The Ascent of Science by Brian Silver, Oxford University Press, $35, 517 pages.
The News & Observer
February 15, 1998
The Ascent of Science
By Phillip Manning
In times past, intellectuals in the humanities understood the
principles of mathematics and science. Plato is supposed to have
chiseled above the door of his Academy, "Let no one ignorant
of mathematics enter my door." Voltaire said of the great
scientist Isaac Newton, "We are all his disciples now."
By the twentieth century, though, attitudes had changed.
In 1959, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow gave a famous
lecture entitled "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution."
Snow suggested that a fully educated person should have knowledge
of the sciences -- and that most humanists didn't meet this criteria.
This brought a bristly response from F.R. Leavis, the Cambridge
don who ruled the literary roost. "The intellectual nullity
is what constitutes any difficulty there may be with Snow's panoptic
pseudo-cogencies, . . ." The English Department, he said,
was the heart of the university and implied that science was not
a proper subject for intellectuals. In "The Ascent of Science,"
Brian Silver, a professor of physical chemistry at the Israel
Institute of Technology, refutes the learned English professor.
He points out that Watson and Crick had just discovered the double
helix of DNA at Cambridge in 1959, and Frederick Sanger was determining
the structure of insulin. What was going on in the English Department?
Not much, says Silver. "There was, of course, criticism,
criticism of criticism, and so on -- infinite reflections in parallel
mirrors."
This book is a text for nonscientists who wish to complete their
education. Although it is intended for the lay reader, the science
is rigorous and humanists will have to work hard to understand
it. But those who do can indeed consider themselves "fully
educated." The goal is worthwhile, says Silver. "Science
is not a harmless intellectual pastime. In the past two centuries
we have moved from simply being observers of nature to being,
in a modest but growing way, its controller. The layman can no
longer afford to stand to one side, ignorant of the meaning of
the advances that will determine the kind of world that his children
will inhabit."
The scope of the book is immense. Perhaps as a consequence, the
writing is uneven -- occasionally cutesy and sometimes dense.
But the author's enthusiasm for his subject compensates for these
deficiencies, and the sheer amount of ground he covers makes the
book a towering achievement. Silver traces the ascent of science,
the physics and chemistry and biology that helped create modern
Western society. He ranges from the motions of planets to the
secrets of atoms, from the big bang to black holes, from classical
genetics to cloning, from thermodynamics to quantum mechanics.
The cast of characters is equally broad: Newton and Galileo, Mendel,
Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and many more.
Silver begins by providing us with a definition of what science
is -- and isn't. "Science is not a means of obtaining absolute
truth," he writes. "The real test of a scientific theory
is not whether it is 'true.' The real test is whether it works."
He then gives an example of how science progresses. In 1687, Newton's
"Principia" was published. In it, he formulated (among
other things) the laws of motion and gravity that explain the
movements of planets in the solar system, overturning the laws
of motion proposed by Aristotle. No one questioned Newtonian physics
for over 200 years, until an obscure German scientist named Albert
Einstein realized that Newton's second law of motion did not hold
at velocities near the speed of light.
Einstein revised Newton's law. The result was the special theory
of relativity, which changed forever the way physicists view space
and time. It also the changed the world. In a mathematical footnote
to special relativity, Einstein showed that mass and energy were
equivalent, a result that led to the most famous equation of all:
E=mc2 . It also led to the most famous explosion of all, the mushroom
cloud that rose over the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, and
launched the atomic age.
The best-written section of the book deals with entropy, one of
the most misunderstood concepts in science. The second law of
thermodynamics can be stated as "The entropy of the universe
is continually increasing." Or, as my thermodynamics professor
Henry Thomas used to say, "In an isolated system, entropy
cannot decrease." Because entropy is a measure of disorder,
an easily understood idea, nonscientists sometimes misuse the
law to make points that have nothing to do with science.
Creationists, for example, have invoked the second law to support
their thesis that life (an ordered or low entropy state) could
not spontaneously arise on an abiotic earth (a high entropy state).
If entropy is increasing, as stated by the second law, how can
the earth go from disorder to order, from lifelessness to life?
It must be God's hand, they proclaim. They overlook, of course,
part of Professor Thomas's dictum. The earth is not an isolated
system; it receives energy from the sun. This allows order to
be created from disorder. A correct interpretation of the second
law doesn't disprove creationism, but it doesn't support it either.
(For a particularly brutal put down of entropy abuse, read Stephen
Jay Gould's "Full House," in which he shreds M. Scott
Peck's best seller, "The Road Less Traveled," for its
sloppy use of the second law.)
A close reading of Silver's book can help us avoid these kinds
of errors. More importantly, though, it can help us participate
as citizens in influencing the course of scientific research.
As Silver says, science is too important to be left entirely to
scientists.
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