3.5 The Children of the Revolution

Let us return to the question of how this so-called scientific revolution affects our present lives. It is easy to get the impression that what we have discussed mainly is about planets. Their effects on our lives may seem limited, at least to those who do not believe in astrology. But it is important to think beyond the planets because this development is not mainly about them – it is about a revolution in human thinking. This chain of developments is the starting point of modern science and the scientific revolution is, thereby, still very much ongoing. When the Newtonian synthesis had shown what the scientific approach could accomplish, other branches of physics developed in leaps and bounds and other sciences were soon fast on the heels of physics. This chain of scientific discoveries has sparked developments in technology and medicine that would seem like magic to the people of the Middle Ages.

With a little imagination, anyone who has experienced a power failure can begin to picture how the scientific revolution has transformed our lives. Firstly the light goes out, then it becomes cold. After some time we find that it is difficult to cook and that our food spoils when the refrigerator warms up. I do not mean to imply that people starved to death before they had electricity, but due to electricity and other technical achievements we do not have to spend most of our days chopping wood, collecting water, manually washing our clothes, and growing our own food. Since the renaissance, humanity has ventured into a broad program of curiosity-driven research that has paid off in a wealth of convenient applications. For example, our understanding of how infections caused by bacteria can be treated using antibiotics is based on scientific research. Those who live in industrialized parts of the world do not have to worry about many diseases that used to harvest large numbers of lives in the past. Our fast and efficient transports on land and in the air is largely due to the science of thermodynamics, which co-evolved with the development of the steam engine. Our ability to communicate instantly over vast distances by mobile telephones, radio, and televison springs directly from basic research in theoretical physics during the late nineteenth century. Computers and electronics are built from semiconductors, a product of the counter-intuitive theory of quantum physics. Many people connect computers with leisure time activities but let us not forget the phenomenal boost they have given to many areas of research. For instance, biomedical researchers often have to handle vast amounts of information requiring complex calculations that are almost impossible to carry out manually. Large-scale computer simulations are nowadays important research tools across many scientific disciplines. It is also largely thanks to computer control that modern cars emit a mere thousandth of the harmful substances that cars in the 1970s spewed out, to name one example of a practical application. Modern households teem with things that build on discoveries that have followed in the wake of the scientific revolution: washing machines and the detergents used in them, refrigerators, light bulbs and fluorescent lights, microwave ovens, television sets, computers, even lasers in some electronic devices, as well as electricity itself, which powers most of these things.

You may object that these things are technical inventions, not scientific discoveries. Would they not have been invented sooner or later anyway? The answer is that it is difficult to separate developments in technology from those in science, since they often progress in a symbiotic relationship. As I have tried to point out above, innovations that build on scientific discoveries can hardly be accomplished before the basic science that makes them possible is in place. Let us consider an example from Sagan [6] to illustrate this.

Imagine that you are Queen Victoria and, in the year 1860, you have a visionary idea about a machine that will carry your voice and moving pictures of you into every home in the kingdom. This should be done through the air, without wires. You would probably allocate a generous budget to the project and involve the leading scientists and engineers of the Empire in it. Even if such a project probably would produce some interesting ideas and spin-offs, it would almost certainly fail. Although the telegraph existed in 1860, the underlying science that makes radio and television possible had not been developed.

This piece of science would come from a completely unexpected direction. Light had been a mystery since antiquity but James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish theoretical physicist, discovered that electricity and magnetism unite with each other to make light. The now conventional understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum, ranging from gamma rays via visible light to radio waves, is due to him. So is radio and television, but it is important to note that he did not invent these things – he was only interested in understanding how electricity makes magnetism and vice versa. He made his discovery by intuitive reasoning about the symmetry of the equations that describe electric and magnetic fields, which was partly based on an esthetic judgment. The details are beyond our scope here and, to put it extremely briefly, his speculation was rather reckless and not based on data at all. The implications of his idea were only to be confirmed afterwards in a series of important experiments but, in Sagan's words, this idea “has done more to shape our civilization than any ten recent presidents and prime ministers”. The important point is that no matter how much money and time the Queen had provided for her engineers in 1860, they would not have gotten close to inventing television. We know this in retrospect because the scientific foundation for it did not exist [6].

But if scientific discoveries are so important for technical advances, would not the discoveries have been made sooner or later, even without the scientific revolution as a starter motor? This is a tempting and common thought. Since we are surrounded by so much science and technology, we see them as natural parts of our society. But remember that most of the elements needed for the scientific revolution were present already during antiquity. Copernicus had learned from Aristarchus. Kepler had learned from Pythagoras. The technology for building Tycho's instruments was not an insurmountable obstacle. Imagine a world where the idea of the elliptic orbits had been thought of already during antiquity. Picture that Democritus had developed the infinitesimal calculus and made the Newtonian synthesis in the fourth century BCE. It is probable that our civilization would have developed differently in that scenario. Would man have set foot on the moon in the first century BCE? Only three hundred years separate Newton from the United States’ Apollo space program, after all. It is, of course, impossible to know if that would have happened. But imagine the opposite scenario instead, that Kepler had never seen Tycho's data, so that the raw material for Newton's synthesis had never come about. Would our cosmology still be built around the Pythagorean solids? Would most of us be out working in the fields instead of reading this book? It is quite possible that we would have had to wait another two millennia for the revolution.

There are no answers to these questions. Had the scientific revolution been born from other ideas in another time, there is no way of knowing what it would have grown up to be. In that respect, the birth of science is like the birth of a child. The newborn turns a new page in the history book and a new story begins. We do not know anything about what the new life will bring. We only know that a new human being has been born, and that the world will never be the same again.