made a number of observations on lunar and solar eclipses, which were later used by Richard Dunthorne in 1749 to compute the apparent acceleration of the Moon. Following in the footsteps of Aryabhata, he used trigonometric functions rather than Greek chords in his mathematical calculations.

Al-Battani wrote a number of books, the most famous of which, De numeris stellerum et motibus, was translated into Latin in the twelfth century. This book consisted of his understanding of astronomy, along with supporting tables, which further established the use of empirical methods and testing techniques in scientific inquiry. Copernicus (1473-1543), in his book De revolutionibus, which was to shatter the idea of an Earth-centered Universe forever, cited and quoted him.

Subsequently, another Arabian scientist, Abu Ali Al-Hasan ibn Al Haytham (965-1039) made considerable advances in optics. He proposed that, when light is reflected, the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection, and that twilight continues until the Sun is nineteen degrees below the horizon with the height of the atmosphere being about thirty miles. The latter two propositions, while being close to actual values, are not correct because of some of his measurements and assumptions. He is considered by many to be the father of modern optics, with Roger Bacon and other scientists of the Renaissance citing his work in this field. He was the first to propose that light from an observed object impacts the eye and causes vision.

Shen Kuo (1031-1095) was a Chinese scientist who, had he lived in the West, would have been considered to be one of the first great Renaissance scientists, perhaps comparable to Leonardo da Vinci. Like Leonardo, he was interested in a multiplicity of subjects, including magnetism, astronomy, mathematics, geology, archaeology, anatomy, and pharmacology. Among his many accomplishments were:

•   He described the use of the magnetic compass for navigation and was the first to propose a difference between true north and magnetic north.

•   He proposed a land formation model, based on his observations of marine fossils located in land areas and deposits of silt, that stated that geological structures were formed by erosion over long periods of time. This concept predated the theories of Charles Lyell (1797-1875) by many centuries.

•   He realized that local environments and climates change slowly over time, which is one of Darwin’s fundamental premises that led to his theory of evolution.

•   His work on the lengths of arcs of circles was a precursor to the field of spherical geometry.

•   He theorized that rainbows were formed when sunlight passed through water droplets.

•   He documented the fact that Bi Sheng, who lived in China during the middle of the eleventh century, invented a type of printing involving ceramic movable type.

It should also be noted that the Eastern world was also responsible for copying and protecting the classical science writings from antiquity, which allowed Western science, when it again started to advance, to not have to start from scratch.

King Charlemagne of France (742-814) is also credited for being responsible for the maintaining of much of the knowledge of the world of antiquity. His edict of 789 ordered: In each bishopric and in each monastery let the psalms, the notes, the chant, calculations, and grammar be taught, and carefully corrected books be available.⁴ Charlemagne had one of the Western world’s most comprehensive book collections. He kept these documents in his castle and allowed a plethora of scholars from the known world to access them. Fortunately, the monks took his edict to duplicate everything in sight literally, which led to the preservation of much of what still exists from antiquity.

Roger Bacon (1214-1292) was an English scientist who believed that all of the sciences are based ultimately on mathematics. In his work, the Opus Majus, he discusses this, along with the reflection and refraction of light and the properties of mirrors and lenses, as well as magnification.

Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) was not a scientist, and yet he is one of the most important contributors to not only the advancement of science, but also to the advancement and retention of all of the knowledge accumulated by humans. His invention of movable type and the printing press in the West allowed for books to be mass produced and distributed. Previously, books had to be laboriously and individually produced by hand. It is quite possible that the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution would never have occurred if the printing press had not been invented.

If ever a single individual expressed the sense of the Renaissance, it was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). He was truly a remarkable man, as he seemed to be a master of everything and was a leading indicator of the fact that scientific inquiry in the West was about to return, with a vengeance. He is known as one of the world’s great artists, having painted The Virgin of the Rocks and the Mona Lisa. As an artist, he created the methodology for linear perspective, which he recorded for posterity. Many of his journals, which were written as the mirror image of conventional writing, still exist today and record his thoughts, ideas, and inventions in various aspects of science. Because of his exceptional ability to describe what he thought about and observed, along with his artistic talent to render detailed illustrations of these thoughts and observations, his journals offer a unique insight into the mind of the man. This, when combined with his use of the scientific method, his repeated testing of proposals and observations, and his explanatory notes, were unique for his time. He was active in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, anatomy, geology, botany, the fossil record, and aeronautics. A few of his many accomplishments and ideas were:

•   He was convinced from his study of geology and the deposit of various fossil shells in various geological strata that the Earth had existed for thousands of centuries and had not been formed during a recent cataclysmic event.

•   He studied human anatomy by dissecting cadavers, and he recorded his findings with detailed drawings.

•   He stated that the Earth was not at the center of the Universe, and it was not the Sun that moves.

•   He designed a helicopter, which was powered by a rotary blade, and a glider, as well as a flying machine.

•   He designed a number of machines powered by water and steam.

Unfortunately, the technology necessary to construct many of his machines did not exist in his time. However, because of the meticulous detail that he used to document his ideas, many of them are now being tested and proven using actual models or computer simulations.

Many of his ideas predate those of Galileo, Lyell, Newton, and Darwin. Simply put, he lived in the wrong time, as a mind such as his would have benefited greatly from the technology available today. Needless to say, we would have benefited more as well.

Gerolamo Cardano (1501-1576) was an Italian mathematician, astrologer, and physician who created the mathematical entity known as a complex number. He could not see any use for these entities; however, subsequent work by Euler and others made them into indispensable tools for modern mathematical analysis. The mathematical techniques used in quantum mechanics would not exist without these numbers, as the probability amplitudes, on which quantum theory is based, are defined by them. He also was one of the first to write a book that analyzed games of chance using probability theory. As an aside, he was arrested and spent several months in prison because, as an astrologer, he published a horoscope of Jesus Christ in 1554.

Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) was a surgeon and an anatomist who was the first to popularize and use standard charts in the study of anatomy and the practice of surgery. These charts would have been much better had he had access to Leonardo’s works; however, Leonardo’s drawings had not been widely distributed.

The first medical practitioner to realize that the heart was a pump that circulated blood throughout the body was William Harvey (1578-1657). He published a number of his conclusions in his book, On the Motion of the Heart and of Blood in Animals, in 1628.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, who is best known for the quote: I think, therefore I am. He is the creator of the Cartesian coordinate system, which allows geometric objects to be expressed as algebraic quantities. This coordinate system is named after the Latin version of his name. He is one of the founders of analytical geometry, and some of his work is considered to be the foundation for the development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz. In physics, he discovered an early law for the conservation of momentum and did major work in the science of optics. His philosophy as well as his science was founded on the premise that one cannot trust his senses.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) studied the data available on the movement of celestial objects and came to the conclusion that Ptolemy’s theory of motion was incorrect and that the Sun was at the center of the Universe, and that the Earth and other planets orbited around it. He delayed publishing this radical idea until just before his death because he was afraid of being branded a heretic by the Church. He saw a copy of his book, De revolutionibus, on the day that he died.

A Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, accumulated a huge amount of observational data on the visible cosmos after realizing that the existing data, some of which had been generated by the ancient Greeks, was inaccurate. Without the use of an accurate timepiece or a telescope, he meticulously recorded celestial positions and other data, which allowed those who came after him to revolutionize the science of astronomy. He turned his data over to a German astronomer, Johannes Kepler, at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a German mathematician and astronomer who used the data generated by Tycho Brahe to formulate three laws for planetary motion. These laws were the death thrust for an Earth-centered Universe and would eventually lead Isaac Newton to formulate the equation for his law of gravity. Kepler’s laws can be summarized as:

•   Planets circle the Sun in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one of the foci of the ellipse.

•   A planet sweeps out equal areas of the ellipse in equal times. Thus, when the planet is closer to the Sun, it is moving faster.

•   The square of the period of the planet’s orbit is proportional to the cube of its distance from the Sun.

These laws were derived from data generated without the use of telescopes or accurate timing devices, yet the first two laws correctly describe the movement of the planets and removed all of the previous complicated manipulations of myriad numbers of celestial spheres or orbiting epicenters.

Johannes Kepler was subsequently honored by my generation with the launching of the Kepler Space Observatory in 2009, whose primary mission is to discover Earth-type planets orbiting other stars.

Leonard Digges (1520-1559), who lived in England, is said to have invented both the refracting and reflecting telescopes. There is some controversy regarding both these claims; however, the benefit they provided to the advancement of astronomy is beyond question. Leonard Digges was probably the first to construct a rudimentary reflecting telescope. His son, Thomas, was one of the first to discard the idea of stars being attached to a sphere surrounding the Earth, and instead postulated that stars are dispersed across an infinite amount of space.

During this period, an Italian scientist named Galileo (1564-1642) observed the skies using the recently invented refracting telescope. He saw Jupiter with its four primary satellites orbiting it and immediately deduced that the planets orbit the Sun in a similar manner. In 1632 he published Dialogue, which was intended as a comparison of an Earth-centered solar system with the Sun-centered system proposed by Copernicus. The Church banned Dialogue because it was clear that Galileo favored Copernicus’s concept, and Galileo was charged with heresy. At age sixty-nine he was threatened with torture unless he recanted this idea. He did so; however, he was still sentenced to life imprisonment. He died a blind man, eight years later, while still under house arrest.

Utilizing his pulse rate for timing, Galileo had previously studied the rate of decent of different materials due to gravity. He was the first to propose that all objects fall at the same rate and would move a distance proportional to the square of the time elapsed, which was completely contrary to the Greek view. This conclusion also helped lead Newton to formulate his law of gravitation and would form the basis for the science of dynamics.

Galileo was also the first to realize that the period of a pendulum remains the same regardless of its amplitude, and he proposed using this principle to construct a clock. This ensured that future astronomers would not only have telescopes to observe events in the heavens, but would also have timepieces to allow them to place these events in an accurate chronological order.

Considered to be one of the greats of science, Galileo developed observations, techniques, and conclusions that form the basis of what constitutes science today. Yet he was rewarded for his efforts by being threatened with torture, placed under house arrest, and discredited by the Church. He still fared better than Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 for supporting the Copernican model and rashly stating that there might be life on other planets.

Galileo and his supporters had to smuggle his book out of Italy, where it was published in Holland in 1638. It was not until 1992 that the Church formally recanted the sentence given to Galileo by the Inquisition, some three hundred years after his death and long after the correctness of his position had been established.

Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647) invented the mercurial barometer in 1643. He designed and built a number of telescopes and microscopes and is noted for the statement, We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air. He is also known to have communicated with Galileo after his publication of Dialogue regarding his support for the Copernican model; however, he does not appear to have defended Galileo after he was condemned by the Vatican.

Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was an English scientist who was appointed the first curator of Britain’s Royal Society shortly after its founding in 1660. The society was founded to promote knowledge of the natural world through observation and experiment. Hooke initially was interested in timekeeping and performed fundamental research on the pendulum clock. In 1660 Hooke defined the law of elasticity, which describes the extension of a spring versus the force applied to it. He then developed the balance spring, which would allow a watch to keep reasonably accurate time.

Hooke was an advocate of a force being the cause of attraction between celestial bodies and believed the strength of this force was inversely proportional to the distance between the bodies. When Newton published his law of gravitation in 1687, Hooke claimed he had led Newton to the belief that the force of gravity between two bodies was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. However, Newton denied this and it certainly was not documented in Hooke’s writings.

Hooke was active in the fields of biology and astronomy, and in 1665 published Micrographia, which included some drawings of observations he had made while using a microscope. He was the first to use the term cell to describe biological organisms.

Hooke also published drawings of the Moon and other astronomical objects as they appeared when viewed through a telescope. Hooke was one of the first to use the method of parallax, which uses the change in relative position of a nearby star as the Earth moves around the Sun to attempt to measure the distance to that star. However, the sophistication of the equipment available to Hooke was not sufficient to allow him to do this with any accuracy.

Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) was the first to observe bacteria and other protozoa directly. He did not use the more advanced compound microscope that Hooke used, but instead concentrated on constructing single lenses of superior power and resolution, which eventually aided him in observing creatures that had never been seen before.

Between 1674 and 1676, the Royal Society in London received a number of letters from Leeuwenhoek in which he claimed to have observed bacteria and other protozoa living in lake and rainwater. These claims were initially greeted with a great deal of skepticism, since Hooke had been using a more advanced technology and had never seen these creatures. Hooke was able to subsequently improve the quality of his lenses to the point where he was able to duplicate Leeuwenhoek’s results. In 1680, Leeuwenhoek was elected to membership in the Society.

One of Leeuwenhoek’s main objectives was to disprove the theory of spontaneous generation, which he did in 1683 when he was the first to observe bacteria cells. Unfortunately, he never made the intellectual leap to associate the bacteria he had discovered with disease.

Isaac Newton (1643-1727), an English scientist who is considered to be one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time, took the results achieved by Kepler and Galileo and constructed from them an edifice that would be the basis of Western science for the next three hundred years. Newton’s ideas on gravity and motion are found in his monumental work, the Principia, which was published in 1687. The Principia is considered by most to be the single most important scientific publication ever written.

Newton’s law of gravity states: The force of attraction (F) between any two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses (m1 and m2), and inversely proportional to the square of the distance (r) between them. Mathematically: F = Gm1m2 /r²; where: G is the gravitational constant of proportionality.

Newton’s laws of motion state:

•   Every object at rest remains at rest unless acted on by a force. Every object in uniform motion stays in uniform motion unless acted on by a force.

•   The acceleration (a), or rate of change of velocity of an object, is proportional to the force (F) being applied, and inversely proportional to its mass (m). Mathematically: F = ma.

•   Every action generates an equal and opposite reaction, equal in force and opposite in direction to the given action.

Using the above laws, Newton was able to show why the planets follow elliptical orbits around the Sun. The motion of the Moon around the Earth, the tidal force generated by the Moon on the Earth’s seas, the trajectory of artillery shells, the movement of the Voyager satellites through the solar system, and how fast your car accelerates when you step on the gas are all governed by these laws.

The above laws were very different from the Greek laws of dynamics, which stated that the rest state is the normal state of a body, and a body moved only if it was acted on by some force. Both Galileo and Newton had reached the conclusion that an object traveling at a constant velocity and an object at rest are indistinguishable from one another locally. The relative velocity of the observer with respect to the object determines whether the observer concludes the object is moving at a constant rate or is at rest.

Newton was originally encouraged to write the Principia when he was asked by Edmund Halley, the discoverer of Halley’s comet, whether an inverse square law would account for the elliptical orbits of the planets. He surprised Halley by saying he had already derived that this was the case, and Halley then encouraged him to publish the result. He did publish this result in Principia, along with an incredible amount of related and additional information.

Most people give Newton credit for inventing calculus and believe he used this to do most of his original proofs involving dynamics. However, for some reason, he went to great lengths to use conventional mathematics in the derivations used in the Principia, perhaps because he wanted his techniques to be familiar to his peers.

Newton proposed the concepts of absolute time and absolute space. By absolute time we mean that all observers measure time at the same rate regardless of their location or motion. By absolute space we mean that there is a reference point in space from which all motion is judged. Newton, in the Principia, defines these quantities as, Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external and Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.⁵

These concepts were not seriously challenged until the advent of relativity theory in the early twentieth century.

Newtonian theory was completely deterministic and assumed that, if an observer was able to calculate the forces on an object from all other bodies surrounding it, he would be able to uniquely determine its future motion for all time. This had a profound effect on both religion and philosophy.

If the world was completely deterministic, there was no place for a God. There might still be a creator, but once he had finished his creation, everything would be uniquely determined, and he would have no further effect on the Universe.

Determinism challenged the concept of free will. It implied that whatever an individual would do or not do was already preordained, and therefore individuals were simply automatons moving through a set script, which we call life.

The breadth of Newton’s knowledge and his contribution to science cannot be overstated. We have touched here on his contribution to mathematics, dynamics, and gravitational theory. Many of the original ideas regarding light, optics, and the theory of colors came from him. He was the inventor of the Newtonian telescope, which bears his name, and is largely responsible for formulating the scientific method, which uses observed data to confirm theoretical theorems. Newton was a fairly reclusive and secretive person who normally had to have his arm twisted in order to discuss or publish his ideas so, no doubt, many of his accomplishments and some of his thoughts and theories have been lost to the world. There are fascinating tidbits from his writings that lead one to believe he really was uncomfortable with gravity being a force that instantaneously acted over any distance, and that he appreciated the duality of photons existing as both particles and waves. For instance, in the Principia, Newton writes regarding gravity:

Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and our seas by the power of gravity but have not yet assigned the cause of this power. This is certain, that it must proceed from a cause that penetrates to the very centers of the Sun and the planets, without suffering the least diminution of its force; that operates not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts (as mechanical causes normally do), but according to the quantity of solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all sides to immense distances… ⁶

He writes to Richard Bentley regarding gravity in 1692 or ’93:

That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to the other, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe that no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.⁷

Newton wrote: If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.⁸ Actually it was those who followed Newton who achieved heights they would probably not have been able to reach had they not had Newton’s shoulders to stand on.

German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) has also been proposed as the inventor of calculus. Newton actually accused him of plagiarism,