ScienceWeek

ON PERSONALITIES IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

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.

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.

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. Charles Darwin's great achievement 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, 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