Science: A History 1543-2001 by John Gribbin. Allen Lane, £25, pp 647. ISBN 0 713 995 033. Rating: ★★★
The year 1543 is a watershed in the history of science. It was then that science as we understand it today was born. Until then, rhetoric, superstition, and fanciful speculation about the natural world ruled. In 1543 Copernicus published his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, in which he stated that the earth moved around the sun, thereby demolishing Ptolemy's theory that the earth was the centre of the universe. Also in 1543, Vesalius, in De Humanis Corporis Fabrica, demonstrated the inaccuracies of Galenic thought about human anatomy.
John Gribbin aims to provide a biographical history of science and prove, at the same time, that science progresses in small, incremental steps taken by many researchers, rather than in Kuhnian paradigm shifts. He largely succeeds. But sadly for us, Gribbin axes much of medicine. There is no mention of John Hunter (whose immortal words “Why think? Why not try the experiment?” surely sums up the scientific method better than anything else); or of Lord Lister and asepsis; or Louis Pasteur and penicillin. Anaesthesia gets only a passing mention but not the cloning of Dolly the sheep, which happened in 1997, well before the 2001 of this book's title.
Astronomy and physics form the bulk of the book. Gribben writes elegantly about them, which is what you might expect from a gifted writer who is also an astronomer. He focuses on facts rather than on interpretations, setting out to put the record straight. Few might know that the famous “coincidence” of Galileo's death and Newton's birth in the same year, 1642, is a masterpiece of historical fudging. Clever, if incorrect, use of the Gregorian calendar for Galileo and the Julian calendar for Newton has ensured this. Or that pathologist Rudolf Virchow opposed the germ theory of disease and the theory of evolution by natural selection and that botanist Gregor Mendel suffered from nerves and kept failing his exams.
Gribbin illustrates how self reliance, chance, and irony play a vital role in scientific discovery. For self reliance, we have the sterling example of Vesalius, who stole bodies and made dissections himself, rather than delegate to others. For chance we have Robert Boyle, who was in Florence at the time of Galileo's death there, and who was inspired by this event to study Galileo's works, which set him on the path of scientific research. As for irony, astronomer Johannes Kepler, the protégé of Tycho Brahe, proved his mentor's theories wrong by using Brahe's own data against him. Brahe had intended Kepler to disprove Copernicus's theory of heliocentricity, but it was not to be.
This is a book about thought processes in science rather than the technology. A companion volume on the people who have contributed to technology would be apt—with a little more representation of medical science.