Science [antikvár]

Foreword To be alive today is to be confronted by the products of science. Science has given us television, the internal combustion engine, the aeroplane, and the computer, to name but a few. Yet consumer products such as these are but one aspect of the benefits science can bring to mankind. Too often, for example, the field of medicine is overlooked in favour of more 'glamorous' fields, such as astrophysics or rocketry. As recently as the last centuiy, death from disease was an everyday occurrence. Both smallpox and polio killed millions until Edward Jenner made the simple yet life-changing discovery that milkmaids infected with cowpox were immune from smallpox, and Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine. That both diseases continue to be killers in the modem world is due not to science, but to a tragic reluctance on the part of richer countries to share its benefits with their poorer counterparts. Science has also produced less beneficial developments; the tank, machine gun, and atomic bomb, but science does achieve results, however morally questionable some of those results may be, and it is this which sets it apart from superstition, witchcraft and religion. Important though the products of science may be, what is perhaps more significant is the scientific method itself, proceeding as it does from empirical observation to theory, to modification of theory in the light of further evidence. We may still pray for rain, but we understand the physical causes of the weather, and to an extent can predict it; we no longer ascribe it to the actions of some unknowable deity and sacrifice our first-bom in the hope of a favourable outcome. This method contrasts with the previous means of discovering truth 'by authority', which claimed beliefs as true not on the basis of what was claimed, rather on the basis of who was making the claim. Rejecting the notion of truth by authority, the scientists in this book observed the worid around them, proposed theories to explain it, and modified these theories to account for further observations. The road out from the darkness of superstition into the light of reason has not always been an easy one. When Vesalius dared to contradict the authority of Galen, he was abused as a liar and madman; the Montgolfier brothers' claims met only scepticism. Galileo and Copernicus both narrowly avoided following Giordano Bruno to the stake for proposing the heliocentric theory of the solar system, in opposition to accepted Church dogma. Yet they perservered, and in so doing, lit a beacon for the rest of humanity to follow. The men and women who make up this book have blazed, in Bertrand Russell's poetic phrase, 'with all the noonday brightness of human genius'. How far the beacon they have lit will guide us, and how far science will yet progress, however, we shall leave to the next generation of scientists who will change the worid.