If you listen, you can hear them talking. Sometimes the conversation is loud and clear. In On the Heavens, Aristotle argues that the Earth has no motions. It neither orbits the Sun nor turns on an axis. Just under two thousand years later, Galileo upbraids him. In Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he presents a fictional debate, entrusting the Copernican argument to the capable Salviati and consigning the Aristotelian to the credulous Simplicio. When their discussion reaches the subject of the motions of the Earth, Simplicio triumphantly produces a copy of On the Heavens (“I keep it always in my pocket,” which, in Galileo-speak, suggests: He would). Salviati then proceeds to demolish Aristotle’s reasoning by using his own words against him.
Sometimes, though, you have to listen a little more closely. Darwin takes the motions of the Earth, adds the notion of deep time from Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology he read aboard the Beagle, and arrives at his majestic final-sentence summing-up in Origin of Species: ”whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” To which Geoffrey Burbidge, Margaret Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle respond nearly a century later, in their 104-page tour de force “On the Origin and Synthesis of Elements in Stars.” By explaining that nuclear reactions within exploding stars cast asunder protons and neutrons and electrons, which then reconfigure themselves in new and more complex forms of matter, the four physicists do for the origin of elements what Darwin had done for the origin of species—a historical continuity they acknowledge: “The elements have evolved, and are evolving.”
It goes on. James Watson and Francis Crick, in 1953, suggesting the double-helix structure of DNA: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, in 2001, announcing that they’ve lived up to their name: “Finally, it has not escaped our notice that the more we learn about the human genome, the more there is to explore.”
To see the history of science as a series of discrete discoveries or results or theories is understandable and often useful. Sometimes we need to know precisely what we’ve learned. The Earth moves. The Earth changes. Homo sapiens changes. Here is the mechanism by which Homo sapiens changes.
But we can also see the history of science as a collective effort. No: We can hear it. Those who are fortunate enough to be part of this conversation seem to know that it spans decades, centuries, millennia. But the rest of us are fortunate, too. Maybe we can’t be part of the conversation, but sometimes, if we’re very, very quiet, we can eavesdrop on it. And when we do, and regardless of what precisely the scientists themselves happen to be saying, what we’ll be sure to hear is this: Science has been, and is, evolving.
Image credit: cSlacker.com
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