The Milestones

of Science
How We Came to
Understand the Universe

James D. Stein
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Names: Stein, James D., 1941– author.
Title: The milestones of science : how we came to understand the universe /
James D. Stein.
Description: Lanham, MD: Prometheus, [2023] | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Summary: “Comprised of riveting and readable
stories from along the path of scientific discovery in the fields of
Astronomy, The Earth, Matter, Forces and Energy, Chemistry, Life,
Genetics & DNA, The Human Body, Disease, and Science in the 21st
Century, author James D. Stein showcases the most noteworthy
achievements of our species in a compelling and comprehensive way”—
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Contents

Scientific Timeline v
Introduction xiii
1 Astronomy 1
2 The Earth 27
3 Chemistry 43
4 Matter 65
5 Forces and Energy 89
6 Life 113
7 Genetics and DNA 133
8 The Human Body 147
9 Disease 161
10 Science in the Twenty-First Century 179
Bibliography 183
Acknowledgments 185
Index 187

iii
Scientific Timeline

585 BCE Thales predicts the first solar eclipse.

ca 350 BCE Aristotle classifies five hundred known animal species.
ca 240 BCE Eratosthenes measures the size of the Earth.
ca 225 BCE Archimedes formulates the law of hydrostatics, to be known
as Archimedes’ principle.
164 CE Galen becomes court physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
1330 William of Occam publishes Occam’s razor, the principle
that one should prefer the simplest explanation.
1543 Nicolaus Copernicus publishes the heliocentric theory.
Vesalius publishes the first illustrated book on human anatomy.
1576 Tycho Brahe begins construction of the first astronomical
observatory.
1590 Galileo’s experiments with falling bodies refutes the Aristote-
lian theory of motion.
1609 Johannes Kepler publishes the first two of his Three Laws of
Planetary Motion.
1628 William Harvey publishes his results on blood circulation.
1658 Jan Swammerdam discovers red blood cells.
1662 Robert Boyle shows that the pressure and volume of a gas
held at constant temperature vary inversely.
1665 Isaac Newton begins the development of the theories of
mechanics and gravitation.
Robert Hooke discovers cells in slices of dried cork.

v
vi    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

1676 Anton von Leeuwenhoek discovers bacteria.

1735 Carl Linnaeus publishes Systema Naturae, outlining a biologi-
cal classification scheme that is still used today.
1753 James Lind discovers that lemon juice cures scurvy.
1771 Luigi Galvani shows that frog muscle responds electrically
when in contact with two different metals.
1779 Jan Ingenhousz discovers photosynthesis.
1781 Charles Messier publishes a list of “nebulosities” that are not
to be confused with comets.
1785 Antoine Lavoisier disproves the phlogiston theory.
James Hutton outlines several principles of modern geology.
Charles Coulomb discovers that electric charge obeys an
inverse-square law similar to gravitation.
1787 Jacques Charles shows that different gases expand by the same
fraction for a given rise in temperature.
1794 Alessandro Volta shows that contact between two different
metals will generate electricity.
1796 Edward Jenner develops a vaccine against smallpox.
1800 Humphry Davy discovers nitrous oxide, aka “laughing gas.”
William Herschel discovers infrared radiation.
1801 Johann Ritter discovers ultraviolet radiation.
1802 Thomas Young’s double-slit experiment shows that light is
a wave.
1803 John Dalton develops the modern atomic theory.
1807 Humphry Davy uses electrolysis to isolate potassium.
1811 Amadeo Avogadro hypothesizes that equal volumes of gas
contain equal numbers of particles.
1820 André Ampère formulates the right-hand rule of electro-
magnetism.
1824 Sadi Carnot investigates thermodynamic efficiency.
1826 Johannes Müller discovers that any form of stimulation of the
optic nerve is interpreted as light.
1827 Georg Ohm discovers the relation between electrical current
flow, potential difference, and resistance.
1828 Friedrich Wöhler fabricates the organic compound urea.
1831 Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction.
 S cientific T imeline    vii

1832 Charles Babbage starts to design the “analytical engine,”

which would direct computation through punched cards.
1835 Gaspard de Coriolis discovers that the earth’s rotation will
deflect atmospheric and oceanic currents.
1837 Louis Agassiz finds evidence of glacial advance that he calls
the “Ice Age.”
1838 Matthias Schleiden announces the cell theory for plants.
1839 Theodor Schwann announces the cell theory for animals.
1842 Crawford Long uses ether to remove a neck tumor.
Christian Doppler determines how a moving source changes
the pitch of a sound; this is known as the Doppler effect.
1843 James Joule determines the mechanical equivalent of heat.
1845 John Couch Adams predicts the existence of Neptune; the
next year Urbain Le Verrier would independently do the same.
1846 William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) obtains an estimate for the
age of the Earth of 100 million years.
1847 Ignaz Semmelweis institutes antiseptic procedures to lower
the incidence of childbed fever.
1854 John Snow uses statistics to analyze the spread of cholera dur-
ing a London epidemic.
1856 William Perkin synthesizes mauve, the first artificial dye.
1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace read their papers on
evolution before a London meeting of the Linnean Society.
Rudolph Virchow states that “all cells arise from cells.”
Friedrich Kekulé presents his theory of chemical bonding.
1859 Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchoff make the first measure-
ments of spectral lines of a chemical element.
1862 Louis Pasteur disproves the theory of spontaneous generation.
1864 James Maxwell publishes his first paper on the electromag-
netic field.
1865 Julius von Sachs discovers that chlorophyll is responsible for
the process of photosynthesis.
1866 Gregor Mendel publishes his work on inherited characteris-
tics in pea plants.
1867 Joseph Lister uses carbolic acid to reduce deaths from post-
operative infection.
1869 Dmitri Mendeleev constructs the periodic table.
viii    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

1871 Ludwig Boltzmann starts work on statistical reformulation of

the second law of thermodynamics.
1872 Louis Pasteur discovers anaerobic bacteria.
1876 Robert Koch demonstrates that bacilli cause anthrax.
1882 Walther Flemming discovers chromosomes and analyzes
mitosis, the process of cell division.
1884 Svante Arrhenius postulates ionization to explain why solu-
tions can conduct electricity.
1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley show that the speed of
light is the same in two perpendicular directions.
1888 Heinrich Hertz detects radio waves.
Edouard van Beneden discovers meiosis, the process of how
sperm and ovum unite that is the basis of genetics.
Friedrich Ostwald discovers that catalysts affect only the
speed of the reaction, not the final result.
1895 Wilhelm Roentgen discovers X-rays.
1896 Antoine Becquerel discovers radioactivity.
Svante Arrhenius raises the possibility that industrial produc-
tion of carbon dioxide may produce a greenhouse effect.
Eduard Buchner demonstrates fermentation outside the cell.
1897 J. J. Thomson discovers the electron.
Christiaan Eijkman discovers that beriberi is caused by a
dietary deficiency.
Richard Oldham discovers that earthquakes generate two
types of seismic waves.
1898 Martinus Beijerinck hypothesizes the existence of disease-
causing organisms smaller than bacteria, which he calls
“viruses.”
1900 Max Planck’s quantum theory resolves the “ultraviolet
catastrophe.”
Karl Landsteiner confirms the correspondence between anti-
gens and antibodies, and uses it to type blood.
1902 Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy discover that radio-
active decay results in the transmutation of elements.
Ivan Pavlov demonstrates the existence of conditioned reflexes.
1905 Albert Einstein publishes the theory of special relativity.
William Bayliss and Ernest Starling discover hormones.
 S cientific T imeline    ix

1906 Ernest Rutherford’s alpha-particle scattering experiments lead

to the discovery of the nucleus.
1907 Bertram Boltwood uses radioactive dating to determine the
existence of rocks more than 400 million years old.
Emil Fischer synthesizes a chain of eighteen amino acids.
1909 Paul Ehrlich develops a cure for syphilis.
1911 Heike Kamerlingh Onnes observes superconductivity in mer-
cury cooled near absolute zero.
Thomas Hunt Morgan creates the first chromosomal maps.
1912 Alfred Wegener propounds the theory of continental drift.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt works out the period-luminosity law
for Cepheid variables.
Max von Laue invents X-ray crystallography.
1913 Niels Bohr develops the “solar-system” model of the atom.
Frederick Soddy hypothesizes the existence of different
isotopes of the same element.
Henry Moseley introduces the concept of atomic numbers
and uses it to revise the periodic table.
1916 Gilbert Lewis introduces covalent bonding for chemical
compounds.
1918 Harlow Shapley suggests that the Sun is fifty thousand light-
years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
1921 Otto Loewi isolates the first neurotransmitter.
1924 Louis de Broglie shows that particles can behave as waves.
1927 Werner Heisenberg formulates the uncertainty principle.
1928 Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin.
1929 Paul Dirac predicts the existence of antimatter.
1931 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar predicts that a white dwarf star
can exist only if its mass is less than 1.4 times that of the Sun.
1932 Carl Anderson discovers the anti-electron while studying
cosmic rays.
1934 Leo Szilard conceives the idea of a chain reaction.
Karl Popper defines falsifiability as the criterion for whether
or not an explanation is a scientific one.
Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie produce radioactive isotopes
not found in nature.
x    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

1935 Wendell Stanley crystallizes the tobacco mosaic virus.

William Rose isolates threonine, the last of the nutritionally
important amino acids.
Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen devise a
thought experiment whose resolution will shed light on the
nature of reality.
Hideki Yukawa develops a theory of the strong force.
1937 Hans Krebs discovers the citric acid cycle that is the primary
source of energy for living organisms.
1938 Hans Bethe develops the theory of thermonuclear fusion to
explain the mechanism that powers the Sun.
1939 Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann publish the results of the
bombardment of uranium with neutrons; Lise Meitner rec-
ognizes that nuclear fission has taken place.
Linus Pauling publishes The Nature of the Chemical Bond.
1940 J. Robert Oppenheimer describes black holes.
1948 John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley
develop the transistor.
1949 Melvin Calvin uses radioactive tracers in his studies on photo-
synthesis.
1950 Karl von Frisch deciphers the dances of bees.
1953 James Watson and Francis Crick decipher the structure of
DNA.
Frederick Sanger works out the structure of insulin.
Stanley Miller simulates lightning in a prebiotic atmosphere
and produces amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
1955 Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine is proven both safe and effective.
1957 Frank Burnet outlines the mechanism by which the immune
system produces antibodies for specific antigens.
1960 Harry Hess develops the theory of seafloor spreading, which
leads to the development of plate tectonics.
François Jacob and Jacques Monod discover the existence of
messenger RNA.
1961 Edward Lorenz discovers the “butterfly effect” in weather
forecasting, leading to the science of chaos.
1962 Marshall Nirenberg deciphers the first codon.
 S cientific T imeline    xi

Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, documenting the

effects of DDT on wildlife.
1963 Morris Goodman inaugurates molecular anthropology with
biochemical studies of blood response to albumin.
Maarten Schmidt proposes that 3C 273 is an immensely dis-
tant radio source that will later be called a quasar.
1964 Murray Gell-Mann proposes that neutrons and protons are
assemblages of three quarks.
1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover the echo of the big
bang.
1967 Allan Wilson and Vincent Sarich conclude from biochemical
evidence that man and ape diverged 5 million years ago.
Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish discover a rapidly rotating
neutron star that will later be called a pulsar.
1968 Werner Arber discovers restriction enzymes.
1970 Howard Temin deciphers the mechanism by which retroviruses
reproduce.
1971 Vera Rubin discovers that galaxies contain dark matter.
1973 Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen create the first genetically
engineered bacterium.
1980 Walter and Luis Alvarez hypothesize that the collision of an
asteroid with Earth led to the death of the dinosaurs.
Alan Guth proposes the inflationary theory of the Universe.
1983 Discovery of three “vector bosons” confirms the electroweak
theory developed by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and
Steven Weinberg.
1984 Bradford Smith and Richard Terrile photograph a protoplan-
etary disk around the star Beta Pictoris.
1986 Karl Müller and Georg Bednorz create the first superconduct-
ing ceramic oxide.
1987 Allan Wilson and coauthors propose the existence of “mito-
chondrial Eve,” a woman whose mitochondrial DNA is now
part of everyone’s genetic makeup.
1994 Alexander Wolszczan discovers a planet orbiting a pulsar.
Introduction

If one judges human accomplishment by the criterion of its contribution to

the quality of life, science is almost certainly our most successful enterprise.
Of course, we cannot overlook the enormous role played by technology—
but without the guidance of science, technology would probably not have
advanced much beyond what was achieved during the Age of Steam.
The remarkable effectiveness of science is due to a number of factors. It
has taken several billion years of evolution to produce the brain and the five
senses that homo sapiens possess, and science makes substantial use of all of
these. Science consists of systematic knowledge of the physical universe using
information obtained through observation or experimentation. The mile-
stones of science fall into three categories—observations, experiments, and
theories. Observation and experimentation use the senses, or artificial devices
such as microscopes that extend the range of our senses. The systematization
of this information is performed by the brain, or artificial devices such as
computers that extend the range of our brain.
Theory is the systematization of information, and observation and ex-
perimentation are needed to both discover information and verify proposed
systematizations. One of the reasons that science is so effective is that theory,
observation, and experimentation are interdependent, and all play key roles.
Science needs theory to systematize and enable us to predict, and also to
decide which observations and experiments should be performed. Science
needs observation and experimentation to gather data for systematization
and to determine whether we have done a good job constructing theories.
Another factor that makes science so effective is that it is cumulative.
No other branch of human endeavor builds so dramatically on what has
already been accomplished. We often say that scientific knowledge increases
xiii
xiv    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

exponentially; although this is generally intended as a metaphor, it is quite

probably the literal truth. The amount of knowledge being acquired is likely
proportional to the amount of knowledge that already exists; if this is stated
in the language of mathematics as a differential equation, its solution is that
knowledge is indeed growing exponentially.
Science is also unique in that part of its toolbox is a methodology for
determining errors. When I was young, I recall learning a verse explaining
the meaning of the word “investigate”:

Investigate if you would know

That what you think is really so.

Investigation is a critical part of science. If a scientific theory does not accord

with the results of an investigation, no matter how beautiful the theory, it
must be discarded.

CONNECTIONS

Many years ago, when I was first appointed to the faculty at California State
University, Long Beach, I had an interview with the provost, a man of sub-
stantial erudition who felt that it was advisable to get to know the people
whom the university was hiring. We talked for an hour, and one of the
questions he asked was, “If you could take only one book to a desert island,
which one would it be?”
I had just finished reading James Burke’s Connections, and even though
it had the advantage of temporal proximity to the asking of the question, I
thought—and still think—that it would be my choice. For those who have
not read the book, you have a treat in store for you. Burke managed to in-
tegrate science, history, biography, and technology into ten stories, each of
which culminated in one of the seminal technological developments of the
twentieth century, such as the computer.
I have used Connections as the model for the structure of this book. In-
stead of the stories culminating in a particular development, as did Burke’s,
each story is organized around a major scientific theme, such as the story
of genetics and DNA. Burke, however, either knew or was able to research
a good deal of the historical and political background that surrounded the
events that he used to tell a story. My goal is somewhat different: to tell the
story of a major scientific theme through its milestones—the theories, obser-
 I ntroduction    xv

vations, and experiments that are the milestones themselves, and the people
who were primarily responsible.
One thing that Burke made clear is that his choices were idiosyncratic—
he mentioned that if he were again to write the story of the connections that
led to the development of the computer, he might tell it in a completely dif-
ferent way. I don’t feel that I possess Burke’s exquisite sensibility for making
those choices—but fortunately, I don’t have to. Yes, I may err in omitting a
great theory or experiment, or in including ones of lesser importance, but if
I make sure to include the theories of Newton and Einstein in telling the tale
of our investigation of the phenomenon of gravity, and include some of the
important observations and experiments that went into the construction and
verification of those theories, I won’t have gone too far wrong.
Finally, Burke told his stories in chronological order. Burke wove history
and technology together—sometimes history influenced technology, some-
times technology influenced history, but one could always see development
and progress. One of the features that made Connections such an enjoyable
read is that Burke had his choice of some of history’s greatest personalities to
insert into his stories. Most of the characters who appear in this book are—
not surprisingly—scientists, but many of the people who appear in this book
led lives every bit as interesting as the political figures and celebrities whose
lives are often better known.

EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS

According to the dictionary, an experiment is “a test under controlled con-

ditions that is made to demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of
a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy of something previously untried.”
Experiments and theories form an important part of science, but so do the
accidental discoveries that result from observations, such as Galileo’s use of
a telescope to look at Saturn or Leeuwenhoek’s microscopic examination of
a drop of water.
Observations guided by experiment also play a key role in everyday
science. A while back I purchased—for the amazingly low price of five
dollars—the 62nd edition (1981–1982) of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry
and Physics. Weighing in at six pounds, this book is an exceptional value in
terms of knowledge per pound, and stores the results of an almost inconceiv-
able amount of observation. On page B-147, for instance, we find that the
inorganic chemical compound sodium chloride, whose chemical formula
is NaCl, has the synonyms “common salt” and “nathalite” (who knew?).
xvi    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

It has a molecular weight of 58.44, a density of 2.165, a melting point of

801°C, and a boiling point of 1413°C. These numbers had to be determined
by experiment, for we certainly can’t deduce these quantities from abstract
theory. You have to weigh, melt, and boil the stuff—and that’s what a lot of
experimentation is about.
The Handbook is truly one of the great achievements of our species.
Richard Feynman once said:

If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be de-

stroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of
creatures, what statement would contain the most information in
the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic
fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of
atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion,
attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but
repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

My feeling is that, if in some cataclysm all books were to be destroyed, and

only one book preserved for the next generation of creatures, which book
would best give those creatures the greatest opportunity to get up to speed
in the shortest possible time? I believe it is the latest precataclysm edition of
the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Although it might be a good idea to
bundle it with Erik Oberg’s Machinery’s Handbook, just so we can rebuild
our technology as quickly as possible.
There are observations and experiments—and then there are great ob-
servations and experiments. There are doubtless situations where it may be
useful—or even critical—to know the melting point of common salt, but
it’s not one of the significant landmarks in the intellectual advancement of
our species. The great discoveries of science are significant landmarks in our
intellectual advancement. A great observation or experiment is one that plays
a key role in a great scientific discovery.
As I see it, there are three ways in which an observation or experiment
can play such a key role. The first is that an observation or experiment can
be a great discovery in and of itself, or play a crucial role in hatching a great
theory. This opens our eyes, enabling us to see things or conceive ideas that
we may not even have imagined.
Second, an observation or experiment deserves to be called great if it is
the vital piece of evidence that nails down an important theory. The impor-
tant theories of science are like the foundations of a house—the house is built
 I ntroduction    xvii

on the foundation, and a faulty foundation can easily lead to the collapse of
the entire edifice.
Third, a critical step on the road to determining the way things really are
is to determine the way things really aren’t. The history of science includes
numerous examples of scientists—and often great scientists—who look at
the available evidence and piece them together into an erroneous theory.
The discovery that a theory is wrong can be the critical step in determining
how things really are. Sometimes a great observation or experiment decides
between two competing theories, but it can also simply sound the death knell
for an erroneous theory, clearing the way for a correct theory to rise from
the ashes.

ELEGANCE

At our current stage of scientific development, most of the great theories

are elegant. Although, as Richard Feynman noted, there may be a single
great theory that defines reality—and such a theory would be the ultimate
in elegance—Feynman also observed that reality could be like an onion, and
we just keep peeling off layers. So far, though, elegance characterizes almost
all the great theories in every branch of science. Relativity, the “big bang,”
and DNA replication are not only great theoretical descriptions of major
phenomena, they are all unquestionably elegant. Sometimes the observations
and experiments that lead to these elegant theories are themselves elegant—
but sometimes not.

UNDERSTANDING THE COSMOS

I like how Carl Sagan described the Cosmos; he said that the Cosmos was all
that was, is, or ever will be. It is a measure of the greatness of homo sapiens
that in a few hundred years, located on a small planet circling an undistin-
guished star in the outlying region of the Milky Way galaxy, we have learned
so much about our environment and ourselves. It is my hope that I tell this
tale well enough that, in the case that we can only leave three books to future
generations, this book may be thought worthy of accompanying The Hand-
book of Chemistry and Physics and Machinery’s Handbook.
CHAPTER 1

Astronomy

Most people who become exceptionally interested in something can gen-

erally recall an experience that triggered their interest—but thanks to the
internet, I can date mine exactly, even though it happened seventy years ago.
My family had moved from New York City to the suburbs. I was going
to school, but my father worked in the city and he and I always got up early
to read the New York Times. I would start with the sports section to catch up
with the previous day’s doings in baseball, and my father would start with
the front section. We would finish and exchange sections—my father wasn’t
especially interested in sports, but the financial news was also in the sports
section.
On September 1, 1951, my father called my attention to an event men-
tioned on the front page of the paper. There was going to be a partial eclipse
of the Sun. My father knew it was dangerous to look at an eclipse directly,
but the safety precautions of the day said it was OK to view them through
exposed photographic film, and as my father was a photography buff, we
had plenty.
Fascinated, I read the article. The eclipse was due to start at 5:25 p.m.,
would reach maximum coverage at 6:01 p.m., and end at 7:10 p.m. As I
recall, there was also a black-and-white drawing on the front page of the
Times indicating what was happening, and the paper may also have given
the maximum percentage of the Sun’s surface that would be covered. Fortu-
nately, September 1 was a Saturday, and so my father was home to help me
experience this.
I know the specific dates and times because I typed “solar eclipses visible
from New York” into a search engine, and was directed to the National Aero-
nautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center
1
2    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

website, where I found a directory of all solar and lunar eclipses visible from
New York from 1 CE to 3000 CE (which means Common Era, which has
largely replaced AD in scientific texts). The fact that there is such a website
is a tribute to both technology and science. I was born in an era in which
my family had an encyclopedia as an immediate access to information, and
if we needed more detailed information, we went to the library. I am still
astounded by the volume and depth of information available through search
engines from the comfort of one’s home—and as will be discussed in a later
chapter, the internet is reshaping not only what we know, but how we ac-
quire that knowledge.
My father and I went out to the backyard a little after five o’clock and
spent two glorious hours watching one of Nature’s most spectacular displays.
I remember that when we went back in for dinner, I asked my father how
they knew when the eclipse would start and when it would end. My father
told me that scientists study such things, and that’s when I made a career
change.
Until that day, my preferred career was a professional baseball player—
despite the fact that I had evidenced nothing in the way of ability in this
area. But the Yankees would have to find someone other than me to replace
Joe DiMaggio in center field, as I was so enthralled by the ability to predict
the exact timing of something so impressive as a solar eclipse that I decided
to become a scientist.

The Solar System

THE SOLAR ECLIPSE OF MAY 28, 585 BCE

Whatever Thales of Miletus did of a scientific nature—and he did a lot—

he was undoubtedly the first to do it, because Thales was the world’s first
scientist.
It is possible that many of Thales’s achievements were the result of his
travels, for he certainly visited Egypt and perhaps Babylonia. Consequently,
he was familiar with many of the achievements of other cultures, and he un-
doubtedly was able to make use of the knowledge that they had accumulated.
Even if many of his achievements relied on knowledge gathered else-
where, there is no question that some of his accomplishments were his alone.
He was unquestionably the first mathematician. He was the first to conceive
of mathematical idealizations, viewing lines as infinitely thin and perfectly
straight, and he is also the first individual to state and prove mathematical
 A stronomy    3

theorems by formal arguments. Among his best-known proofs are that the
diameter of a circle divides it into two equal parts, and that the base angles
of an isosceles triangle are equal.
The prototype Greek intellectual, Thales was the first to blend astron-
omy and philosophy into the subject that is now called cosmology. He is
the first person known to have asked the question, “Of what is the Universe
made?,” and to answer it without invoking elephants on the backs of turtles,
or other mystical phenomena. Thales’s answer, that the Universe was an infi-
nite ocean in which the Earth floated as a flat disk, is obviously incorrect, but
it is a fact that he asked the question and answered it in nonmythical terms,
and that clearly marks him as a scientist.
Thales’s greatest achievement, however, is the first accurate prediction
of a solar eclipse. Nowadays when a solar eclipse is due, the news will be all
over the internet, and the chances are extremely good that you can get a live
video feed—especially if it’s a total eclipse. Thales merely predicted that a
solar eclipse would occur in the year 585 BCE. Ballpark estimates are a le-
gitimate part of science, even if in this case the ballpark was pretty large. We
can be certain of the date of May 28 because we are now able to determine
that the only solar eclipse that occurred that year in that portion of the world
happened on May 28.
It is known that the Babylonians were able to accurately predict lunar
eclipses two centuries prior to Thales, but lunar eclipses occur much more
frequently and the periodicity is easier to determine. Thales’s prediction
was historically as well scientifically significant, because the Medes and the
Lydians were about to go to war. When the eclipse occurred, it was taken as
a sign that the gods would not look favorably upon the war. The two sides
signed a peace treaty and went home. The fact that the solar eclipse hap-
pened on May 28 makes the decision not to go to war the first historical
event that can be accurately dated.
Thales was also the world’s first all-around intellectual, combining his
scientific inclination with an interest in philosophy and, perhaps surprisingly
for a scientist, politics. Thales urged the Greek city-states to unite in order
to defend themselves against Lydia. The Greeks, who were attracted to the
number seven (the seven wonders of the ancient world), were later to con-
struct lists of the seven wise men of ancient Greece. Thales was invariably
placed first.
Thales was probably not the first person to be asked, “If you’re so
smart, why ain’t you rich?” but he is the first one recorded to devise a bril-
liant retort. It is said that by his study of the weather he knew that the next
olive crop would be a good one. He then purchased options on all the olive
4    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

presses, and when the olive crop indeed proved bountiful, was able to obtain
enough money by renting his presses to live comfortably for the remainder of
his life. Having made his point (and his fortune), he turned again to science,
philosophy, and politics.

THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Slightly more than five hundred years after the birth of Christ, Rome fell
to the invading barbarians, beginning a thousand-year period known as the
Dark Ages. One of the major factors in making the Dark Ages dark was an
almost complete lack of scientific progress. A “media blitz” during the Dark
Ages put forth the prevailing view that all the great questions had been an-
swered: the philosophical ones by the Church, and the secular ones by the
ancient authorities, such as Ptolemy and Aristotle. What questions arose that
could not be answered were viewed not as puzzles to be solved, but as myster-
ies into which it would be blasphemous to delve.
One of the central problems was the geometry of the Universe. Since
Christ had lived on Earth, it was obvious that the Earth was the center of
the Universe. In the geocentric theory, the Sun, Moon, and planets revolved
in circular orbits around the Earth, and the stars belonged to a great fixed
sphere.
One obvious difficulty with this theory was that, from time to time,
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn would reverse their direction of motion in the
night sky. This obvious discrepancy had to be patched up, and so the geocen-
tric theory was modified by Ptolemy, who introduced the theory of epicycles,
which assumed that these planets described circular loops within their basic
circular orbits, somewhat akin to a person on the edge of a merry-go-round
walking around in a small circle near the edge. The beautiful basic geocentric
theory, which used simple circles to describe the motions of the planets, was
now somewhat untidy.
It was easy to understand why, if the Almighty had placed the Earth at
the center of the Universe, He had designed the Sun, Moon, and planets
to rotate around it in perfect circles. Why the Almighty felt it necessary to
use epicycles bothered some curious individuals, especially those who had
been exposed to the philosophical principle known as Occam’s razor, which
asserts that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. In 1514.
Nicolaus Copernicus produced a small handwritten volume, entitled Little
Commentary, in which the author was not named—but Copernicus sent it
out to some of his friends. In it he stated seven axioms, three of which were
 A stronomy    5

pivotal in the heliocentric theory. These were that the center of the Universe
was near the Sun, the annual cycle of the seasons was produced by the Earth
revolving around the Sun, and that the epicycles were an artifact of viewing
these motions from the Earth. In 1543, near the end of his life, he decided
to publish these conjectures.
This theory was greeted with a literal firestorm of opposition from the
Roman Catholic Church—its adherents sometimes being burned at the
stake. Nonetheless, it made some important converts, one of whom was
Tycho Brahe, a Danish nobleman who may be said to be the founder of
observational astronomy. Brahe devoted much of his life to the problem
of accurate astronomical measurements. He persuaded Frederick II, the king
of Denmark, to underwrite the construction of an astronomical observatory,
thus beginning a tradition of obtaining government grants for the study of
pure science.
One other convert to the Copernican theory was Johannes Kepler,
whose belief in the theory arose from a curious mixture of science, religion,
astrology, and numerology. In order to accurately determine the orbits of the
planets, Kepler spent more than twenty years refining Brahe’s measurements.
Kepler labored diligently to fit this data into a geometric scheme in which the
circular orbits were determined by inscribing spheres inside the five Platonic
solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron).
Try as he might, Kepler could not get the data to fit his hypothesis. He
then made one of the great scientific decisions of all time. Rather than try
to hammer data into a hypothesis, he abandoned his hypothesis to see if he
could find one that fit the data. The result was Kepler’s three laws of plan-
etary motion, the first of which was that the orbit of a planet is an ellipse with
the Sun at one of the foci. This result was one of the pivotal checks on the
correctness of Newton’s law of gravitation, from which all of Kepler’s laws
of planetary motion could be deduced.
Copernicus, Brahe, and Kepler came from entirely different back-
grounds. Copernicus was actually a junior executive within the hierarchy of
the Church, holding a position that today might be referred to as a deputy
comptroller. His epic work might never have been published had he not
been strongly encouraged to do so by Georg Rheticus, a young professor of
mathematics and astronomy who lived with Copernicus for two years, and
urged him to share his thoughts with the world.
Brahe was a playboy who literally partied himself to death. At a party
in which he had imbibed a considerable quantity of wine, he followed the
practice of the times and did not leave the table until his host did. As a result
of the failure to relieve the pressure on his bladder, he became unable to
6    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

urinate, and the resulting buildup of toxins within his system caused his
death some eleven days later. Let it not be said that there is nothing practical
to be learned from a history of science.
Kepler was a professor of mathematics who accepted court appointments
in mathematics and astronomy, which would enable him to collect addi-
tional orbital data. One of Kepler’s notable achievements was successfully
defending his mother on a charge of witchcraft—the charge was dismissed
on a technicality because the prosecution failed to follow the appropriate
legal procedures with regard to torture. Sadly, echoes of this barbaric practice
can still be found in a number of legal systems in the Western world. Kepler
could also lay claim to the title of father of science fiction, as he wrote a book
called The Dream in which he imagined voyages to other worlds than Earth.

THE LAW OF FALLING BODIES

When most people think of temptation, a course in geometry does not

immediately come to mind. Galileo’s father, however, was a mathemati-
cian, then as now a profession with substantial intellectual rewards, but—
speaking as a math professor—not nearly as many earthly ones. As a result,
he determined that his son should become a physician, then as now a profes-
sion desired by many parents for their children. Aware that the family pro-
clivity for mathematics might be passed on to his son, he did his best to keep
Galileo away from mathematics. His efforts were to be in vain, as Galileo
heard a lecture in geometry, and then discovered a book on the mathemati-
cal and scientific achievements of Archimedes. Bowing to the inevitable, his
father consented to let him study mathematics and science.
Galileo was the first scientist of the modern era to fully appreciate two
important aspects of science: the necessity for accurate data in the construc-
tion of a theory, and the role of mathematics in providing a framework for
physical laws. Galileo was never content to rely on the words of authorities
when he could ascertain the truth for himself. Aristotle’s claim that heavier
bodies fall faster than lighter ones had been accepted for millennia. In a
classic, though possibly apocryphal, experiment, Galileo dropped two can-
nonballs off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, one ten times heavier than the other.
Both hit the ground at the same time. Galileo conjectured that a feather and
an iron weight would fall at identical rates in a vacuum, an experiment that
was performed by astronauts on the Moon in front of a worldwide television
audience.
 A stronomy    7

Galileo’s work in mechanics prepared the way for Newton’s revolu-

tionary theories. Galileo measured the rate at which a ball rolled down an
inclined plane. By varying the angle at which the plane was inclined, he was
able to show that the distance traveled by a falling object was proportional
to the square of the time that the object had been falling. This was a truly
remarkable observation, as throughout his life Galileo was hampered by the
unavailability of accurate means of measurement, and had to use his own
pulse as a clock.
Other areas of scientific advance beckoned. When the telescope was in-
vented, it was initially used for military and commercial observations. Galileo
trained the instrument on the sky, and created telescopic astronomy. Among
his many discoveries were mountains on the Moon, sunspots, the phases of
Venus, and the four largest moons of Jupiter, which are now known as the
Galilean satellites. These discoveries convinced Galileo that two pillars of
Church dogma, the geocentric theory of the Universe and the perfection of
the heavens, were erroneous. Despite the fact that Giordano Bruno had been
burned at the stake in 1600 for similar heresies, Galileo was convinced that
Church authorities would view the promulgation of his ideas with greater
tolerance.
He would be sadly disillusioned. Even though he was an old man, nearly
blind from imprudent observations of the sun, the Roman Catholic Inqui-
sition brought him to trial. Showing far greater common sense than had
Bruno, Galileo ostensibly recanted, although he is reputed to have said, in
reference to the Earth, “And yet it moves!” as he was led off after the trial.
Galileo was confined to house arrest for the remainder of his life, and died in
1642, the year in which Isaac Newton was born. The torch had been passed.
Although Brahe and Kepler were convinced of the truth of the Coper-
nican theory, it was Galileo’s telescopic observations that slammed the nails
into the coffin of the idea that the Earth was the center of the Universe.
The four largest moons of Jupiter could actually be seen, by anyone with
a sufficiently powerful telescope, to revolve around Jupiter, clearly demon-
strating that not all heavenly bodies revolved around the Earth. One would
think that this overwhelming evidence would have convinced anyone. Then
as now, belief continued to die hard, and while burning at the stake is no
longer a recognized threat to a new scientific theory, many scientists have
had to fight with as much determination as did Galileo to gain acceptance
for their ideas. Nowadays, although the Catholic Church is not the threat to
science that it was in Galileo’s time, there are still religions that stand against
scientific progress, and they have been joined by strong political factions in
many countries—including the United States.
8    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

THE LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION

The current COVID-19 pandemic pales into insignificance when compared

with some of the plagues of the past. We see a lot of comparisons with the
Spanish flu pandemic of 1919, which is estimated to have killed more than
100 million people—but in the four years from 1347 to 1351, the Black
Death slaughtered approximately 40 percent of the population of Europe.
Europe was periodically revisited by the Black Death, and it came again to
London in 1665. Cambridge University, then as now a citadel of higher
education, closed down for two years, and Isaac Newton, a young student,
returned to his family home at Woolsthorpe. Possibly due to the fact that
people didn’t travel much in those days, the plague didn’t strike country vil-
lages with the same ferocity that it had struck London.
There was, however, one extremely fortuitous consequence—Newton
was left to his own devices, and had time to explore some of his ideas. As
he put it, “in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666 . . . I was in the prime
of my age for invention, and minded mathematics best of all.” In those two
years, Newton developed the law of universal gravitation—and set the model
by which science in the future would be done.
Science consists of observations, experiments, and theories. Galileo had
performed the experiments and made the observations, which resulted in a
mathematical description of how bodies fall. Newton hypothesized that the
force of gravity between two objects was directly proportional to the prod-
uct of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance
between them. From this assumption, he was able to deduce Kepler’s three
laws of planetary motion. The aesthetic appeal of the simplicity of Newton’s
assumptions, as well as the demonstrable validity of the conclusions that
could be drawn from them, caused as instantaneous an acceptance of this
model for doing science as was possible at the time.
Much science—perhaps most science—follows Newton’s guidelines.
Observations and experiments are woven into a theory that makes predic-
tions beyond the observations and experiments used to construct the theory.
We then perform experiments and make observations to see if those predic-
tions accord with reality.
Newton’s law of gravitation changed the way we regard the Universe.
Prior to Newton, it had been assumed that objects in the heavens moved
according to different laws than did objects on Earth. The Universe was
believed to function according to a design that man was not meant to un-
derstand. Newton replaced this mystical Universe with one that operated as
a giant mechanism, whose inner workings could be revealed through rational
 A stronomy    9

investigation. This point of view is responsible for many of the most impor-
tant advances of Western civilization.
Like many brilliant and creative individuals, Newton was beset with psy-
chological problems. He was undoubtedly paranoid—fearful of criticism, he
refused to publish many of his discoveries. His articles on calculus, a supreme
mathematical tool, only came to light when the German philosopher Gott-
fried Leibniz, who independently invented calculus more than ten years after
Newton had done so, announced his discoveries. The seeds of the Principia,
which contained his ideas on universal gravitation, remained in his desk for
twenty years. Only the impassioned pleas of his good friend, astronomer
Edmund Halley (of Halley’s Comet fame), persuaded Newton to publish it,
and Halley himself had to finance the initial printing. History repeated itself;
recall that Copernicus might not have published his heliocentric theory had
not a good friend urged him to do so.
Back in 1999, Time magazine nominated Albert Einstein as its Man of
the Century. I think they missed an opportunity to nominate a Man of the
Millennium—and if they had, I would have started a write-in campaign for
Newton.
I’ve always loved what the poet Wordsworth wrote, on seeing a bust of
Newton.

The marble index of a mind forever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

THE DISCOVERY OF NEPTUNE

We can be pretty sure that even before recorded history, the objects that
appeared in the sky fascinated those who observed them. The Greeks were
certainly among the first to make charts of the location of the stars, although
there is evidence of other cultures also making such records. In doing so,
the Greeks observed that certain luminous objects, which they called planets
(from the Greek word for wanderer), moved rapidly among the stars. Five
planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—were visible to the
naked eye.
The invention of the telescope accelerated the growth of observational
astronomy. Two of the finest telescope makers, and consequently two of the
finest astronomers, were the Englishman William Herschel and his sister
Caroline. William was a superb lens grinder, and while he was at work, Caro-
line (who would become the first great woman astronomer) read aloud to
10    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

him and fed him so that he could continue working. In 1781, he came across
an object in the sky that he had never seen. Because it formed a visible disc
in the telescope, rather than the mere point that a star would make, Herschel
at first concluded that he had discovered a comet. Subsequent observations
showed that the disc had a sharp edge like a planet, rather than the fuzzy edge
characteristic of comets. When he had obtained enough data to calculate
the orbit, he found that it was nearly circular, like a planet, rather than the
elongated ellipse of a comet. The conclusion was inescapable: he had indeed
discovered a planet, which was later named Uranus.
Its orbit was carefully determined according to the laws of Newton’s
law of gravitation. After several decades, though, discrepancies began to
appear between where the planet was supposed to be, and where it actually
was. These discrepancies were noted by the Astronomer Royal, Sir George
Airy, who believed that they were due to imperfections in Newton’s law. As
a result, when he received a paper in 1845 by a Cambridge undergraduate
named John Couch Adams concerning the orbit of Uranus, he paid it no
attention.
History was to show that this was a mammoth error on the part of Airy.
Adams, who was compelled to tutor at Cambridge in order to earn money
for his tuition, had spent his vacation working on a radical theory: the orbit
of Uranus was deviating from the calculated path because of the influence
of an undiscovered planet. Adams had worked out the mass and location
that this undiscovered planet must have had in order to cause the observed
changes.
Adams was not alone. The Frenchman Urbain Le Verrier, working on
the same hypothesis, also deduced the mass and location of the planet. Le
Verrier, however, had luck on his side. Unlike Adams, he was an established
astronomer. When Johann Galle of the Berlin Observatory sent him some
preprints, Le Verrier wrote back to thank him and suggest that he look at
a particular region of the sky. Le Verrier’s luck continued, as Galle had just
been sent new and improved maps of the area in which Le Verrier was inter-
ested. As a result, Galle became the first individual to see the planet Neptune.
The discovery of Neptune was a theoretical tour de force, and estab-
lished beyond any possible doubt the validity of Newton’s law of gravitation
(although not much doubt existed at the time). Both Le Verrier and Adams
went on to have distinguished careers as astronomers, but the discovery of
Neptune was the high point for each.
The discovery of Neptune was not Le Verrier’s first attempt at finding
an unknown planet. Before tackling the problem of the discrepancies in the
orbit of Uranus, he had noticed subtle anomalies in the orbit of Mercury,
 A stronomy    11

and attempted to account for them the same way, by postulating a planet
he referred to as Vulcan (probably because it was even closer to the sun than
Mercury, and would therefore have been hotter than Vulcan’s mythical
forge). No such planet was ever found, and the problems with anomalies
in Mercury’s orbit nagged astronomers until early in the twentieth century.
The fault was not with Le Verrier’s calculation, but with Newton’s law of
gravitation—as a young German-born physicist was to show in the twentieth
century.

THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

In 1905, Albert Einstein had probably the most astounding year any scientist
has ever experienced. Upon finishing his doctorate, he found himself unable
to find an appropriate job in the academic world, so he took a job with the
Swiss Patent Office in Berne. During the day, he was a civil servant, scru-
tinizing patent applications for such ordinary devices as an improved gun,
and a new use for alternating current. During the evening, he would some-
times stop at the nearby Cafe Bollwerk for a cup of coffee and conversation.
Somehow, amid the responsibilities of a nine-to-five job, he managed to
write three papers. Two of these papers led directly to Nobel Prizes; the third
paper was merely brilliant.
Einstein is best known for the theory of relativity, a brilliant restructur-
ing of how gravity operates. When Einstein first started thinking about the
ideas that were to lead to the theory of relativity, he performed a famous
thought experiment. Suppose that, at the exact moment that a clock struck
noon, you were able to ride away from the clock on a beam of light. Because
light itself carries the information from the clock about what time the clock
shows, you would forever see the clock as showing noon. Time stands still if
you happen to be traveling at the speed of light. The corollary is that time
itself is not absolute, but depends on the observer.
The relativity of time appeared in Einstein’s 1905 paper, “On the Elec-
trodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which lay at the core of the theory of special
relativity. But Einstein was to go further. A decade of work culminated in
the theory of general relativity, Einstein’s reformulation of the Newtonian
Universe.
In Newton’s Universe, space and time are independent and absolute
quantities, which can be measured by any observer. At any given moment,
the Universe is a snapshot of a spatial stage, and the masses are the actors
12    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

moving about this stage in relation to one another. The Universe according
to Newton is an unfolding motion picture.
In Einstein’s Universe, space and time are interlinked to form a four-
dimensional geometrical structure called spacetime. The shape of spacetime
determines how objects move; conversely, the objects themselves determine
the shape of spacetime. The Universe according to Einstein is a geometrical
entity in which space, time, and objects are all indissolubly related to one
another. The differences between the Universes of Newton and Einstein are
not apparent in everyday life, manifesting themselves mostly when objects
travel at very high speed or are exceptionally massive. The first demonstra-
tion of the correctness of Einstein’s reformulation was made in 1919, when
Sir Arthur Eddington led an expedition to Africa to view a total eclipse of the
Sun. Only then would it be possible to make the critical measurements of the
motion of the planet Mercury to decide whether Einstein had supplied the
answer to a discrepancy that had appeared in Newton’s theory. In extreme
situations such as described previously, Einstein’s theory was proven correct,
and since then Einstein’s theory has passed every test with flying colors.
Einstein was unquestionably the most famous scientist who ever lived,
and arguably the most brilliant. Unlike the moody and paranoid Newton
and the gloomy and pessimistic Darwin, he was a warm and charming
humanitarian. Unlike many celebrities, he was aware of both his strengths
and limitations. As one of the leading spokesmen of the Zionist cause, and
certainly the most famous, he was the first to be offered the presidency of
Israel when that nation came into being. He turned it down, saying that he
had no great understanding of human problems.
Einstein was well known for his proclivity to phrase statements about
the Universe by ascribing various points of view to God. When he was asked
in 1919 how he would have felt if the measurements made during the total
eclipse had not confirmed his predictions, he replied that he would have
criticized God for a bad job in designing the Universe. Einstein’s view of
the probabilistically based subject of quantum mechanics is certainly best
summarized in his well-known quote that “God does not play dice with the
Universe.” Finally, his good friend Niels Bohr, with whom he used to take
long walks and discuss physics, grew rather tired of these pronouncements,
and told him, “Stop telling God what to do.” It took someone of the genius
of Bohr to achieve a put-down of Einstein. Nonetheless, the feeling that the
scientific community has toward Einstein may have been best expressed by
Jacob Bronowski in The Ascent of Man: “Einstein was a man who could ask
immensely simple questions. And what his life showed, and his work, is that
when the answers are simple too, then you hear God thinking.”
 A stronomy    13

Stars
THE PERIOD-LUMINOSITY CURVE
OF THE CEPHEID VARIABLES

Among the questions that have undoubtedly been asked at all times and in
all cultures is, “How big is the Universe?”
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the construction of tele-
scopes had improved to the point where it was actually possible to detect
parallax, which is a type of relative motion of nearby objects against a fixed
background. You can experience parallax for yourself if you hold a finger in
front of your nose, and then look at the finger with one eye closed, then the
other—the background shifts relative to your finger. Using this technique,
Friedrich Bessel concluded in 1838 that the distance of the star 61 Cygni was
more than six light-years from Earth. This discovery enlarged the Universe
substantially, as even so great an authority as Newton had estimated that the
stars were no more than two light-years from Earth.
Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, the measurement
of parallax was the leading-edge technique for determining distances to the
stars. Telescopes became even more powerful, and smaller parallaxes could
be detected. This pushed the threshold of the furthest measurable stars to
several hundred light-years. Because the distance to most stars could not
be measured, astronomers naturally suspected that the Universe was much
larger, but how much larger was still anybody’s guess.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, several different events
combined to make possible more accurate measurements of the size of the
Universe. The first was the definition by Ejnar Hertzsprung, a Danish as-
tronomer, of the concept of absolute magnitude of a star. Previously, the
magnitude of a star (now called the apparent magnitude) was a measure of
how bright the star appeared. This is a function of the star’s intrinsic bright-
ness and the distance of the star from Earth. Hertzsprung suggested that
one could compute how bright a star would appear if it were at a standard
distance. As a result, there was a simple equation connecting three numbers:
absolute magnitude (Hertzsprung’s number), apparent magnitude, and dis-
tance from Earth.
The distance of a star could be computed if both the apparent magni-
tude and the absolute magnitude of a star were known. Astronomers had
been measuring apparent magnitude for years, but the difficulty lay in com-
puting the absolute magnitude of a star. When astronomers looked at a dim
14    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

star, there was no way to tell if they were looking at a dim nearby star, or an
extremely bright one dimmed by distance.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an astronomer working at Harvard Univer-
sity. She was particularly interested in a class of stars called Cepheid variables.
These stars, originally discovered in the constellation of Cepheus, brightened
and dimmed in an extremely regular fashion. Leavitt’s great discovery was
that there was a mathematical relationship between the absolute magnitude
of a Cepheid variable and the length of the period of that variable—how
long it took to go from brightest to dimmest and back to brightest again.
These periods were obviously easy to measure; one simply timed them. The
distances of several Cepheid variables had actually been computed by then,
and so it was possible to use these measurements to calibrate the Cepheid
yardstick. Several years later Cepheid variables were discovered in collections
of stars that would later be known as galaxies, and for the first time it was
realized that the Universe was at least millions of light-years in diameter.
The Cepheid variable yardstick is still the only one whose accuracy is
acknowledged by the astronomical community as a whole. One cannot use
this technique for distant galaxies, though, as it is impossible to make out
individual Cepheid variables in such galaxies. One of the latest proposals is
to update Leavitt’s period-luminosity law for Cepheid variables by trying
to find a different observable type of star for which there is a correlation
between brightness and distance. The current candidate is the Type Ia super-
nova, which is visible over huge distances. Astronomers are currently trying
to work out a law for Type Ia supernovas analogous to the period-luminosity
law for Cepheid variables. If such a law exists, it would bring a realistic de-
termination of the size of the Universe within reach.
Leavitt’s life serves as a good indicator of the second-class status (if that)
held by women during her lifetime. She eventually graduated from what is
currently known as Radcliffe College with a certificate that stated had she
been a man, she would have received a Bachelor of Arts degree. Harlow
Shapley, who was one of the leading astronomers of the times, wrote to
her superior at Harvard Observatory that, “Her discovery of the relation of
period to brightness is destined to be one of the most significant results of
stellar astronomy, I believe.”
Leavitt died in 1921, but despite her contributions, the news of her
passing was not known to a number of prestigious scientists, including Gösta
Mittag-Leffler, who wrote a letter to her in 1925 in which he stated,

Honoured Miss Leavitt, What my friend and colleague Professor

von Zeipel of Uppsala has told me about your admirable discov-
 A stronomy    15

ery of the empirical law touching the connection between magni-

tude and period-length for the S Cepheid-variables of the Little
Magellan’s cloud, has impressed me so deeply that I feel seriously
inclined to nominate you to the Nobel prize in physics for 1926.

It’s hard to believe that the death of someone whose work was held in such
esteem would have gone unnoticed—and, in keeping with her graduation
certificate, that death probably would not have gone unnoticed had Leavitt
been a man.

FUSION AND THE LIVES OF STARS

How does the Sun supply the light and heat necessary for life on Earth? With
the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, it was quickly seen that chemi-
cal burning, such as takes place in coal, was far too inefficient. In 1854, the
German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz considered a subtler mechanism
for producing heat: gravitation. The kinetic energy of particles falling toward
the center of the Sun could be converted to radiation in accordance with the
laws of thermodynamics. This would power the Sun for 25 million years.
Unfortunately, geologists had supplied convincing evidence that the
Earth was at least hundreds of millions of years old, and so gravitational
conversion of mechanical energy to heat radiation was clearly not the answer.
The problem would remain unsolved until the start of the twentieth century,
when additional sources of energy were discovered within the heart of the
atom itself. Einstein’s famous formula E = mc2 demonstrated that the Sun
clearly had more than enough mass to generate energy for billions of years,
providing that a mechanism to convert energy with sufficient efficiency
could be found.
The individual who figured out the conversion technique was Hans
Bethe, a German physicist who escaped from Nazi Germany and ended
up at Cornell University. Bethe was familiar with nuclear processes, and he
had also read Arthur Eddington’s conclusions that the temperatures in the
interiors of stars had to be on the order of hundreds of millions of degrees.
Using these results, Bethe was able to postulate a process whose result was the
squeezing together of hydrogen nuclei to form helium. The helium resulting
from this “fusion” process weighed less than the hydrogen that formed it,
and Bethe was able to show that the missing mass was converted to energy in
accordance with Einstein’s formula. The Sun was a giant furnace, converting
16    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

4,200,000 tons of mass to energy every second. Because of the huge size of
the Sun, the Sun could continue to radiate heat and light for billions of years.
This process, which goes on in all stars, results in a delicate balance be-
tween the star’s radiation pressure, which makes the star expand, and its in-
ternal gravitation, which makes the star contract. At approximately the same
time, the Indian astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar determined
that the outcome of this battle depended on the initial size of the star. The
very small stars gradually exhaust their fuel and cool to a dull red. In larger
stars, whose initial mass is less than about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass, the rate
of burning is faster and gravitational contraction is stronger. Such stars end
their lives as white dwarfs—extremely hot, but very tiny.
In the ensuing years, a more detailed study of the fusion mechanism in
even larger stars has been developed. After a star has burned its hydrogen to
helium, it contracts, and this contraction heats up the central core further.
This added heat enables helium to be fused to carbon. When the helium
has been consumed, the star contracts further, becoming hot enough to fuse
carbon to oxygen. And so it continues, with added contraction enabling oxy-
gen to be fused to neon, then silicon, sulfur and, finally, iron. These events
occur at an ever-faster rate. When the core of the star becomes iron, it can
no longer fuse. The long battle between radiation pressure and gravitational
contraction is won by the latter, and the star collapses and rebounds in one
of the most dramatic events in the Universe—a supernova explosion.
The lives of the stars are long, and man has only been observing the
Universe intensively for four hundred years. However, there are so many
stars in the Universe that, given the observing power of today’s telescopes,
sooner or later a really interesting event will be observed. “Sooner” came in
1987 with the discovery of Supernova 1987A, the first nearby supernova to
be observed in more than three hundred years. All the important predictions
of the theory were upheld. The theory of the lives of stars is of profound
importance to us, for it postulates that all the heavier elements, from the
calcium in our bones to the iron in our blood, are formed in supernovas. We
are, in a very real sense, intimately connected to the Universe: our very lives
are possible because of the violent deaths of stars.

BLACK HOLES, QUASARS, AND PULSARS

As anyone in the advertising business can attest, good packaging can make
any product more attractive, even a product like an arcane physics concept.
The term “black hole” was coined by John Wheeler to describe a situation
 A stronomy    17

that at first blush seems unbelievable. After an extremely heavy star becomes
a supernova, it leaves behind a remnant that has so much mass packed in
so small an area that there is no effective barrier to the force of gravitational
collapse. This procedure, initially conceived by the English astronomer John
Michell in 1783, was first described in full detail by J. Robert Oppenheimer
before he was called away from theoretical physics to head the Manhattan
Project, the top-secret World War II project to develop the first atomic
bomb. Like the Energizer Bunny, the supernova remnant just keeps going
and going and going—until the gravitational force is so strong that not even
light can escape. Then it is gone—from the Universe.
Initially the idea of a black hole attracted a good deal of interest in the
astrophysics community, but when no one could supply a candidate, that
interest dwindled. Then, in 1963, the astronomer Maarten Schmidt made
a discovery that was to incite new interest in the possibility of black holes.
Schmidt was studying an astronomical object known as 3C 273 with the
huge Mount Palomar telescope. 3C 273 looked like a star, but had a spec-
trum unlike that of any known star. In a burst of insight, Schmidt realized
that it would be possible to attach meaning to the spectral lines of 3C 273
if one assumed that 3C 273 possessed an extremely high red shift. The only
way objects possess a high red shift is if they are receding at an enormous
velocity. In view of the Hubble relationship between recession velocity and
distance, this meant that 3C 273 was an astounding 2 billion light-years
away. The only mechanism that astronomers could imagine that would make
an object that far away appear that bright was a black hole with the mass of
billions of suns, continually gobbling matter and converting it into radiation.
Other objects similar to 3C 273 were discovered and given the name “quasi-
stellar radio sources,” from which the term “quasar” is derived.
Four years later, British astronomer Anthony Hewish had assigned his
graduate student Jocelyn Bell to study quasars. She detected an extremely
unusual radio signal from one of them, a pulse with metronomic regularity.
Initially, Hewish could not conceive of a natural mechanism to account for
the regularity of the signals, and was considering the possibility that he and
Bell had stumbled upon a signal beacon from an extraterrestrial life-form.
Not entirely in jest, they referred to the object as LGM-1, where LGM stood
for “little green men.”
After several more months, four more such objects had been discovered.
Hewish was able to abandon the “little green men” theory when, on further
reflection, he realized that the signal could be a radio pulse from a rapidly
spinning neutron star. Neutron stars are the residue of the explosion of a
supernova, but the supernova is not quite massive enough to degenerate into
18    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

a black hole. The star is so massive that the electrons and protons of its atoms
are forced together and annihilate each other’s electrical charge, leaving only
electrically neutral neutrons. The spinning star acts like a cosmic lighthouse,
with the radio beam regularly flashing past Earth, and this was the signal that
Bell had detected. The term “pulsar” is used to describe the spinning neutron
star which emits radio pulses.
It should be observed that while there is much inferential evidence for
the existence of black holes, the riddle of the quasars has not yet been un-
raveled to the satisfaction of all astronomers. In 1974, Joseph Turner made
careful studies of the rotation rate of a neutron star. Einstein’s theory of rela-
tivity predicted that such an object should radiate gravitational waves, and
the energy loss should slow down the spinning of the star. Turner’s studies
confirmed this, killing two birds at once: he had demonstrated the existence
of both neutron stars and gravitational waves.
Oppenheimer’s brilliance as a physicist was overshadowed—if that is the
correct word—by his experience in heading the Manhattan Project, which
some believe would not have succeeded with any other physicist in the posi-
tion Oppenheimer occupied. Oppenheimer was not only brilliant, but by
all accounts immensely charismatic—and his involvement in the Manhattan
Project persuaded others to sign on. After the conclusion of the war, his in-
fluence faded as a result of concerns about his association with members of
the Communist Party.

The Universe
THE STRUCTURE AND DIMENSIONS
OF THE MILKY WAY GALAXY

Not until the twentieth century did we realize how large the Universe really
is. We have also made the fascinating discovery that there is a simple correla-
tion between the size of the Universe and the age of the Universe.
Although the telescope was first invented and used for astronomical
purposes in the seventeenth century, observational astronomy only became
a popular pursuit in the eighteenth century with the invention of improved
lenses. One of those who became interested in this field was Charles Messier,
a Frenchman who was the first person to spot Halley’s comet when it re-
turned, as Halley had predicted, in 1758. This inspired him to spend his life
searching for comets.
 A stronomy    19

Unfortunately, there were numerous objects in the sky that appeared in

a telescope to be as fuzzy and blurry as comets, so Messier decided to keep
track of these objects so he would not mistake them for comets. He found
and catalogued more than a hundred of these objects. Some would later be
revealed as mere wisps of dust, but others would be vast collections of stars
that Messier’s telescope was simply too weak to resolve into individual stars.
Messier found some twenty-one comets during his lifetime, none of which
were memorable. However, many of the “nebulosities” he cataloged have
been of immense astronomical importance.
The thirteenth entry in Messier’s catalog is known to astronomers as
Messier 13, or M13 for short. It is actually a huge cluster of more than a
million stars, now called the Great Hercules Cluster because it appears in
the constellation Hercules. Between 1915 and 1920, Harlow Shapley of
the Mount Wilson Observatory made a study of globular clusters similar to
M13. The 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson was so good that many of
the individual stars in the clusters could be resolved.
Fortunately, several years earlier Henrietta Swan Leavitt had worked out
the period-luminosity curve of the type of stars known as Cepheid variables.
The period-luminosity curve enabled one to compute the distances of these
stars. Shapley decided to work out the distances of the globular clusters.
The globular clusters were not evenly distributed over the sky, as might
have been expected if the Sun were at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Instead, the globular clusters were distributed roughly spherically, and the
center of the sphere was located somewhere in the constellation Sagittarius.
Since the Milky Way galaxy seemed to be symmetric about a central point,
and since there was no logical reason for Shapley to believe that the globular
clusters were not also distributed symmetrically, he suggested that the center
of the sphere of globular clusters was also the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Having computed the distance of the globular clusters, Shapley was thus
able to compute the distance to the center of the galaxy. In 1918 he proposed
a model of the galaxy in which the distance from the Sun to the galaxy’s cen-
ter was approximately fifty thousand light-years. This distance was far greater
than anything previously suggested, and was actually a little too large; the
currently accepted figure is thirty thousand light-years. Previous underesti-
mates occurred when astronomers had assumed that, because the stars in the
Milky Way seemed equally bright in all directions, the Sun was at the center
of the galaxy. Shapley pointed out that dark dust clouds obscured the bright
center of the galaxy, leaving us only able to see the stars in our immediate
neighborhood. This was later confirmed by radio astronomy.
20    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Shapley’s work also continued the process, which had begun with Co-
pernicus, of demoting the Earth from the central position in the Universe.
Not only was the Earth not the center of the solar system, the Sun was not
even in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy has been
shown to have a spiral structure and the Sun is in one of the arms, about
two-thirds of the way from the center to the edge.
And that’s a good thing. According to current theory, the galactic habit-
able zone—that portion of a galaxy where intelligent life is most likely to
form—is some distance from the center of the galaxy, which contains the
greatest density of supernovae and other energetic cosmic events, the radia-
tion from which is capable of sterilizing planets some distance away. It may
be more exciting to be where the action is in the center of a galaxy, but
supernovae are—as they said of war in the 1960s—harmful to children and
other living things.

THE BIG BANG THEORY

In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble began to make measurements of the velocities

at which the galaxies were moving, and cosmology—the study of the Uni-
verse as a whole—began.
When Hubble measured the velocities of the galaxies, he discovered two
extraordinary facts. The first was that almost every galaxy was moving away
from us. The second was that the speed at which galaxies were moving de-
pended in a straightforward fashion on how far away they were from us—if
galaxy A was twice as far away as galaxy B, then galaxy A was moving away
twice as fast as was galaxy B. This implied that the Universe was expanding.
By the early 1950s, two theories had been proposed to account for this
expansion. In the steady state theory, the Universe looked the same at all
times, past, present, or future; the Universe had no beginning and no end.
Although the galaxies were rushing away from one another, new matter was
being created at a rate that ensured that the galactic density would remain the
same at all times. In the big bang theory, however, the Universe had a well-de-
fined beginning in a gigantic explosion, and the galactic density—the number
of galaxies per cubic light-year of space—would decrease as time advanced.
To decide between the two theories by waiting a couple of billion years
and measuring the galactic density was obviously unappealing. Fortunately,
there was another way to decide which theory was correct. The big bang the-
ory predicted that the echo of the giant explosion from which the Universe
 A stronomy    21

began could be detected by sufficiently sensitive radio telescopes, whereas the

steady state theory made no such prediction.
In the early 1960s two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson, had been recruited by Bell Laboratories to modify a radio antenna
to bounce signals off the Echo satellite so that the antenna could send and
receive microwave transmissions from the recently launched Telstar satellite.
Once the modifications had been made, Penzias and Wilson would be al-
lowed to use the antenna for radio astronomy.
Try as they might, Penzias and Wilson could not eliminate an unex-
plained background noise that seemed to come from everywhere. It was
a challenge to their skill as engineers, and they spent over a year doing
everything possible—cleaning out roosting pigeons (and the residue of the
pigeons’ tenancy), even rebuilding the antenna. They were about to dismiss
the signal as spurious when Penzias was informed of a paper by a Princeton
astrophysicist predicting that the echo of the hypothetical big bang might
be detected with a sufficiently sensitive radio antenna. Penzias and Wilson
called up Princeton, and the two groups ended up writing back-to-back pa-
pers in the Astrophysical Journal. The paper by Penzias and Wilson described
the technical nature of reconditioning the antenna, the problems, and the
leftover background noise. The paper by the Princeton group pointed out
the possible interpretation that the signal was the leftover echo of the big
bang.
Rarely has a plausible theory succumbed to experiment so quickly.
Within a short time, the steady state theory was dead, and the birth an-
nouncements for the Universe were sent out.
In 1978, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for phys-
ics. Although great discoveries have often come about unexpectedly, to be
awarded a Nobel Prize for accomplishing something when you (a) were try-
ing unsuccessfully to do something else, and (b) needed outside help to make
you aware of what you had accomplished, must set some sort of record for in-
tellectual good fortune. If you want to win a Nobel Prize, your best chance is
by being willing to get your hands dirty—great scientific discoveries can arise
by accident, but great scientific theories rarely, if ever, occur in this fashion.

THE FATE OF THE UNIVERSE

Until the twentieth century, any discussion of the eventual fate of the Uni-
verse was conducted by philosophers and theologians, as the question could
not even be accurately framed in a scientific setting. However, when Edwin
22    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Hubble discovered that the galaxies were all receding from one another, this
opened up the question to scientific debate.
If the galaxies are all flying away from one another, there are only three
possibilities. The first is that the expansion remains unchecked, and that
sooner or later each galaxy is alone in the Cosmos, unable to receive signals
from any other galaxy. The second possibility is that there is enough mass in
the Universe to reverse the expansion, and that the galaxies will all eventually
collide with one another. The Universe, born in a big bang, will end in a big
crunch. Third, there might be just enough matter to slow down the expan-
sion to zero, but not enough to cause a big crunch. Scientists have calculated
that the amount of matter needed to cause this last scenario is about three
atoms of hydrogen for every cubic meter of space. This amount of matter is
called the critical density.
If the only matter in the Universe is what we see through our telescopes,
then the density of the Universe is only about 2 percent of the critical den-
sity, and the Universe would expand forever. However, there is a lot more
matter out there that we cannot see through our telescopes.
The existence of this unseen matter, generally called “dark matter,” was
discovered by Vera Rubin, an astronomer who had earned her doctorate
working for George Gamow, one of the authors of the big bang theory.
Rubin decided to measure the speed at which various galaxies rotated. She
observed that galaxies rotated much more rapidly than they would have if
the only mass in these galaxies were the luminous mass we can see through
the telescopes. The actual rotation of these galaxies could only be explained
if there were large quantities of dark matter making them rotate faster.
Was there enough dark matter in the galaxies, and outside of them, to
cause the Universe to contract in a big crunch? The answer to that question
is still to be determined, and can only be answered by observation. However,
a recent theoretical development suggests that the actual density of the Uni-
verse is the critical density.
Currently, the measured density of the Universe is about 10 percent of
the critical density. At the time of the big bang, the actual density of the
Universe had to be either the exact critical density, above it, or below it. Had
the actual density been just a tiny bit above or below it, the 15 billion years
or so of galactic expansion would have caused the current measured density
to deviate tremendously from the critical density. Scientists were faced with a
huge credibility problem: why was the initial density of the Universe exactly
(to about sixty decimal places!) the critical density? This is known as the
“flatness problem.”
 A stronomy    23

In 1980, Alan Guth proposed a revolutionary scenario known as “infla-

tion.” He theorized that for one unimaginably brief moment after the big
bang, the Universe actually inflated (expanded) far more rapidly than it is
doing now. No matter how the Universe had actually begun, this superfast
expansion created conditions in which the measured density at this moment
was extremely close to the critical density. The inflationary scenario also
explained why the Universe looks pretty much the same in all directions.
Although it is still a theory, it has a large following among cosmologists.
Another interesting question raised by Rubin’s work is the nature of the
dark matter: what exactly is it? At the moment, no one knows, but there are
plenty of guesses. Some astronomers believe that dark matter consists mostly
of run-of-the-mill objects such as stars that have died and no longer glow.
Some think that neutrinos, which recently have been shown to have very
small masses, actually have enough mass to close the Universe, because there
are a tremendous number of neutrinos in the Universe. Finally, there is a
contingent that believes that dark matter consists of particles we have not yet
detected; these particles are described by the more exotic “supersymmetric”
theories of the nature of matter.
When Vera Rubin graduated from Vassar in 1948 as the school’s only
astronomy major, she applied to Princeton for graduate study, only to be
told that “Princeton does not accept women” in the astronomy program—a
policy that was only discarded in 1975. Princeton is undoubtedly one of the
great educational and research institutions of the world, but it was way be-
hind the curve as far as civil rights are concerned—in the 1940s, it also had
a policy of not allowing blacks to attend lectures.
Rubin eventually received her doctorate from Georgetown University
working under the supervision of George Gamow, who was one of the first
proponents of the big bang theory. Gamow wrote one of the first popular
books on mathematics and science. A few years ago, I had the opportunity
to re-read One, Two, Three . . . Infinity. Some of it is a little out of date, but
it’s still a great introduction to math and science.

THE DISCOVERY OF PLANETS OUTSIDE THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Just as the question of the origin of life on our own planet is one of the most
important questions that science has yet to answer, so is the existence of life
elsewhere in the Universe. Despite the legions of reports of alien abductions
and visits by flying saucers, there is not a single confirmed shred of evidence
pointing to the existence of life beyond the limits of the Earth’s atmosphere.
24    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Our Moon is totally dead. Life would have to be able to evolve and survive
at a temperature of 1000°C in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and sulfuric
acid on Venus, and the Mariner landings on Mars gave hints of intriguing
chemistry but no sign of biology.
Scientists feel reasonably sure that, in order for life to exist, it must
evolve on a planet. However, since the detection of the planet Pluto by Clyde
Tombaugh in 1930, no new planet has ever been observed—and Pluto has
sadly been demoted from planetary status. The detection of Pluto was the
culmination of a search lasting many years, and all attempts to find another
planet in our own solar system have failed. To find a planet circling another
star, and consequently thousands of times further away from us than Pluto,
was until quite recently an impossible task.
Not only is a planet physically so small that it would be virtually im-
possible to see at so great a distance, it would also be hidden by the glare of
the star it is orbiting. Despite the improvements in technology, for decades
scientists felt that the optical detection of a planet would be virtually impos-
sible. The only possibility, many felt, would be the reception of a signal
from another life-form. Thus was born SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence.
However, there was another possible way to detect the existence of a
planet. Although most people think that the planets in the solar system orbit
the Sun, in reality the planets orbit the center of mass of the solar system,
which is actually within the Sun. The Sun itself also orbits this center of
mass, and this produces detectable wobbles in the Sun’s rotation. Perhaps
these wobbles could be detected in other stars.
The generally accepted theory of the evolution of the solar system is that
the planets are the result of the gravitational collapse of a cloud of material
circling the Sun. In 1984, astronomers Bradford Smith and Richard Terrile
obtained photographs of a cloud of material circling the star Beta Pictoris.
Even though no planets were found, this was felt to be an extremely hopeful
sign, as it indicated that the processes that produced the solar system could
occur elsewhere.
Meanwhile, other scientists were still trying to detect wobbles in other
stars by using an extremely sensitive technique known as interferometry. In
1994, astronomer Alexander Wolszczan detected the first planets outside
the solar system. Scientists initially had a hard time crediting Wolszczan’s
discovery, because the presumed planet was circling a pulsar. According to
conventional theory, this planet should not have existed. A pulsar is created
when a massive star explodes as a supernova, leaving a rapidly rotating neu-
tron star. Why didn’t the supernova explosion destroy the planet? As of now,
 A stronomy    25

no one knows—maybe the planet was captured from another nearby star, or
maybe our theories of how pulsars are created are in error.
The Wolszczan planet could not possibly serve as a source for extrater-
restrial life. For that, it is felt that a star much like the Sun would be the best
bet. However, in the quarter-century since Wolszczan’s discovery, the exo-
planet business has boomed, thanks both to improved wobble detection and
the addition of other weapons, such as transit detection, to the arsenal. There
are now more than four thousand known exoplanets, including several that
orbit sunlike stars in a zone that is habitable for life as we know it. Sometime
in the next few years, we will actually have technology that will enable us to
see the surface of some of these planets, and maybe detect signatures of life.
CHAPTER 2

The Earth

We have been as curious about the Earth, which lies under our feet, as we
have been about the planets and stars that lie above our heads and have been
out of reach for most of human history. Surprisingly, it has been almost as
difficult to piece together an accurate picture of the Earth as it has been to
piece together an accurate picture of the heavens.
If one looks at a sixteenth-century map of the surface of the Earth, it
gets a lot right—especially with regard to Europe, Africa, and a large part
of Asia. North America and South America are depicted less accurately, the
Arctic still less accurately, and Australia and the Antarctic receive almost no
mention. Although a reasonable amount was known about the surface of the
Earth, almost nothing was known of Earth’s history—how it came to be,
how old it was, and how it was structured.
Five hundred years later, we have reliable answers to those questions.
What we don’t have is a reliable answer to what is going to happen to the
Earth in the near term. We do know that some 2 billion years from now, the
Sun will expand to swallow the Earth, but a much more pressing question is
whether what we are currently doing will alter the habitability of the Earth
in the next century or so.
The nearest exoplanet is Proxima Centauri b, about 4.2 light-years from
Earth. Fortunately, it is located in the habitable zone, that region of space
surrounding a star that conceivably could support human life. We may
even be able to get a look at Proxima Centauri b sometime in the next few
decades—but unless we actually develop some method of traveling through
space at velocities close to the speed of light, it will take millennia—or
longer—to get there.

27
28    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Throughout human history, the Earth has been our home. It will be
our home for the foreseeable future. It behooves us to understand how it
functions and how we affect its functioning—because humanity isn’t going
anywhere soon.

Measurements
THE FIRST ACCURATE MEASUREMENT
OF THE SIZE OF THE EARTH

One of the chief activities common to all sciences is measuring.

Nowadays, geometry is not considered a science, but rather a branch of
mathematics. However, the literal meaning of the word “geometry” is “the
measurement of the Earth.” Although several pre-Hellenic civilizations used
different aspects of geometry, it was the Greeks who formalized the study
of geometry, and used it both to examine their world and construct their
civilization.
To the Greeks, the shape of the Earth was not in doubt. The sun and
moon could both be seen to be circular, and during a lunar eclipse the
shadow of the Earth, falling upon the moon, was also seen to be circular.
Since the shadow was always circular no matter when the eclipse occurred,
every shadow cast by the Earth must be a circle, and this was possible only
if the Earth was a sphere. What was not known to the Greeks was the actual
size of the sphere.
Eratosthenes was a man of far-reaching intellectual interests. He was a
historian who made an attempt to establish an accurate chronology of all the
dates since the Trojan War, and is recognized as the first man to realize the
need for the accurate dating of events. He was a literary critic who wrote a
treatise on Greek comedy. As a scholar he was so well-regarded that he was
summoned from Greece to Alexandria to head the library at Alexandria,
arguably the most important intellectual position of the day. He was the
greatest geographer of the time, constructing a map of the known world
that extended from the British Isles to Ceylon and from the Caspian Sea
to Ethiopia. He was a mathematician who constructed a systematic way of
determining prime numbers that is still known as the sieve of Eratosthenes.
However, the feat for which he is best known is measuring the size of
the Earth. He realized that the cities of Alexandria and Syene lie on the same
meridian, and made use of that fact to determine the circumference of the
Earth. It was known that on a particular day of the year the Sun was directly
 T he E arth    29

overhead at midday in Alexandria. What Eratosthenes needed was someone

to make a critical measurement, and he established the laudable precedent
of paying for scientific research by hiring a man to travel the 800 or so miles
south to Syene to measure the angle cast by a shadow at precisely the same
time. Using this measurement, by simple geometry he was able to estimate
the diameter of the Earth as approximately 25,000 miles, quite close to its
actual value.
Eratosthenes also used this value to deduce geographical facts about the
undiscovered portion of the Earth. He was able to estimate the size of the
area of the known world from his experience as a geographer. Realizing that
this formed a very small portion of the size of the Earth, he reasoned that
the seas lying to the east and the seas lying to the west must actually form a
part of a worldwide interconnected ocean. This deduction took nearly two
thousand years to establish, but it was confirmed when Ferdinand Magellan
circumnavigated the globe in the sixteenth century.
Eratosthenes was known to his colleagues as Beta, the second letter in
the Greek alphabet, as he seemed to be the world’s second-greatest author-
ity on practically everything. When he was eighty years old, his sight failed.
Depressed by his blindness, he committed suicide by voluntary starvation.

THE AGE OF THE EARTH

In an extraordinary work of biblical scholarship, James Ussher, an Irish

bishop, culminated years of study with the announcement in 1650 that the
Earth had been created at 9:00 a.m. on October 26 in the year 4004 BCE.
The chronology determined by this date was printed in the margins of the
King James Bible for two hundred years. However, more than one hundred
years before Ussher completed his work, the German Georgius Agricola had
noted the presence of mysterious bones in the Earth, and had coined the
word “fossil” to describe them. In 1691, the English naturalist John Ray
conjectured that these were the remains of extinct animals. This was a revo-
lutionary point of view at that time, but later events were to prove it correct.
Considering the evident slowness with which living species change, the
existence of fossils prompted one of two conclusions. Either the Earth was
periodically swept by catastrophes that totally destroyed existing species, and
then repopulated, or existing species evolved into others over long periods of
time. The former view was obviously popular with those who felt that the
Biblical view of creation was correct, while the latter appealed to a growing
community of biologists and geologists. By 1830, the geologist Charles Lyell
30    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

estimated that the oldest fossil-bearing rocks must be hundreds of millions

of years old.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, other sciences were to become
involved in this question. William Thomson (later to be knighted Lord Kel-
vin) was an infant prodigy. The son of a mathematics professor, he entered
the University of Glasgow at the tender age of eleven, graduating second in
his class. He was appointed to a professorship in 1846, at which time he
decided to calculate the age of the Earth using the laws of cooling that were
known from physics. Under the erroneous assumption that the Earth was
originally part of the sun, he derived the result that the age of the Earth was
approximately 100 million years.
This was not well received by the geologists, who were using other argu-
ments to reach the conclusion that the Earth was considerably older. The
astronomers and geologists engaged in heated debate for over half a century,
but it took the science of chemistry to come up with an answer that satisfied
everyone.
By the twentieth century, radioactive elements had been discovered, and
had been shown to give off heat. This rendered Kelvin’s argument invalid.
In 1904, Bertram Boltwood was able to show that one radioactive element
could decay into another, and that uranium would decay into lead, where-
upon the decay would stop. By 1907 he had improved his results to the point
where he could calculate the age of a rock by computing the ratio of uranium
to lead, and concluded that minerals near his Connecticut home were more
than 400 million years old. Thus was born the science of radioactive dating.
Using this technique, rocks have been discovered that are 4.2 billion years
old, and the current age of the Earth is estimated at 4.6 billion years.
The problem of determining the age of the Earth is obviously a compel-
ling one, as religion, paleontology, biology, geology, astronomy, physics, and
chemistry have all had a hand in its solution.
The name Kelvin is inextricably tied to heat, as it was a subject which
fascinated him. Even though he was significantly in error in his use of heat
to determine the age of the Earth, he was extremely accurate in arriving at
one very important conclusion. Noting that a gas at 0°C lost 1/273 of its
volume for every degree Celsius the temperature decreased, he reached the
conclusion that it would have no volume at −273°C, and therefore it was im-
possible to achieve a colder temperature. He therefore suggested that a new
temperature scale be adopted in which the coldest possible temperature was
0°. This temperature is now known as absolute zero, and measurements on
this temperature scale are quoted in degrees Kelvin (°K).
 T he E arth    31

Geology
THE THEORY OF UNIFORMITARIANISM

There is only one requirement for becoming a scientist, and that is the urge
to satisfy a deep curiosity concerning the true nature of the world around us.
However, there is no requirement on the preliminaries that must be fulfilled
in order to become a scientist. James Hutton entered science after flirting
with one career and embracing another.
It is rare that a person receives a medical degree but never practices or
conducts medical research. However, after graduating from medical school,
Hutton became an agricultural chemist. Sensing that there were financial
opportunities in the budding chemical industry, Hutton established a factory
for the manufacture of ammonium chloride. He did so well at this that he
was able to retire at age forty-two to pursue his chief interest, the study of
the geological structures of his native Scotland.
This was the period of the Industrial Revolution, and it was becom-
ing clear that the study of geology had important economic consequences.
Correct location of canals and railways depended on knowledge of geologi-
cal conditions, to say nothing of the clues geology could yield concerning
potential mineral deposits. When Hutton began his work, the world’s most
respected geologist was Abraham Werner, a German who believed that the
Earth had originally been covered with water in which minerals had been
dissolved. Over time, solids precipitated out of the water to form the various
layers of rocks that covered the Earth. This theory came to be called neptun-
ism, from the Greek god of the sea.
Werner was one of the first to call attention to the possibility that it
had taken the Earth a long time to reach its current state. At the time of
Hutton’s investigations, conservative points of view once again dominated
the intellectual landscape. As noted in the previous section, during the early
seventeenth century, Bishop James Ussher had made a detailed study of the
time periods in the Bible and had come to the conclusion that the Universe
had been created in 4004 BCE. This date was unquestioningly accepted by
many religious and secular authorities in Hutton’s time, and to challenge it
ran risks, although the sanctions imposed were not as drastic as those man-
dated by the Catholic Inquisition a century and a half earlier on Giordano
Bruno and Galileo.
Through long study, Hutton became convinced of two fundamental
ideas concerning geology. The first was that the processes that shaped the
32    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Earth continued to operate even today, and they were processes that ran
slowly and at a uniform rate. As a result, Hutton’s theories were described by
the word “uniformitarianism.” Hutton was also convinced that the mecha-
nism driving the changes was the internal heat of the Earth. As Werner’s
theory was called neptunism, Hutton’s was called plutonism, in reference to
the deity controlling the heated nether regions.
Hutton published his conclusions in 1785, in a book entitled Theory of
the Earth. Although he reached several erroneous conclusions, among which
was the idea that the Earth had neither beginning nor foreseeable end, many
of his ideas form the basis of modern geology. Geological processes are cur-
rently seen as being driven by two different operating systems, the uniform
ones described by Hutton, and the catastrophic ones such as meteor im-
pacts, which are presently thought to be responsible for the extinction of the
dinosaurs.
Hutton is universally regarded as the father of modern geology, but if
the notes on which he was working had come to light earlier, he might have
achieved even greater fame. In 1947, scholars examined a Hutton manuscript
that had been undiscovered until then. In it, he outlined some of the basic
ideas on evolution by natural selection that were to occur to both Charles
Darwin and Alfred Wallace half a century after Hutton had suggested them.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE EARTH’S INTERIOR

As anyone who has ever experienced an earthquake knows—and there was

one with an epicenter not ten miles from me not long ago—an earthquake is
one of the most terrifying of natural phenomena. Because of the devastation
earthquakes can cause, the effort to understand and predict them is one of
the primary goals of geology. It is one of the fascinating detective stories in
science that the effort to understand what causes the damage at the surface
of the Earth has revealed what is going on inside the Earth.
Richard Oldham was an Irish geologist who, like many others, made
an intensive study of earthquakes. In examining the records of earthquakes,
Oldham showed that an earthquake generated two main types of waves. The
first type of wave is called the P (for primary) wave. It is a compressional
wave, alternately compressing and dilating the rock through which it travels.
The other major type of wave is called the S (for secondary) wave. It is a
shearing wave, and is responsible for the characteristic up-and-down shaking
my wife and I experienced while sheltering under a doorway frame—you
learn to do this if you live in California.
 T he E arth    33

Besides the types of motion they induce, the P and S waves have other,
different characteristics. P waves are much faster, and always are the first to
arrive after an earthquake. A P wave can travel through both solid and liquid,
but shearing is not possible in liquids, and so S waves only travel through
solid rock. Two other important properties of waves are reflection and
refraction—the refraction of light waves is responsible for the fact that a
straw in a glass of water seems bent at the interface between water and air.
Oldham showed that the different speeds of the P and S waves, combined
with their reflective and refractive properties, could be used as diagnostic
tools to probe the interior of the Earth.
Andrija Mohorovičić studied records from a Yugoslavian earthquake
that produced a second set of waves that mirrored the first set. He concluded
that the second set occurred when the first set bounced off a discontinuity
that marked the dividing line between the surface of the Earth (known as
the crust) and another distinct layer of material. This next layer is known
as the mantle. The dividing line is known as the Mohorovičić discontinuity
(or Moho).
It had long been suspected that at the center of the Earth there exists a
solid metallic core, simply because the density of the Earth was known to be
greater than the density of rock. Oldham was able to analyze the waves from
numerous earthquakes to construct a simplified model of the Earth with a
metallic core. In the next few decades, the sophistication of seismic detectors
improved, and the database of earthquake records expanded significantly.
These advances made it possible for Inge Lehmann, a Danish geologist, to
demonstrate that the Earth’s core actually consisted of two distinct layers,
an outer liquid layer and an inner solid core. As a result of these efforts, the
structure of the Earth is now known. Even though there are local variations,
this consists basically of a crust anywhere from 10 to 40 kilometers thick, a
mantle of molten rock that extends for another 2,800 kilometers, a liquid
outer core some 2,200 kilometers thick, and a solid metallic inner core with
a radius of 2,200 kilometers.
A truly great earthquake has the power to shake the entire Earth and set
it “ringing” like a massive spherical bell. Subtle information can be obtained
from the various different “tones” with which the Earth rings. The devices
used for this analysis are tomographic scanners, similar in principle to the
CAT scans used in hospitals. It was also discovered that the Sun also rings
like a bell, and the techniques employed in analyzing the Earth are used in
the new science of helioseismology to investigate the structure of the Sun.
34    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

THE THEORY OF PLATE TECTONICS

When an artist’s life is tragic, such as in the case of Mozart or Van Gogh,
it sometimes makes its way into the popular culture in the form of plays or
movies. When a scientist’s life is tragic, it does not seem to attract the same
attention.
Alfred Wegener was a respected German meteorologist in the first two
decades of the twentieth century. Wegener’s interests extended beyond me-
teorology, and like others before him, he was intrigued by the apparent close
fit between the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America. Un-
like the others, he did not confine his investigations to the shape of the two
continents, but examined the geologic and fossil records of both continents.
It appeared to Wegener that similar rock strata and fossils could be found
on both continents. As a result, he proposed a theory of “continental drift.”
In this theory, all the continents had at one time formed a single land mass,
which had later fractured into the various continents. Over hundreds of mil-
lions of years, the continents had drifted apart.
There was a major difficulty with this theory. At the time Wegener
propounded it, no mechanism was known that would enable the continents
to drift apart. As for the similar fossil records in Africa and South America,
the geologists of the time proposed the existence of land bridges between
the continents, which had subsequently sunk beneath the sea. Wegener, the
geologists of the time suggested, should stick to meteorology.
Wegener had long been interested in Greenland, and had made three
successful expeditions there. His fourth expedition was a mission of mercy,
an attempt to bring food to a group of researchers who were running low
on supplies. When he arrived, there were not enough supplies remaining to
enable everyone to ride out the winter, so Wegener and a colleague took dog
sleds to try to make it to another camp. They never made it.
Ten years later, the world was plunged into the Second World War, and
it became important to obtain maps of the ocean floor. One person who
worked on this problem was Harry Hess, an American geologist who actu-
ally attained the rank of rear admiral in the U.S. Naval Reserve. In the early
1960s, F. J. Vine and D. H. Matthews made a startling discovery concern-
ing the structure of the ocean floor. It had been known since 1929 that the
earth’s magnetic field continually reversed its polarity after several hundred
thousand years. Vine and Matthews discovered evidence that the direction
of the Earth’s magnetic field was recorded in the rocks on the ocean floor in
adjacent parallel strips. The youngest strips are next to a sub-oceanic valley
 T he E arth    35

with mountains on either side, which is known as a rift valley. The further
one travels from the rift, the older the magnetized strips of rock become.
Hess proposed that new ocean floor was formed by volcanic action at the
rift, and that the creation of new floor wedged the old strips further apart.
This meant that new ocean floor was being continually created, and since
the Earth was not getting larger, the old surface must be destroyed. Hess’s
theory was that the older portion of the surface would be destroyed by being
submerged and later melted by the intense heat of the Earth’s interior.
This theory was refined during the 1960s, as it was discovered that the
Earth’s surface consists of approximately a dozen large plates, which are
continually moving and colliding with one another. As the plates collide,
mountains are formed and one plate is submerged under the other, with the
destroyed plate surface being replaced by volcanic action at the rift valleys.
This theory, known as plate tectonics, not only explained why earthquakes
occurred at particular locations (where the plates were colliding), but also
provided the mechanism for Wegener’s continental drift—the continents
drift on the moving plates. Like Van Gogh and Mozart, Wegener had been
vindicated by a subsequent generation.
Although Hess was an acknowledged expert on the Earth’s oceans, he
also lent his expertise to NASA as it prepared for the first landing on the
moon. Just as Wegener was not to see the results of his work, neither was
Hess, who died a month before the successful mission of Apollo 11.

The Earth’s Surface

DYNAMICS OF THE ATMOSPHERE AND THE OCEAN

One of the most important discoveries in the earth sciences has been the
complicated interrelationship between the oceans and the atmosphere. It is
a story of exploration, of data gathering, of mathematical analysis, and of
physical modeling—and there’s a lot of science that is essentially the same
type of story.
All the oceans of the world are interlinked, but they are not just stag-
nant pools of water. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Board of
Customs in Boston complained that mail packet ships from England took
two weeks longer to make the transatlantic crossing than did Rhode Island
merchant ships. Benjamin Franklin asked a Nantucket sea captain if he
could find an explanation, and the captain told him that the American ships
avoided the Gulf Stream on the westward leg, but the British ships paid no
36    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

attention to it. Since the Gulf Stream moved at three miles per hour relative
to the surrounding water, the British ships were effectively trying to swim
upstream.
Franklin was the first to draw a chart of the Gulf Stream, the greatest of
the ocean currents. The explorer Alexander von Humboldt discovered an-
other major ocean current off the coast of Peru. Now called the Humboldt
Current, its behavior has a profound effect on world climate. At irregular
intervals, the normally cold Humboldt Current is deflected away from the
coast by a rush of warm water surging down from the equator. This is disas-
trous for the local economy, as the anchovy harvest on which it depends is
greatly reduced by warm water. More importantly, this El Niño condition,
as it is called, has a profound effect on the world’s climate, often producing
floods in the United States and drought in Africa.
The first great advance in understanding the physics of the ocean came
from an analysis performed in 1835 by a French physicist, Gaspard de Corio-
lis. He showed that the rotation of the Earth deflected moving air and water
eastward when moving away from the equator, and westward when moving
toward it. This deflection, which was mathematically proven some twenty
years later by William Ferrel, is known as the Coriolis force, and it has a
strong influence on the formation of both wind and water vortices. In the
northern hemisphere, these vortices circulate clockwise, while they circulate
counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere, as can be seen when watching
water swirl down the drain and rotating in different directions depending on
whether you are north or south of the equator.
The twentieth century saw an intensive investigation of the relationship
between the atmosphere and the ocean. Because of the importance of atmo-
spheric and oceanic behavior on the Scandinavian countries, many of the
major contributors in this area have been Scandinavians. Three generations
of the Bjerknes family—Carl, Vilhelm, and Jacob—have devoted their lives
to the study of the oceans and the atmosphere. The fronts that appear on the
daily weather map you see on TV use symbology devised by Jacob Bjerknes.
Vilhelm, the second of the three generations, not only corrected errors
in his father’s analyses, but was an extremely inspirational teacher. Among
his students were his son (naturally), and two of the twentieth century’s fore-
most scientists in this area. Vagn Ekman studied the effect that the Coriolis
force had on the top layer of the ocean; this layer is now known as the Ekman
layer. Another student, Carl-Gustaf Rossby, is responsible for discovering
the jet streams, those fast-moving currents of air which influence not only
the daily weather, but also the time necessary for airplane travel. In a sense,
 T he E arth    37

the jet stream plays a role in the atmosphere similar to the one the Gulf
Stream plays in the ocean—affecting not only weather but transportation.
One of Rossby’s contributions to meteorology was that he was among
the first to apply computers to the problem of weather forecasting. Com-
puterized weather forecasting has improved substantially over the last half-
century; the seven-day forecasts of today are as accurate as the two-day
forecasts of the early 1970s. Computers are also currently being used to ana-
lyze and forecast future climate changes. A disturbing discovery is that the
coupled interplay of oceanic and atmospheric currents has resulted in bizarre
climatic shifts in the past, with the world being suddenly jolted into either
glacial or tropical conditions in extremely short periods of time. The next
great climatic shift may not come from the greenhouse effect, but from con-
ditions deep below the surface of the ocean. And warming and cooling seem
to be interlinked. Recent studies have shown that there is a strong correlation
between the warming of the Arctic and the severe winters in North America,
and the cause of this is the shifting of a current deep in the Atlantic Ocean.

THE ICE AGES

Occasionally a great scientific discovery is not so much a brand-new idea as it

is a rediscovery of a previously existing one. For example, in medieval Europe
it was common practice to cover wounds with moldy bread; centuries later,
Alexander Fleming would discover the antibiotic powers of the penicillin
mold.
Perhaps it is appropriate that Louis Agassiz, the scientist who first made
the ice age a credible scientific theory, was Swiss, because the icy glaciers of
Switzerland were in large part responsible for this theory. However, the idea
of an ice age did not occur first to the scientific community, but rather to the
mountaineers of Switzerland, who were very familiar with glaciers. In 1815,
the mountaineer Jean-Pierre Perraudin observed scars on hard rocks that did
not weather at the base of a valley. Having seen similar scars on rocks near
glaciers at the top, he wrote that the only explanation was that glaciers had
once filled the entire valley. He communicated this to a well-known natural-
ist, who was impressed but not completely convinced.
In 1815, Louis Agassiz was eight years old. After graduating from college
with a degree in zoology, he took a position as a professor of natural history
at Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where he produced a well-received five-volume se-
ries on fossil fishes. Agassiz was a naturalist who loved exploring the country-
side, and these explorations brought him into contact with large boulders in
38    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

the middle of valleys, which obviously had been transported to their present
locations. From several scientists and non-scientists he heard the conjecture
that the boulders had been brought from high atop the mountains to the
valleys by means of glaciers that had long since receded. Agassiz decided to
investigate for himself.
The alternative source of movement for these boulders was the “Great
Flood” described in the Bible. Raging rivers were known to have the ability
to move large boulders, and no one had yet amassed evidence to demonstrate
that glaciers could also do the job. Agassiz found that glaciers generally ter-
minated in rocks and boulders, and these rocks bore scratches and grooves
similar to those found by Perraudin. In 1839, Agassiz found a cabin that had
been built on a glacier in 1827, and had moved a mile down the glacier from
the original site. He then pounded a straight line of stakes deep into the ice;
within two years they had not only moved but were now shaped like a U.
This showed that the ice in the center moved faster than the ice on the sides,
which was slowed by friction with the surrounding mountains.
Agassiz was now persuaded that there had indeed been an ice age. He
found evidence that glaciers once existed in the British Isles. As a result of his
years of research, the existence of an ice age was finally established.
Modern science has uncovered the fact that ice ages have been a recur-
ring phenomenon; evidence exists that there were ice ages hundreds of mil-
lions of years ago. Now that we know that ice ages are a part of our history,
the question arises: what causes them? One of the most ambitious efforts
in this direction is the theory of the Yugoslavian physicist Milutin Milan-
kovitch, who published three papers between 1912 and 1914. In these he
hypothesized that there were two astronomical cycles that played a major
role in determining Earth’s climate—the 41,000-year cycle of the inclina-
tion of the Earth’s axis, and the 22,000-year oscillation of the Earth-Sun
distance. Milankovitch’s theory has generated a good deal of interest in the
meteorological community. Even though his original formulation seems to
have been disproved, every so often a scientist finds another cycle that, when
combined with the ones cited by Milankovitch, does an increasingly good
job of predicting climate conditions.
Another fascinating question is: when is the next ice age? In an era when
we are continually reminded of the possibility of overheating due to the
greenhouse effect, it would be ironic if we were next to suffer through a trial
by ice rather than a trial by fire. Recent computer simulations have raised
the disturbing possibility that the meandering of deep, cold, ocean currents
is chaotic in nature, and a dislocation of these currents could flip the Earth
into an ice age in less than a century.
 T he E arth    39

THE EFFECT OF MAN ON THE EARTH

It is only within the past few decades that ecology, a word coined by the Ger-
man philosopher and biologist Ernst Haeckel to describe the interrelation-
ship between living things and the environment, has become a recognized
scientific subject. However, it was the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius
who was responsible for the first discovery concerning the possible effects of
the activities of man on the environment.
Arrhenius was a top-notch chemist whose theory of the behavior of ions
resulted in his winning one of the first Nobel Prizes. In 1896, Arrhenius
noted that the gas carbon dioxide had the property of allowing the high-
frequency sunlight that the Earth received by day to pass through it, but it
reflected the low-frequency infrared light that the Earth reradiated as heat by
night. This meant that a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which
Arrhenius noted was taking place because of increased industrialization,
could be accompanied by an increase in heat. This was the first discussion of
the greenhouse effect. Later in the twentieth century it would be shown that
the planet Venus had succumbed to a runaway version of the greenhouse ef-
fect, resulting in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide at crushing pressures and
a planetary temperature of 475°C.
Ecology as a science was neglected during the first half of the twentieth
century. The key development in its emergence occurred as the result of a
correspondence between a naturalist author and a friend who owned a bird
sanctuary. Rachel Carson was an aquatic biologist with the U.S. Bureau of
Fisheries who had abandoned her youthful interest in writing to major in
zoology in college. While with the bureau, she prepared a series of radio
broadcasts on underwater life, and eventually published her first book, Under
the Sea, in 1941. Her second book, The Sea Around Us, published ten years
later, was an instant classic and a huge financial success.
The financial freedom she achieved enabled her to observe and write
about nature. A friend of Carson who owned a private bird sanctuary wrote
to Carson to describe the appalling effects of DDT spraying on the birds
within the sanctuary. DDT was an insecticide that had proved tremendously
beneficial in wiping out mosquito populations and greatly reducing the oc-
currence of malaria, but its effect on wildlife had not been thoroughly in-
vestigated. Carson’s study of the problem resulted in the book Silent Spring,
unarguably the single most influential book ever written on environmental
problems. Published in 1962, by the end of the year legislators had intro-
duced over 40 bills concerning pesticide regulation, and the environmental
movement as we know it today was born.
40    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Carson died in 1967, not living long enough to see the banning of DDT
in the United States in 1972. Environmental studies are now part of the
curriculum of many colleges and universities. A heightened awareness of the
impact of man on the environment has caused a major change in the actions
of business and industry, which must now file environmental impact reports
before major construction projects are authorized.
A measure of the increased consciousness concerning environmental
problems can be seen by looking at the history of chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs), chemicals commonly used in refrigeration. In 1974, Mario Molina
and F. Sherwood Rowland warned that CFCs may be contributing to the
destruction of the ozone layer that protects the Earth from ultraviolet radia-
tion. This report was at first taken lightly. In the 1980s, satellites detected
the growth of a hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic. As a result, the
Montreal Protocol resulted in the decision to totally phase out CFCs by
2000. In 1995, Molina and Rowland received the Nobel Prize in chemistry
for their work.

THE DISCOVERY OF CHAOTIC PHENOMENA

We’ve discussed how important measurement is to the sciences. In fact, it

has long been realized that numbers so completely describe a large class of
phenomena that if there were a way to predict the numbers, one would in
essence be predicting the phenomena. As a result, the development of afford-
able electronic computers during the late 1950s was welcomed by a host of
scientists eager to use the devices to construct numerical models with which
they could simulate processes in the real world.
In late 1961, Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts In-
stitute of Technology, had programmed one such computer to simulate the
weather. The movement of the atmosphere was an example of fluid flow, the
equations for which were well known but impossible to solve directly. With a
computer, it was possible to generate numerical approximations to the exact
solutions of these equations. Lorenz developed a computer model that would
print numbers characterizing a single day’s weather every minute. He became
accustomed to some of the numerical patterns that the computer would
generate, much as one becomes accustomed to the patterns of the weather,
which are familiar but never exactly predictable.
In order to start the model, it was necessary to give it initial conditions,
an assumed state of the weather from which the model could begin calcu-
lating. One day Lorenz wanted to examine a particular sequence of days
 T he E arth    41

more closely, and so he took a shortcut. Rather than start all over again, he
took the output from the computer for a day midway in the sequence, and
used that output as the initial conditions. For a while, the computer results
duplicated the previous run, just as one would expect. Then, very slowly,
discrepancies began to appear. After some time, the results of the second run
bore no relation to the results of the first run.
It took Lorenz some time to realize what had happened. The computer
had computed and stored data to six-digit accuracy, such as .318297, but
typed them out only to three-digit accuracy, in this case .318. When Lo-
renz re-entered the numbers, he had entered only three digits. As a result,
the computer was presented with an initial condition of .318, rather than
.318297. This minuscule difference in initial conditions would have major
effects later in the computer run.
The fact that minuscule initial differences can have subsequent profound
consequences is now known as the “butterfly effect.” The name comes from
the notion that whether or not a butterfly flaps its wings in Hawaii can de-
termine whether or not there is a tornado in Kansas three weeks later.
The butterfly effect was to be the first example of a host of processes that
are now known as chaotic phenomena. Prior to their discovery, a process
would be described as either deterministic or random. A simple example of
deterministic phenomena would be the orbits of the planets, which are so
reliable that it is possible to predict eclipses centuries in advance. A flip of a
coin, or the decay of a radioactive atom, is an example of a random process.
Chaos is the study of those phenomena that appear on the surface to be pre-
dictable, but whose predictability turns out to be intrinsically limited.
Sometimes a discovery in science triggers a re-examination of many
other areas. Just as Newton’s mechanics spurred the search for mathematical
laws in areas encompassing all branches of human knowledge, Lorenz’s work
has led to the discovery of chaos in areas as diverse as the fibrillation of the
heart during a heart attack, and the behavior of stock markets during finan-
cial crashes. The realization that some phenomena are chaotic has expanded
the way we describe the Universe.
It has also exacerbated the fear that at some stage, we may inadvertently
load on the straw that breaks the camel’s back of the climate system. We do
not know whether what we are doing will precipitate an ice age, or a runaway
greenhouse effect like the one on Venus. But we had better pay attention to
the warnings the simulations give us, as one day we may awake to the fact that
those simulations have indeed been the distant early warning (DEW) line for
an ominous reality.
CHAPTER 3

Chemistry

Complicated stuff is often made up of simple stuff. A lot of science is orga-

nized around three important questions: what are the basic building blocks,
how are they arranged to form more complicated structures, and what can
we humans do to form these more complicated structures.
When I was growing up, one of the major chemical companies spon-
sored a TV show I enjoyed watching. The motto of the company was “Bet-
ter Living Through Chemistry.” And arguably, of all the sciences, chemistry
may be able to claim the prize for most contributions to making life better.
Yes, the life sciences are tremendously helpful when we’re sick—but
thankfully, most of the time we aren’t sick. And it’s hard to imagine
life without some form of energy harnessed through our knowledge of
physics—life wouldn’t be the same without universal electrification—but
you can run a reasonably complicated and moderately advanced society
without it.
But we’ve been taking advantage of chemistry ever since we first used
fire (arguably the first chemical reaction to be successfully harnessed), and
since we first used a chemical reaction (even more arguably fermentation, for
the purpose of creating alcoholic beverages). And every day you use a host
of chemical products that have made your life demonstrably better. “Better
Living Through Chemistry” could easily serve as a one-sentence description
of the success of Western civilization. It is hard to pass an hour in any day
that is totally unaffected by the consequences of our knowledge of chemistry.
As supporting evidence for the fundamental role played by chemistry,
there’s a branch of chemistry in practically every other science—from as-
tronomy to zoology, and I don’t believe there’s a whole lot of astronomy
in zoology, or vice-versa. But chemistry permeates every branch of science
43
44    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

because chemistry is the quintessential subject that investigates stuff—how it

is made, how to make it, and how to make new stuff. And that includes stuff
that, as far as we know, exists only here on Earth, because it was nowhere to
be found on Earth until we made it, and we have as yet received no reports
of stuff-making aliens. At least, no reliable reports.

Organizing Principles
Isaac Newton, my candidate for the most influential scientist in history, is
best known for his contributions to math and physics. However, he dedi-
cated a number of years in an attempt to do for alchemy what he had done
for physics, and didn’t accomplish anything of note.
In devising his theories of mechanics and gravitation, Newton had a lot
to work with. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler had provided valuable data
on the orbits of the planets, and Galileo had come up with his law of falling
bodies. But there existed no data on subjects related to chemistry that would
have helped him, as the rules that formed the basic organizing principles of
chemistry were not to be discovered until nearly a century after Newton had
done his seminal work in physics.

THE LAW OF CONSERVATION OF MASS

One of the most difficult things to accomplish in science is to overturn a

widely supported theory. The picture that science is a smoothly progressing
march to the truth is almost completely wrong. Many of the great advances
in science have had to overcome well-established, but erroneous, opposing
views.
A case in point is the phlogiston theory of combustion, which was the
dominant viewpoint on this subject for more than a century. Centuries be-
fore Christ, the Greeks had propounded the theory that everything in the
Universe was constructed of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. The
pursuit of knowledge, reborn after the Dark Ages, needed a foundation on
which to build. That foundation was often the theories of the ancient Greeks.
One of the great mysteries of the seventeenth century was the nature of
fire. The German chemist, Georg Stahl, building on both Greek theories and
the experimental knowledge that was gradually beginning to be developed,
expounded what was known as the phlogiston theory. This theory held that
all combustible materials contained a substance called phlogiston. Upon
 C hemistry    45

burning, the substance released its phlogiston into the air. Substances that
burned especially well were rich in phlogiston; substances that did not burn
contained no phlogiston.
On the surface, this was certainly a plausible theory. It explained the fact
that some substances burned better than others, and it also explained why,
after burning, a substance was no longer capable of combustion. However,
all attempts to isolate phlogiston met with defeat.
Not only that, there were experiments whose results were at odds with
the phlogiston theory. When mercury or tin was burned, the weight of the
resultant material after burning was greater than the weight of the material
before burning. Phlogiston theory predicted that the substances, having lost
their phlogiston, would be lighter after burning.
Faced with the results of these experiments, the proponents of phlogis-
ton theory did what many scientists since have done—attempted to modify
the theory to fit the observed data. Phlogiston was hypothesized to be a
substance without weight, or possibly even lighter, and so under the right
circumstances, a substance could gain weight by losing phlogiston.
By the latter portion of the eighteenth century, air had been shown to be
a mixture of various gases, one of which (oxygen) had been shown not only
to enhance combustion, but to be necessary for respiration. Enter Antoine
Lavoisier, a French lawyer and tax collector turned chemist. He performed
an experiment that was both simple and elegant. First he heated mercury
in the presence of oxygen, carefully weighing the amount of oxygen and
mercury before, and the amount of material (mercuric oxide) and oxygen
after. Then he heated the mercuric oxide to the point where the oxygen
was released, again carefully measuring the amount of material with which
he started and with which he finished. From the results of this experiment,
he was able to conclude not only that combustion consisted of combining
with oxygen, but that in a chemical reaction—even though the substances
involve may change—the total quantity of reactants doesn’t change. With
one experiment, Lavoisier had not only demolished the phlogiston theory,
but established one of the most fundamental laws of chemistry, that of con-
servation of mass.
The idea of conservation, although not in the quantitative form in which
Lavoisier stated it, was broached more than two millennia before by the
Greek philosopher Epicurus, who believed that “the totality of things was
always such as it is now, and always will be.” The Arab scientist Nasir-al-Din-
al-Tusi nailed it more precisely when he wrote, “A body of matter cannot
disappear completely. It only changes its form, condition, composition, color
46    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

and other properties and turns into a different complex or elementary mat-
ter.” But it was Lavoisier who actually established it quantitatively.
Lavoisier had the good fortune to be married to a woman who was of
substantial help to his work, but had the bad fortune to be living in France
during the time of the French Revolution. His work as a tax collector made
him a natural target of the political frenzy that was sweeping the nation, and
he was condemned to death by guillotine. When it was argued that Lavoisier
was a great scientist, the reply from the presiding judge was, “The Republic
has no need of scientists.” Sadly, the last few years have seen substantial evi-
dence that we are living in an era—and a republic—in which many have a
similar view as the presiding judge.
Commenting later on his death, the brilliant mathematician and physi-
cist Joseph-Louis Lagrange declared, “It took but a moment to sever that
head, though a hundred years perhaps will be unable to replace it.”

THE ATOMIC THEORY

In 1961, the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman began the basic physics
course at Caltech with the following words: “If, in some cataclysm, all of
scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on
to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most
information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis . . . that
all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual
motion.”
The idea that all things are made of atoms, the smallest particles in the
Universe to retain their identity, goes back to the Greek philosophers. But
it is one thing to speculate on the ultimate constituents of matter, and quite
another thing to develop a workable theory that not only explained, but pre-
dicted. At the outset of the nineteenth century, it was known that substances
such as hydrogen and oxygen were elements, and that elements were capable
of combining into compounds. Water, for instance, was a substance made by
combining hydrogen and oxygen, and the same quantities of hydrogen and
oxygen always produced the identical quantity of water. What mechanism
could account for this?
John Dalton, a Quaker schoolteacher living in Manchester, England,
spent the summer of 1803 pursuing an extension of the Greek theory of
atoms. Unlike the Greeks, whose atoms were philosophical constructs, Dal-
ton’s atoms possessed a tangible physical property: weight. As Dalton wrote:
“An enquiry into the relative weights of the ultimate particles is, as far as I
 C hemistry    47

know, entirely new. I have lately been prosecuting this enquiry with remark-
able success.” Dalton realized that, if one were to hypothesize that each ele-
ment consisted of identical atoms, all having exactly the same weight, this
would account for the manner in which the elements combined to produce
compounds.
Science has always been a highly conservative and hardheaded endeavor,
and new ideas tend to be treated with reserve bordering on skepticism.
However, so brilliant was Dalton’s atomic theory, and so strong its predic-
tive power, that it was accepted virtually instantaneously. During the course
of the next hundred and fifty years, the physical properties of atoms were
determined with ever-increasing accuracy, even though it wasn’t until the
1980s that atoms were first actually seen. Without Dalton’s atomic theory,
chemistry would be reduced to the hit-and-miss hodgepodge of mixing and
heating that characterized its predecessor, alchemy, and we would all be sig-
nificantly the poorer for it.
Dalton was a man of exceptionally regular habits. Every Thursday
he would take a walk through the English countryside to play bowls (no
bowling alleys existed in the nineteenth century), and every day for almost
sixty years he would meticulously record the temperature, rainfall, and air
pressure. During a lifetime he recorded more than 200,000 meteorological
measurements, a database probably unparalleled for the era, and one that was
never put to any noteworthy use. Or was it? Perhaps a lifetime of accumulat-
ing and reflecting upon meteorological data helped create the mindset that
enabled Dalton to devise the atomic theory.

AVOGADRO’S HYPOTHESIS

The list of great scientists includes many individuals who did not start out
to be scientists, but who embarked initially upon another career, such as law
(one suspects that the list of great lawyers who started out as scientists is an
extremely short one). A case in point is Amadeo Avogadro, who received a
doctorate in law, practiced for three years, and then became a scientist.
This transformation took place roughly around the turn of the nine-
teenth century, when much of the scientific world was turning its attention
to Dalton’s atomic theory. Chemistry had burgeoned during the latter por-
tion of the eighteenth century, and there was a concerted effort to explain
every experimental result in terms of the atomic theory.
One such result was Gay-Lussac’s law of combining volumes. A care-
ful experimenter, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac had discovered that if two gases
48    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

were combined at equal temperature and pressure, they combined in simple

whole-number ratios. When hydrogen and oxygen combine to produce
water, 2 volumes of hydrogen will combine with 1 volume of oxygen, pro-
ducing 2 volumes of water vapor.
From this information, Avogadro reached a startling but logical conclu-
sion: at the same temperature and pressure, equal volumes of gases must
contain equal numbers of particles. This result is known as Avogadro’s
hypothesis.
His reasoning was simple and straightforward. On combining 2 volumes
of hydrogen with 1 volume of oxygen, there is no hydrogen or oxygen left
uncombined. Under the assumption of Avogadro’s hypothesis, 2 hydrogen
particles would have combined with 1 oxygen particle to produce 2 water
vapor particles, and no hydrogen or oxygen would be left uncombined.
Avogadro’s hypothesis produced an immediate useful dividend. By that
time, it was known that the chemical formula for water was H2O. Using
Dalton’s atomic hypothesis, 2 molecules (a word coined by Avogadro) of
water required 4 atoms of hydrogen (supplied by the 2 hydrogen particles)
and 2 atoms of oxygen (supplied by the 1 oxygen particle). Therefore, each
particle (molecule) of hydrogen must consist of 2 atoms of hydrogen, and
each particle of oxygen must consist of 2 atoms of oxygen.
It later proved possible to extend Avogadro’s hypothesis to all substances.
Equal atomic weights of substances have the same number of particles. The
atomic weight of carbon is 12, and the atomic weight of a molecule of am-
monia (NH3) is 17, so 12 grams of carbon contain the same number of par-
ticles as 17 grams of ammonia. An atomic weight of any substance contains
“Avogadro’s number” of molecules of that substance, a number that chemists
simply call N. Later experiments would show that N is approximately 6 fol-
lowed by 23 zeros.
Avogadro’s hypothesis was unrecognized in its time, and it wasn’t until
the first International Chemical Congress in 1860 that it was fully appre-
ciated. The Italian chemist Stanislao Cannizzaro showed that Avogadro’s
hypothesis could be used to compute the molecular weights of gases, and
also represented a way to clear up the confusion that existed concerning the
difference between atoms and molecules. Unfortunately, Avogadro did not
live to see his ideas vindicated, having died two years earlier.
Avogadro’s hypothesis actually occurred to John Dalton, who rejected it
on intelligent but erroneous grounds. Dalton felt that the molecules of a gas
were in close contact with one another, and if the gas molecules had different
weights, it would be impossible for equal volumes to have the same number
of particles. This reasoning applies perfectly to solids and liquids, but in gases
 C hemistry    49

the molecules are separated by substantial distances (substantial, that is, rela-
tive to the size of the molecules themselves). So convinced by this reasoning
was Dalton that he suggested Gay-Lussac’s experiments must be in error, and
that Gay-Lussac should redo them.

THE PERIODIC TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS

Should you decide to cut up some beef, potatoes, carrots, and onions for
dinner, and cook them together, you know precisely what you will get—beef
stew. Moreover, you probably have a pretty fair idea of how it will taste. The
situation was nowhere as simple for chemists in the middle of the nineteenth
century.
By that time, the world’s chemists had discovered sixty-three elements,
the basic ingredients in the cosmic cookbook. The rules of the cosmic cook-
book, however, remained maddeningly elusive. For example, when sodium, a
lightweight fizzy metal, was “cooked” (chemically combined) with chlorine,
a poisonous yellow-green gas, the result was common table salt, sodium chlo-
ride, a compound that was neither metallic nor gassy, poisonous nor fizzy.
Until the rules of the cosmic cookbook could be discovered, the potential of
chemistry would be limited to hit-or-miss activity.
One of the fundamental discoveries of science is that many phenomena
in the natural world can be organized into a pattern. Dmitri Mendeleev, a
Russian chemist, decided to try to organize the known elements into a pat-
tern. To do so, he first arranged these elements in increasing order of atomic
weight, the same physical property that had attracted the attention of John
Dalton when he devised the atomic theory. He then imposed another level
of order by grouping the elements according to secondary properties such as
metallicity and chemical reactivity—the ease with which elements combined
with other elements.
The result of Mendeleev’s deliberations was the periodic table of the ele-
ments, a tabular arrangement of the elements in both rows and columns. In
essence, each column was characterized by a specific chemical property such
as alkali metal or chemically nonreactive gas. The atomic weights increased
from left to right in each row, and from top to bottom in each column.
When Mendeleev began his work, not all the elements were known.
As a result, there were occasional gaps in the periodic table—places where
Mendeleev would have expected an element with a particular atomic weight
and chemical properties to be, but no such element was known to exist. With
supreme confidence, Mendeleev predicted the future discovery of three such
50    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

elements, giving their approximate atomic weights and chemical properties

even before their existence could be substantiated. His most famous predic-
tion involved an element that Mendeleev called eka-silicon. Located between
silicon and tin in one of his columns, Mendeleev predicted that it would be
a metal with properties resembling those of silicon and tin. Further, he made
several quantifiable predictions: its weight would be 5.5 times heavier than
water, its oxide would be 4.7 times heavier than water, and so on. When
eka-silicon (later called germanium) was discovered some twenty years later,
Mendeleev’s predictions were right on the money.
The periodic table has tremendous practical importance. If a substance
is useful but has undesirable properties, it may be possible to modify it by
substituting an element with similar properties. For those who must regulate
their sodium intake, an acceptable alternative is “light” table salt—potassium
chloride, made by substituting potassium, which lies directly under sodium
in the periodic table, for the sodium in salt.
Scientists often develop their theories in surprising fashion. It was nec-
essary for Mendeleev to engage in countless restructurings of his periodic
table, as he had no idea at the start how many rows and columns would be
required. To write down the results of each trial would tax anyone’s patience.
So Mendeleev constructed a deck of cards in which each card contained the
name and properties of a specific element. Playing solitaire with this deck of
cards made it easier and more entertaining to try the different possibilities for
the periodic table. Incidentally, the nineteenth-century name for a version
of solitaire was Patience, something that Mendeleev undoubtedly possessed
in quantity.

Analysis and Synthesis

Analysis is the process of breaking apart; synthesis is the process of putting
together. A typical chemical reaction features both. A simple example takes
place when sodium hydroxide is combined with hydrochloric acid. Each
compound breaks apart into parts, and these parts recombine into common
table salt and water.
What distinguishes a chemical reaction is that different compounds
emerge from the ones that were initially there. You can mix salt with water,
and the water will become salty, but you’ve still got salt and water. The study
of how compounds break apart, and how they are put together to create
different substances, continues a process that began centuries ago and still
enriches our quality of life. Not that it isn’t without risk—many compounds
 C hemistry    51

have been created that have had a deleterious effect. But overall, we have
produced, are producing, and will continue to produce better living through
chemistry.

Electrochemistry
Humphry Davy may have been the Horatio Alger of science, a story of rags
to riches. He was born burdened with debt, and as he did not enjoy school
he dropped out at the age of seventeen to become a pharmacist’s apprentice.
As so often happens, the value of an education became apparent only after
one leaves school, and so Davy began an extensive course of self-education.
His interests were initially diverse, as are the interests of many seventeen-
year-olds, but they became focused after he read a book on chemistry by the
great French scientist Antoine Lavoisier. At that time there wasn’t much of a
theoretical basis for chemistry, which probably bothered Davy not at all, as
he was the quintessential experimenter.
His favorite guinea pig was himself. After he became the superintendent
of an institution for the study of therapeutic uses of various gases, Davy
would think nothing of inhaling the products of his experiment to test their
effect. Fortunately, he never inhaled any cyanide, but he nearly suffocated
twice, once when he tried to breathe hydrogen, and once when he tried to
breathe carbon dioxide. However, one of these experiments paid very large
dividends. Davy discovered that the gas nitrous oxide made him feel giddy
and intoxicated, and also reduced the sensation of physical pain. His obser-
vations on this subject were initially ignored, but decades later nitrous oxide
became the first chemical anesthetic. It is still used today.
Davy was probably the first scientist to popularize science. When he was
hired to lecture for the Royal Institute, his lectures and demonstrations were
so interesting and well-presented that he soon became a darling of London’s
high society. As an experimenter, Davy was brilliant rather than meticulous.
He would get interested in a topic, and then experiment until boredom set
in, after which he would switch to another topic.
After learning of Volta’s development of the electric battery, Davy built
powerful batteries, and in 1805 developed arc lighting, in which a strong
current forces an electric arc to bridge the gap between electrodes. Like his
discovery of the anesthetic powers of nitrous oxide, arc lighting had to wait
decades before a practical use was discovered.
However, Davy’s most noteworthy contributions were in the field of
electrochemistry. It had been discovered that an electric current could be
52    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

used to break up water into hydrogen and oxygen. At the time, substances
such as potash, lime, and magnesia were suspected of being metallic com-
pounds, but no one was able to demonstrate this. Davy used his powerful
batteries to pass an electric current through molten potash. This liberated
globules of the as-yet-undiscovered element potassium. On seeing the ap-
pearance of the shiny metallic drops, Davy danced around his laboratory in
glee. Within a week, he had isolated metallic sodium from soda (it is easy to
see where Davy found the names for his discoveries). Soon he had discovered
the elements magnesium, barium, strontium, and calcium as well.
Davy’s experiments showed the importance of electrochemistry to the
scientific world. However, perhaps Davy’s greatest contribution to science
was his hiring of Michael Faraday as his assistant. Where Davy was im-
petuous, Faraday was meticulous. Davy discovered elements, but Faraday
discovered laws. Among these were Faraday’s laws of electrolysis, which
demonstrated that there is a quantitative relationship between electricity and
chemistry. These laws would later prove to be very important in demonstrat-
ing that electricity was a stream of particles, a discovery that initiated atomic
physics.
Even as Davy was receiving the plaudits of the scientific world, he could
sense that his assistant Faraday would eventually supersede him. Davy be-
came jealous of the acclaim that Faraday was receiving, and when Faraday
was nominated for membership in the Royal Society, there was only one
negative vote—Davy’s. It is conceivable that this action was the result of the
systemic poisoning Davy had suffered in his early days as an experimenter,
when he would inhale or taste any compound. His health began to deterio-
rate substantially when he was only in his thirties. He suffered a stroke at the
relatively young age of forty-nine, and died two years later.

THE DYE MAUVE AND THE BIRTH

OF SYNTHETIC ORGANIC CHEMISTRY

We live in a world of synthetics. Many of the products we use every day

are made of substances that man has created through techniques that began
approximately 150 years ago, when the Royal College of Science in London
decided it needed a good course in chemistry. At the time, the best chemists
were Germans, but fortunately for the Royal College, they had a German
connection. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, was German, and he
suggested a young German named August von Hofmann, who happily ac-
cepted the job.
 C hemistry    53

Hofmann had numerous research interests, including the study of coal

tar, an unattractive gummy black residue given off by coal when it is burnt.
Coal tar had been shown to be a source of several useful organic compounds,
including benzene and aniline, which Hofmann had managed to obtain from
coal tar.
One of Hofmann’s best students was a bright, industrious seventeen-
year-old named William Perkin. Hofmann offered Perkin a job as an assis-
tant, which Perkin eagerly accepted. Perkin was so enthusiastic that he built
his own laboratory at home, in order to pursue his research when not at the
Royal College.
At the time, Britain was building an empire in the Far East, and many
of its best and brightest were succumbing to malaria, which was an ever-
present threat. It was known that quinine, found in the bark of the cinchona
tree, would cure malaria, but the demand for quinine greatly exceeded the
supply. Chemists had deciphered the molecular composition of quinine, and
Hofmann suggested that Perkin try to synthesize it from coal tar.
This was not a complete shot in the dark. One of the coal tar compounds
had roughly half of the atoms of each element needed for quinine, so join-
ing two of the molecules together and adding some missing atoms might
produce quinine. With the aid of hindsight, this approach had no chance
because even though the composition of quinine was known, the molecular
structure of quinine would have precluded such an approach.
One day, after a fruitless attempt to synthesize quinine, Perkin ended
with a blackish goo. He decided to add some alcohol, and the concoction
turned a beautiful shade of purple. Perkin was instantly aware that this acci-
dent might have serendipitously produced a useful and valuable compound.
At the time, all existing dyes were natural, and some were extremely ex-
pensive. Purple had always been a rare and much-admired color. In ancient
Rome, the only shade of purple came from shellfish and only the nobility
could afford it (from which comes the expression, “born to the purple”).
Opportunity may have knocked only once, but Perkin recognized the
sound. He obtained a patent, went into business, and within six months
was producing a dye he called “aniline purple,” which was superior to any
other dye in its color range. In a marketing triumph, the name of the color
was changed to “mauve,” and Perkin soon found himself both rich and the
world’s leading authority on synthetic dyes.
The dam had been broken. Within years, virtually all natural dyes had
been synthesized, and cheap and easily obtainable colored fabric began to
brighten the world. The techniques of synthesis obviously could be used on
other organic compounds. By the twentieth century, the game was not only
54    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

to synthesize natural organic compounds, but create new ones never seen in
nature. The plastics industry that has so revolutionized our lives is unques-
tionably the result of Perkin’s accidental discovery.
Perkin clearly possessed the Midas touch when it came to chemistry.
After ten years or so in the dye business, he was wealthy enough to retire and
pursue his first love, research. One of his first achievements was the synthesis
of coumarin, which is responsible for the pleasant smell of new-mown hay.
This represented the beginning of the synthetic perfume industry that, like
synthetic dyes, has annual revenues in the billions of dollars.

CHEMICAL BONDS

By the middle of the nineteenth century, chemists had confirmed the cor-
rectness of Dalton’s theory that every compound was constructed using a
fixed ratio of elements. Water was written H2O (as it still is), but the mecha-
nism by which two atoms of hydrogen combined with one atom of oxygen
to produce water was a mystery.
The first person to make a noticeable dent in this problem was the Ger-
man chemist Friedrich Kekulé. At the time, chemists had formulated a rough
idea of the valence, or combining power, of each element. Kekulé came up
with the idea that each molecule had a structural pattern, which could be
represented by lines joining atoms. For example, ethyl alcohol, which had the
chemical formula C2H6O, could be shown as

In addition to providing the first hint of pattern behind the structure of

a molecule, Kekulé’s notation enabled chemists to realize how two different
isomers, which were different chemical compounds with the same ratio of
elements, could exist. Isomers would simply be different structural patterns
using the same ratio of elements.
 C hemistry    55

One of Kekulé’s greatest triumphs came in unraveling the structure of

benzene, which was known to have the chemical composition C6H6. Try as
he might, Kekulé was unable to fit benzene into his scheme until one day,
half-awake and half-asleep, he dreamed of a snake rolling down a hill with its
tail in its mouth. Thus was born the benzene ring, in which the six carbon
atoms are linked in a hexagon by alternating single and double bonds, with a
hydrogen atom sticking onto each carbon atom like a spoke protruding from
the hexagonal hub.
Further significant developments had to await the unraveling of atomic
structure that was to take place at the end of the nineteenth and the begin-
ning of the twentieth century. Scientists realized that the electrons surround-
ing the nucleus were grouped in shells, with all the electrons in a shell being
the same distance away from the nucleus. An American chemist, Gilbert
Lewis, proposed that the chemical activity of elements depended upon how
close their outer shells were to being filled with electrons. Inert gases such as
helium were chemically inactive because their outer shells were filled, while
elements that had only one electron (or were missing one electron) in their
outer shell were highly active. This led to the concept of the ionic bond,
in which an element with an excess of electrons in its outer shell donates
those electrons to an element with a deficiency of electrons in its outer shell.
Another important type of chemical bond, the covalent bond, involves the
mutual sharing of electrons between elements.
In the 1930s, Linus Pauling applied the new quantum mechanics to de-
veloping the theory of the chemical bond. Pauling showed that two elements
could reduce their energy by forming a chemical bond, but that this would
only take place if the atoms were close to each other. To reduce a chemical
compound to its constituent elements, Pauling’s mathematics showed that it
was necessary to add energy, a fact known to the ancients who smelted iron
from iron ore. Pauling’s theory explained additional properties of chemical
bonds and chemical reactions beyond the reach of previous theories. For this
work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1954.
To gain a true appreciation of the respect in which Pauling was held by
other scientists, read The Double Helix by James Watson, which describes the
struggle to unravel the structure of DNA. Pauling had just deciphered some
of the basic structure of proteins, and one of the highlights of the book is
Watson’s description of the relief he experienced when he realized Pauling’s
hypothetical structure for DNA contradicted recently taken X-ray diffraction
photos of which Pauling was unaware. The impression one gets is that of a
gunslinger in Dodge City who realizes that the fastest gun in the West is out
of ammunition.
56    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

I was fortunate to hear a PBS broadcast of a Pauling question-and-

answer session with some students. The first thing I noticed was that Pauling
paused for about five seconds, and then answered every question in complete
sentences. One question that he was asked by a student was what he thought
of astrology. Pauling replied that the basics of astrology were devised by
Ptolemy, who was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant men of his time,
but was hampered by the lack of any sort of accurate data. Pauling said that
he felt that Ptolemy, were he alive today, would be quick to reject astrology
as completely unscientific.
However, my favorite Pauling answer did not take place at this session.
He was once asked how he got so many good ideas, and replied that he just
got a lot of ideas, and threw out the bad ones.

CATALYSIS AND PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY

One of the unwritten rules that many scientific graduate students learn is
that it doesn’t pay to be too brilliant when you are writing a thesis. There
is a very good reason for this—in order to get to be a player in the science
game, you first have to be accepted by the scientific community. Getting a
doctorate requires doing something that the science community regards as
good science, and many brilliant ideas require a lot of time before they are
considered good science.
Svante Arrhenius had been a child prodigy. When the time came for him
to write his thesis, he chose as his subject electrolytes, substances that were
capable of conducting electricity when dissolved. Arrhenius proposed that
when a molecule of an electrolyte actually dissolved, it separated into charged
particles called ions, which enabled the current to flow. At the time, chemists
adhered to Dalton’s picture of the atom as indivisible, and so Arrhenius’s
theory was rejected by the majority of the scientific community. His thesis,
however, was given the lowest possible passing grade, possibly on the ground
that even though it was obviously erroneous, it was undoubtedly brilliant.
When a phenomenon is not completely understood, scientists may have
a majority opinion, but there is usually a skeptical minority. Arrhenius sent
copies of his thesis to several of the leading chemists, one of whom was Fried-
rich Ostwald. Ostwald was convinced of the validity of Arrhenius’s ideas and
helped to spread them, even as Arrhenius was continuing to gather evidence
to support his views.
Gradually, the chemists became increasingly convinced of Arrhenius’s
ideas, but the key development in establishing them occurred when J. J.
 C hemistry    57

Thomson identified the electron, a subatomic particle, and when Henri Bec-
querel showed that radioactivity involved the breakdown of atoms.
Many of the ideas of both Arrhenius and Ostwald lay at the junction
of both physics and chemistry; indeed, the two scientists practically created
the subject of physical chemistry. An excellent example of the importance of
physical chemistry can be seen in the process of catalysis. Arrhenius realized
that chemical reactions usually proceed more rapidly when the reacting sub-
stances are heated. We see this every day in the kitchen; it takes a shorter time
to cook a roast at a high temperature than at a low one. Arrhenius suggested
that molecules needed to be supplied a certain amount of energy, the “energy
of activation,” in order to participate in a chemical reaction.
Ostwald, meanwhile, was busily applying Arrhenius’s ideas on ioniza-
tion to a different aspect of catalysis. Some chemical reactions, such as the
production of sugar from starch, are catalyzed by the presence of an acid.
Ostwald realized that this type of catalysis involved lowering the energy of
activation of the reacting substances.
Ostwald’s observations on catalysis immediately found application in
industry. Ostwald himself helped devise a procedure using platinum as a
catalyst in making nitric acid more efficiently. Because nitric acid is im-
portant in the manufacture of high explosives, Ostwald’s process enabled
Germany to produce explosives during World War I without importing raw
materials. The contribution of Ostwald to lengthening World War I must be
counterbalanced by the fact that Ostwald’s theories of catalysis were later to
help explain the activity of enzymes, and so Ostwald indirectly contributed
to the development of biochemistry and genetic engineering.
It is rather paradoxical that many of the contributions of Arrhenius and
Ostwald could be explained by the atomic theory of Dalton, yet Ostwald
himself did not believe in that theory until he was more than fifty years old!
Perhaps this explains the fact that Ostwald was such a strong early supporter
of Arrhenius’s ideas on ionization, which required the breakdown of atoms if
one believed in the atomic theory. Since Ostwald didn’t believe in the atomic
theory, this might have made it easier for him to agree with Arrhenius.

The Foundations of Biochemistry

It is chemistry that makes life possible.
We do not yet know how this was first achieved, but we do know that
practically all the processes that characterize life are chemical reactions.
Life must exhibit homeostasis—the ability to maintain a relatively stable
58    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

internal environment. It must be able to convert food to energy. It must be

able to reproduce, and do so relatively faithfully, with only minor changes
(if any) from generation to generation. Each of these processes is a remark-
able complex of chemical reactions. Deciphering these reactions and their
implications constitute biochemistry, which is arguably the most important
branch of science in promoting the continued well-being of humanity, both
as individuals and as a species.

THE SYNTHESIS OF UREA

The theory of evolution has been under constant siege from the moment it
was first propounded, and attempts have been made in many states either to
have it removed entirely from the curriculum, or to denigrate its status. One
strategy has been to require that creationism, an alternate view of the Uni-
verse in which everything was created by a supreme being, must be taught as
well as evolution, placing the two theories on an equal footing.
In order to consider a suit by creationists to require the teaching of
creationism, a judge undertook the reasonable task of trying to discover
exactly what constitutes a scientific theory. He finally settled on a definition
of scientific theory from the philosopher Karl Popper: a scientific theory is
one that can be falsified. Experiments can be performed, or evidence can be
found, which demonstrate that the theory is false. Under that definition,
creationism is not a scientific theory because it is impossible to perform an
experiment or find evidence that will invalidate the fundamental hypothesis
of creationism.
Georg Stahl, a German who was a contemporary of Isaac Newton, was
a pioneer in the fields of chemistry and biology. He observed, he experi-
mented, he theorized, and he came up with two theories that were to have a
profound effect on the development of chemistry. As we have seen, his phlo-
giston theory on the nature of combustion was shown to be false by Antoine
Lavoisier in the latter portion of the eighteenth century. His other theory,
vitalism, held on substantially longer.
Vitalism can be summarized by saying that there are two sets of laws: one
governing inanimate objects and one governing living things. At the time
it was propounded, vitalism represented an attempt to retain some of the
mystic wonder with which religions viewed the phenomenon of life, while
at the same time incorporating aspects of the newly emerging sciences. With
the possible exception of perspiration, which consists primarily of the simple
chemicals water and salt, nearly every chemical associated with life could not
 C hemistry    59

be analyzed by the techniques and instruments available in the eighteenth

century. Just because you can’t do something doesn’t mean it can’t be done,
but it is very easy to accept that something can’t be done because it hasn’t yet
been done. And until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the chemicals
produced by living organisms resisted all attempt by scientists to analyze
them.
As a result, vitalism remained a tenable theory as late as the early nine-
teenth century. The greatest chemist of the time, the Swede Jöns Jakob
Berzelius, had in fact classified chemicals into two groups: inorganic and
organic, organic chemicals being the products of life processes.
While debate raged in the chemical world as to whether inorganic
and organic compounds were subject to different laws, the German chem-
ist Friedrich Wohler was engaged in experiments with inorganic cyanide
compounds. In 1828, he heated some ammonium cyanate. The residue of
this experiment were crystals that seemed suspiciously familiar to Wohler.
Subsequent testing revealed that the crystals were urea, which is the primary
chemical compound present in urine. An organic compound had been cre-
ated in the laboratory from inorganic precursors.
Chemistry today is still divided into organic chemistry and inorganic
chemistry, although the distinction is now based on the chemistry of the
element carbon rather than on the origins of the chemical. Despite the fact
that the vitalistic theory had been overturned, it was still a key step on the
road to scientific knowledge, which often emerges from initial ventures in
precisely the wrong direction.
Without attempting to disparage the significance of Wohler’s experi-
ment, some historians have argued that the ammonium cyanate he used
was actually an organic compound, and so his experiment did not really
transform inorganic substances into organic ones. Even conceding this point,
Wohler’s result convinced chemists that the distinction between organic and
inorganic chemistry was an artificial one, and paved the way for the explosion
in synthetic organic chemistry that was to come. Incidentally, Stahl might
be pleased to note that vitalism lives on—although there is no chemical dif-
ference between synthetically produced vitamins and those obtained from
natural sources, many people are still willing to pay a premium for the latter.

THE ISOLATION OF ZYMASE

In vino, veritas—in wine, there is truth. The discovery of the truth of the
almost-miraculous procedure that turns grape juice into wine is a story that
60    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

reaches far back into history, and climaxes with the birth of biochemistry in
the nineteenth century.
Wine has been around for almost ten thousand years, and its manufac-
ture amazed the ancients. In fact, so astounding was the transformation of
grape juice to wine that, in the Middle Ages, it effected a transformation on
the chemical theory of the time, which held that the world was comprised of
four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. The process by which grape juice
became wine must have involved a quinta essencia, a fifth element, which
reflected and shaped the unique form of living matter. This fifth element
uniquely characterized the life that possessed it, and our word “quintessen-
tial” reflects this characterization.
Fermentation, the process by which grape juice becomes wine, con-
tinued to be studied by many of the great scientists of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The brilliant French chemist Lavoisier showed that
the addition of a small amount of yeast to a sugar solution resulted in the
production of alcohol, thus classifying fermentation as a chemical reaction.
Since this reaction did not occur without the yeast, it was clear that the yeast
played a vital role in the process.
But what kind of a role was yeast playing? The German chemist Justus
von Liebig, one of the founders of organic chemistry, held that the role of the
yeast was to emit vibrations that accelerated the chemical reactions. At ap-
proximately the same time, the German biologist Theodor Schwann and the
French inventor Charles Caignard de la Tour discovered that yeast was actu-
ally a living entity. This led to the biological theory of fermentation, in which
sugar was ingested by the yeast, and alcohol and carbon dioxide excreted.
Louis Pasteur, one of the undoubted titans of science, had helped rescue
a tottering French wine industry by his discovery that bacteria could spoil
wine. Pasteur’s investigations resulted in the realization that yeast was com-
posed of living cells, and that the transformation of sugar into alcohol and
carbon dioxide was an integral part of their life. However, Pasteur believed
that this transformation depended upon the living condition of the yeast.
This was a somewhat unusual conclusion to reach for the man who had ef-
fectively destroyed the vitalistic theory of spontaneous generation—that life
could simply arise from nonliving matter.
The ultimate resolution of the question came in 1897. Two brothers,
Hans and Eduard Buchner, through a series of carefully designed and con-
structed experiments, managed to isolate zymase, the enzyme responsible
for transforming sugar into alcohol. Crushing the yeast cells through filter
paper, they obtained an extract that, although clearly not alive, was able to
convert sugar to alcohol. This experiment led eventually to the realization
 C hemistry    61

that the processes of life were essentially chemical in nature, and that the
role of enzymes, of which zymase was one, was to accelerate the chemical
transformations that enabled living cells to transform raw materials into us-
able products.
Different sciences arise in different ways. Some are the result of a single
dazzling insight, such as Mendel’s formulation of the concept of the gene.
Others are the result of long years of observations and theorizing, false trails
and dead ends. Once the correct path is determined, however, the advances
often come with dazzling swiftness.
Although zymase was not the first enzyme to be discovered, it was the
first whose actions were observed in vitro (literally, “in glass”), without the
necessity of the participation of a living entity. A few years after the isolation
of zymase, Franz Hofmeister formulated the central dogma of biochemistry,
that all cellular processes would be shown to be controlled by enzymes.
Hans Buchner died in 1902, and was thus unable to share in the Nobel
Prize awarded to Eduard in 1907. Eduard continued a distinguished career
as a professor of chemistry until, in 1917, at the age of fifty-seven he volun-
teered for a second tour of duty in World War I. Captain Eduard Buchner
was wounded on the Eastern Front, and died two days later.

THE STRUCTURE OF INSULIN

It was apparent to the chemists of the late eighteenth century that the proper-
ties of a substance depended upon its molecular composition. What was not
immediately apparent was that the properties of a substance also depended
upon the molecular architecture.
If one thinks of a house, for example, it is obvious that a house built of
brick will have different properties from a house built of wood. However,
two houses may be built from precisely the same number of bricks and be
radically different—the architecture can create very dissimilar buildings. One
may be light and airy, the other somber and foreboding.
Hints that the same idea might permeate chemistry began to crop up
early in the nineteenth century. One of the first to get an insight into this
was Louis Pasteur.
Pasteur’s first accomplishment as a scientist was to show that crystals
of tartaric acid consisted of two distinct types. One type of crystal polar-
ized light so that it bent to the right, and the other polarized light so that it
bent to the left. News of this discovery reached Jean-Baptiste Biot, one of
France’s greatest scientists. Biot had spent considerable time investigating the
62    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

polarization of light, a phenomenon that concerns a type of organized behav-

ior displayed by light waves, and is used to create reduced-glare sunglasses, as
well as to detect lines of stress in materials. (Lasers involve a different type of
organized behavior of light waves.) Biot was skeptical, and asked Pasteur to
demonstrate this for him. Pasteur prepared the experiment, and when Biot
observed the desired effect, he grabbed Pasteur’s hand and said, “My dear
fellow, I have been so enamored of science all my life that this causes my
heart to beat faster.”
By the end of the nineteenth century, chemists were certain that pro-
teins, the most crucial of the organic molecules, were constructed by linking
together fundamental structural units known as amino acids. It was later dis-
covered that the genetic code in DNA gives instructions as to which amino
acids, and in which order, are to be used in the making of proteins. With
the advent in the 1940s of a technique called chromatography, it became
possible to work out the amino acid composition of a protein. However, one
cannot understand protein function by knowing its amino acid composition
any more than one can tell what type of house is being built simply by know-
ing how many of which type of brick are used. The architecture, in proteins
as in houses, is all-important.
Frederick Sanger, a British biochemist, was the first person to success-
fully unravel the structure of a protein. He worked with the protein insulin,
which was known to consist of fifty amino acids. The fifty amino acids were
assembled in two chains, one nineteen amino acids long, the other thirty-
one. Sanger had discovered a chemical that would attach itself to a specific
end of a chain of amino acids. Using this chemical (now known as Sanger’s
reagent) and the technique of chromatography, Sanger would break the big
chains into fragments, painstakingly work out the location and structure
of each fragment, and then fit the fragments together, much as one puts
together a jigsaw puzzle by assembling individual pieces into small portions,
and then fitting the portions together. It was arduous work, extending over
eight years. However, by 1953 he had worked out the structure of the insulin
molecule, an epochal achievement for which he was awarded the 1958 Nobel
Prize in chemistry.
The importance of structure, as opposed to mere composition, cannot
be underestimated. For example, the reason that carbon monoxide poisoning
occurs is that the carbon monoxide molecule fits into an indentation of the
hemoglobin molecule even more snugly than oxygen. As a result, faced with
a choice of grabbing oxygen or carbon monoxide, the hemoglobin molecule
will go for the carbon monoxide, with fatal results. So strongly does hemo-
globin sequester carbon monoxide that simply breathing oxygen is not an ad-
 C hemistry    63

equate treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning—it is necessary to breathe

oxygen at two to three times atmospheric pressure to force the hemoglobin
to disgorge the carbon monoxide molecules.
As evidence of the importance the scientific community attached to
Sanger’s achievement, it is worth noting that 1953, the year in which Sanger
deciphered the structure of insulin, was also the year that Watson and Crick
deciphered the structure of DNA. Watson and Crick, however, did not re-
ceive their Nobel Prizes until 1962.
CHAPTER 4

Matter

Complicated stuff is made of simple stuff, and one of the great quests of
science has been to understand what the simple stuff is, and how it works.
Chemistry is concerned with how the simple stuff fits together to form com-
plicated stuff, but physics is concerned with what the simple stuff is.

Phases of Matter
There are three fundamental phases of matter—solid, liquid, and gas. Al-
though the Greeks didn’t explicitly state it in this fashion, they believed the
world was constructed of four basic elements—earth, air, fire, and water.
The three fundamental phases are represented here—earth is solid, water
is liquid, and air is gaseous. It would be millennia before the atomic theory
revealed precisely what made water a solid (as ice), a liquid (as water), and a
gas (as steam).
A fourth phase of matter—plasma—was discovered in the late nine-
teenth century, but one could make a pretty good argument that the Greeks
had at least a hint of this, because fire—which generally results from heat
energy being applied to a combustible material—is in some sense analogous
to plasma, which consists of ionized particles and generates its own magnetic
field. Fire, too, consists of particles generating a form of energy.
Water, being the most common substance available—at least, available
in all three phases of matter—was a natural candidate for investigation. One
could see that as winter came, water in rivers and lakes transformed into ice,
and back to water again with the coming of spring. Similarly, heating water
causes it to become steam, which became water again when it condensed on
65
66    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

a cooling surface. But these were merely qualitative descriptions of phenom-

ena. While science often starts with qualitative descriptions, it really only
acquires significant predictive power—and the utility associated with this
predictive power—when these qualitative descriptions become quantitative.
And in order for them to become quantitative, there have to be instruments
available capable of measuring parameters. The Greeks could measure vol-
ume and mass, but had no way to measure parameters such as temperature.

THE GAS LAWS

Hero of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician, scientist, and engineer who

actually made it into the history books under two different names. He was
also known as Heron, and Heron’s formula in mathematics enables one to
compute the area of a triangle from the length of its sides. But he is most fa-
mous as an engineer and scientist—he constructed both windmills and steam
engines, although nowadays these would probably be classified as proof-of-
concept prototypes rather than as industrial equipment ready for prime time.
Hero also made an intensive study of air. He showed that air was actually a
substance (unlike fire) by demonstrating that water would not enter a con-
tainer filled with air unless the air was first removed. Hero also argued that,
because air was compressible, it must consist of particles separated by empty
space—a remarkable insight.
Almost 1,800 years would pass before as talented an engineer would
again investigate air. The engineer was Otto von Guericke, who invented the
first air pump. It cost him a prodigious amount of money, but von Guericke
was also a good promoter, and gave impressive demonstrations on the nature
of a vacuum. He showed that candles would not burn and animals could not
live in a vacuum, and demonstrated the power of air pressure by evacuating
a metal sphere and showing that teams of horses could not pull it apart.
The British scientist Robert Boyle read of von Guericke’s experiments,
and decided to duplicate them. He actually improved von Guericke’s air
pump, and used it to demonstrate the truth of Galileo’s contention that,
in a vacuum, a feather and a lump of lead should fall at the same rate (this
experiment was also demonstrated somewhat more dramatically some three
hundred years later—on the surface of the Moon). Boyle also showed that
sound could not be heard in a vacuum, but that an electric charge could
jump across one.
As a result of these experiments, Boyle was led to investigate the nature of
gases. He was the first chemist to actually collect a gas, but his major contribu-
 M atter    67

tion was to measure the relation between the pressure applied to a gas and the
volume that it occupied. Using a J-shaped tube, Boyle demonstrated that the
volume of the gas was inversely related to the pressure. Double the pressure
and the volume halved; triple the pressure and the volume was reduced to a
third of the original volume. This relation is known as Boyle’s law.
A century later, the French balloonist Jacques Charles was also interested
in gases, although from a more practical point of view—he was, after all, a
balloonist, and balloons are filled with hot air. Charles was the first balloonist
to ascend to an altitude of more than 3,000 meters (about 10,000 feet). He
was able to accomplish this feat because he had read of Cavendish’s discov-
ery of the much lighter hydrogen, and he realized that the lifting power of
hydrogen would be far greater than that of air.
Charles’s chief contribution was to show the effect of temperature on the
volume of a gas. Again, this is perhaps not surprising in view of the balloon-
ist’s interest in heated gases. He discovered that different gases all expanded
the same fraction of their initial volume when the temperature was raised by
a given amount. For each degree Celsius that the temperature rose above 0°C,
the volume increased by 1/273; for each degree the temperature fell below
0°C, the volume decreased by 1/273. In retrospect, this can be seen as fore-
shadowing the concept of absolute zero—if you keep reducing the volume
by 1/273 for every degree the temperature is lowered, lower it 273 degrees
and the volume is zero, so you can’t lower it any more. And indeed, absolute
zero is almost exactly 273 degrees below 0°C.
Charles did not actually publish this result, but it was later discovered
(and published) by Joseph Gay-Lussac, who was by a curious coincidence
a fellow balloonist! Ballooning was not only a passion with Charles, and
the source of his scientific reputation, it also saved his life. He had the bad
luck to be in the Tuileries when it was invaded by an angry mob during the
French Revolution, but he had the presence of mind to recount some of his
ballooning anecdotes to the bloodthirsty mob that accosted him. He must
have been an exceptional storyteller, or had some truly fascinating anecdotes,
as they let him go.

The Realm of the Atom

As Richard Feynman observed, the atomic theory was the key to many of
the major scientific developments. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
it was widely accepted that there were a number of basic elements such as
68    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

carbon, iron, and oxygen, and that all the stuff on Earth was made up of
these. But what about the heavens?
Meteors had been observed as far back as prehistory, but they were felt
to be connected with the atmosphere—the word “meteor” is derived from
the Greek word for “atmospheric.” It wasn’t until the great meteor shower of
November 1833 that it was realized that the origin of meteors was extrater-
restrial. Prior to that, in 1807 Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale University
had performed a chemical analysis of a meteor and shown that it contained
iron, so it was known that at least some of what made up the heavens was
made of the same stuff that made up the Earth. But the big breakthrough
occurred half a century later.

SPECTROSCOPY

In 1835, the philosopher Auguste Comte attempted to go where no philoso-

pher had gone before. Hitherto philosophers had tried to define the limits of
human knowledge, but had generally done so by looking at moral, ethical,
and religious questions that they felt would never be resolved. Comte com-
piled a list of questions he felt science would never be able to answer. One of
those questions was to determine the composition of the stars. This was not
an unreasonable idea; in 1838 Friedrich Bessel would show that the distance
to the star 61 Cygni was six light-years, a distance far larger than anyone had
even suspected.
This prediction probably went unnoticed by Robert Bunsen, a Ger-
man chemist absorbed in studying organic arsenic-containing compounds.
Bunsen was, perhaps, seventy-five years too early, for he was studying com-
pounds that would not attract much interest until Paul Ehrlich developed a
chemotherapeutic cure for syphilis from one such compound. These com-
pounds were highly toxic, and Bunsen lost an eye and twice almost died from
arsenic poisoning. Upon recovering, he decided that discretion was the better
part of valor, and never again touched organic chemistry.
He then switched to a study of the role of heat in chemical reactions,
inventing numerous devices. Interestingly enough, he did not invent the one
for which he is best known, the Bunsen burner, but he made it a standard
tool in chemical laboratories.
One of his early students was Gustav Kirchhoff. The two worked to-
gether for four years, and then their paths diverged. Kirchhoff was initially
interested in electricity (he was the first person to demonstrate that electricity
moved at the speed of light), but when he and Bunsen were reunited, Kirch-
 M atter    69

hoff took up Bunsen’s investigation of photochemistry (chemical reactions

that absorb or emit light). Bunsen at the time was using colored filters, but
Kirchhoff, who had an extensive mathematical background and was an ad-
mirer of Newton, suggested that they use a prism, as had Newton during his
investigation of optics.
The two combined Thomas Young’s idea of passing light through a
slit with Newton’s idea of passing light through a prism. Thus was born
the spectroscope. The Bunsen burner was used to heat chemicals to incan-
descence, and the light passed through a spectroscope to throw a pattern of
colored lines on a screen. It was soon discovered that this pattern of colored
lines was a chemical fingerprint, and that each element had its own charac-
teristic pattern, or spectrum.
Using the spectroscope to analyze the light of the sun, Kirchhoff dis-
covered a spectral line characteristic of the element sodium. Since there was
no sodium in the Earth’s atmosphere, and certainly none in the vacuum be-
tween the sun and the Earth, the conclusion was inescapable: sodium existed
in the sun. The same technique would later be used on the light from stars,
enabling their chemical composition to be determined.
Kirchhoff’s banker, a pragmatic sort, asked Kirchhoff, “Of what use is
gold in the sun if I cannot bring it down to Earth?” Kirchhoff was soon to
be awarded a medal and an accompanying monetary prize from Great Britain
for his work. The money was awarded in golden sovereigns. Kirchhoff, hand-
ing them to his banker, could not resist the opportunity to remark, “Here is
gold from the sun.”
Spectroscopy has advanced considerably since its initial discovery. There
are instruments on the James Webb telescope, launched in December 2021,
capable of detecting the signatures of molecules in the atmospheres of exo-
planets. At the outer limits of which molecules can be detected by the instru-
ments on the Webb telescope are oxygen and ozone, two molecules that on
Earth indicate the presence of life. The SETI project (Search for Extrater-
restrial Intelligence) has scanned the Universe for more than half a century,
trying to find a signal that might indicate the presence of intelligent life.
Maybe SETI is asking for too much, but if the Webb telescope finds oxygen
or ozone in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it would be a likely indicator
that life exists elsewhere in the Universe.
Auguste Comte, the author of the ill-fated prediction about the stars,
later went insane, and died two years before the development of the spectro-
scope. Comte’s prediction has been treated by some historians as the work
of a buffoon, but the truth is that Comte was right in principle, if wrong in
specifics. Almost a century after Comte’s prediction, the German physicist
70    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Werner Heisenberg would formulate the uncertainty principle of quantum

mechanics, a fundamental discovery showing that Comte was right, and that
there are limits to scientific knowledge. A few years later, Kurt Gödel would
prove his famous incompleteness theorem, showing that there were limits to
mathematical knowledge as well.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE ATOM

With the atomic theory firmly in place by the end of the nineteenth century,
it was thought that the ultimate constituents of matter had been discovered.
The prevailing view of what an atom would prove to be, if indeed it were
ever possible to actually see one, was that it would be a small, hard, feature-
less sphere. Meanwhile, the nature of electromagnetic energy occupied the
attention of several physicists.
James Maxwell had shown that electromagnetism could be regarded as
waves, but in the late 1870s, William Crookes discovered that the rays emit-
ted by the cathode of a vacuum tube could be deflected by a magnetic field.
This convinced Crookes that these rays were actually particles carrying an
electric charge. Two decades later, J. J. Thomson was able to show that these
rays could also be affected by an electric field, and were therefore definitely
particles. By careful experimentation, Thomson was able to go even further,
measuring the charge-to-mass ratio of the particles. From this he deduced
that the particles, soon to be known as electrons, were extremely small, hav-
ing approximately 1/1837 the mass of a hydrogen atom. Since the hydrogen
atom was the smallest possible atom, electrons were substantially smaller
than atoms. The field of subatomic physics had dawned.
One of Thomson’s assistants was Ernest Rutherford, who had lived the
early portion of his life on a potato farm in New Zealand. Rutherford re-
ceived news of the offer of a scholarship at Cambridge while digging potatoes
on his father’s farm. Flinging aside his shovel, he declared, “That’s the last
potato I’ll dig,” and set sail for England.
Rutherford was initially interested (as was practically everyone else) in
the emissions given off by radioactive material. He embarked upon the study
of how these rays bounced off thin sheets of metal. He fired alpha particles,
which had a positive electric charge, at a sheet of gold only two thousand
atoms thick. When some of the alpha particles bounced almost straight back,
Rutherford realized that there had to be a concentrated region of positive
charge somewhere in the atom, as it would take a positive charge to repel the
positively charged alpha particles. However, since the vast majority of the
 M atter    71

alpha particles passed straight through the sheet of gold without being de-
flected at all, Rutherford realized the atoms must be mostly empty space. He
therefore proposed a model of the atom in which the positive charges (pro-
tons) in the nucleus were packed in tightly around the center, surrounded by
electrons in the outer layers.
One of Rutherford’s assistants was Niels Bohr, a young Danish scientist
who had migrated to Rutherford after working with Thomson. The atomic
model proposed by Rutherford had a number of deficiencies, one of which
was its inability to explain why each atom had its telltale fingerprint of spec-
tral lines. Using the newly developed quantum theory, Bohr made a radical
assumption—that the electrons circled the nucleus like planets circling the
sun. Moreover, quantum theory required that the orbits of the electron could
only occur at certain specific distances from the nucleus—“in-between”
orbits simply were not allowed. Bohr’s theory explained the spectral lines oc-
curring in the hydrogen atom, and Bohr’s picture of the atom is, with some
modifications, basically the one that is held today.
In the early twentieth century, the best way to assure yourself of being
on the short list for a Nobel Prize was to be one of Thomson’s assistants.
Thomson himself received a Nobel Prize, as did Rutherford, Bohr, and five
other Thomson assistants. Rutherford and Bohr also did yeoman service in
helping Jewish scientists escape from Nazi Germany. When Denmark fell
to the Germans, Bohr helped most of the Danish Jews escape Hitler’s death
camps. In 1943, Bohr himself fled Denmark to Sweden, then flew in a tiny
plane to England, nearly dying en route from lack of oxygen. From there he
went to the United States, where he was one of the physicists at Los Alamos
who helped to develop the atom bomb.

THE QUANTUM HYPOTHESIS

As the nineteenth century came to a close, physicists around the world were
beginning to feel their time had come and gone. The eminent physicist
Philipp von Jolly advised his students to pursue other careers, feeling that
the future of physics would consist of the rather mundane task of measuring
the physical constants of the Universe (such as the speed of light) to ever-
increasing levels of accuracy.
Still, there were minor problems still unresolved. One of the unsettled
questions concerned how an object radiates. When iron is heated on a forge,
it first glows a dull red, then a brighter red, and then white; in other words,
the color changes in a consistent way with increasing temperature. Classical
72    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

physics was having a hard time accounting for this. In fact, the prevailing
Rayleigh–Jeans theory predicted that an idealized object called a blackbody
would emit infinite energy as the wavelength falling on it became shorter
and shorter. Short-wavelength light is ultraviolet; the failure of the Rayleigh–
Jeans theory to predict finite energy for a radiating blackbody exposed to
ultraviolet light came to be known as the “ultraviolet catastrophe.”
The Rayleigh–Jeans theory operated under a very commonsense
premise—that energy could be radiated at all frequencies. An analogy would
be to consider the speed of a car; the car should be able to travel at all veloci-
ties up to its theoretical limit. If a car cannot go faster than 100 miles per
hour, for instance, it should be able to move at 30 miles per hour, or 40 miles
per hour, or 56.4281 miles per hour.
One day in 1900 the German physicist Max Planck, one of those advised
by von Jolly to consider another major when he entered the university, made
a bizarre assumption in an attempt to escape the ultraviolet catastrophe. In-
stead of assuming that energy could be radiated at all frequencies, he assumed
that only certain frequencies were possible. Continuing the analogy with the
speed of the car, Planck’s hypothesis would be something like only speeds
that were multiples of 5, like 25 miles per hour, 40 miles per hour, and so
on would be possible. He was able to show almost immediately that this
counterintuitive hypothesis resolved the dilemma, and the radiation curves
he obtained matched the ones recorded by experiment. That day, while
walking with his young son after lunch, he said, “I have had a conception
today as revolutionary and as great as the kind of thought that Newton had.”
His colleagues did not immediately think so. Planck was a respected
physicist, but the idea of the quantum—energy existing only at certain
levels—was at first not taken seriously. It was viewed as a kind of mathemati-
cal trickery that resolved the ultraviolet catastrophe, but did so by using rules
that the real world did not obey. Planck’s idea languished for five years, until
Einstein used it in 1905 to explain the photoelectric effect. Eight years later,
Niels Bohr used it to explain the spectrum of the hydrogen atom. Within an-
other twenty years, Planck had won a Nobel Prize, and quantum mechanics
had become one of the most fundamental theories of the real world, explain-
ing the behavior of the world of the atom and making possible many of the
high-tech industries of today.
With the coming of the Nazis, German science suffered severely. Many
of the leading scientists were either Jewish or had Jewish relatives, and fled
the country. Many others reacted with abhorrence to the Nazi regime, and
also departed. Planck, although deploring the Nazis, decided to stay in
Germany. It was to be a tragic decision. In 1945, Planck’s younger son was
 M atter    73

executed for his part in the “Revolt of the Colonels,” the unsuccessful at-
tempt by several members of the German armed forces to assassinate Hitler.

RADIOACTIVE DECAY AND ISOTOPES

When John Dalton first proposed his atomic theory, the atoms he envisioned
were immutable, and the atoms of any particular element were identical in
shape, size, and mass. As the twentieth century began to unfold, and scien-
tists became able to discern the structure of the atom, the validity of these
hypotheses became open to doubt.
The first of Dalton’s atomic characteristics to tumble was the idea that
atoms were immutable. Interestingly enough, the hypothesis of immutabil-
ity was one of the most noteworthy differences between Dalton’s atomic
theory and the ideas of the old alchemists. The alchemists felt that the ele-
ments could be transformed into one another, and a great deal of effort was
expended in a futile search for the “Philosopher’s Stone,” whose touch would
change lead into gold. In 1902, Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy
conducted a series of experiments with the newly discovered radioactive
materials. They showed that radioactive elements were subject to spontane-
ous decay; radioactivity consisted of an emission of particles whose absence
actually transformed the radioactive element into a different element. With
remarkable insight, Rutherford and Soddy suggested that this transformation
took place at a subatomic level. Their discovery necessitated a revision in
the atomic theory, and was eventually to lead to Rutherford’s views on the
existence of an atomic nucleus.
Soddy spent the most productive portion of his career working on
phenomena associated with radioactive decay. He helped discover that lead
was the end product of all radioactive decay series. He also devised a law to
explain radioactive decay, called the radioactive displacement law.
At the time, scientists had noted that two different types of particles
could be emitted during radioactive decay, which they had named alpha
and beta particles. Soddy observed that when an alpha particle was emitted,
both the atomic weight of the element from which the particle was emitted
and the nuclear charge decreased by two. With the aid of hindsight, we can
see that this is explained if an alpha particle consists of two protons and two
neutrons, but the neutron would not be discovered for almost twenty years.
When a beta particle was emitted, the atomic weight did not change, but
the nuclear charge increased by one. It would later be understood that this
74    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

occurred because when a neutron decayed, it formed a proton and ejected

an electron.
Soddy realized that the same element could be formed from an element
two places higher in the periodic table by alpha decay, or by an element one
place lower in the periodic table by beta decay. However, the atomic weights
as measured didn’t add up. Soddy interpreted this as showing that elements
could exist in more than one form, which he called isotopes. Two different
isotopes of the same element would have the same nuclear charge, but dif-
ferent atomic weights.
This was another revision to Dalton’s atomic theory. Atoms, no longer
immutable, were now no longer identical. The discovery of the neutron by
British physicist James Chadwick eventually supplied the mechanism by
which different isotopes were able to exist, as neutrons did not alter nuclear
charge, but did change the atomic weight.
Two different isotopes of the same element have essentially the same
chemical properties but different atomic properties. Different isotopes have
been used in medicine, and in radioactive dating. The most historically
significant use of different isotopes was discovered in the late 1930s. Ninety-
nine percent of naturally occurring uranium has an atomic weight of 238,
and less than 1 percent has an atomic weight of 235. When bombarded with
neutrons, the less stable uranium-235 fissions into two smaller atoms, releas-
ing both energy and additional neutrons. These additional neutrons then
slam into other uranium-235 atoms, which in turn release more energy and
more neutrons. This process is called a chain reaction and is the mechanism
behind the explosive power of the atomic bomb.

X-RAY CRYSTALLOGRAPHY

New Age adherents are only the latest of a long line of people to be fascinated
by crystals. The beauty and symmetry of many forms of crystals, to say noth-
ing of their rarity, have caused them to be highly valued for thousands of
years, as well as being suspected of having mystical properties.
The scientific investigation of crystals can be traced to Nicolaus Steno, a
seventeenth-century Danish scientist who was one of the first to suggest that
fossils were the petrified remains of long-dead animals. Steno observed that
when a crystal broke, it did so not in random pieces, but in straight planes
that always met at characteristic angles. This observation would later become
known as the first law of crystallography.
 M atter    75

Crystallography languished for a century until René Haüy, a French

priest, accidentally dropped a piece of calcite that was part of a friend’s min-
eral collection. Apologizing for his clumsiness, he picked up the pieces and
noted, as had Steno a century earlier, that the fragment faces showed straight
planes meeting at a constant angle. Haüy pursued this observation further,
this time deliberately breaking crystals. He suggested that crystals were com-
posed of “unit cells,” formed from repeating geometric configurations—a
surprisingly prescient prediction of the atomic structure that crystals display.
The nineteenth century witnessed extensive investigation into other
properties of crystals. Certain crystals were discovered to have the ability
to polarize light. Another unusual property, discovered by Pierre Curie, is
piezoelectricity—squeeze certain types of crystals, and they emit an electric
current. Conversely, an electric current will cause certain crystals to vibrate.
This principle is the basis of the quartz watches that were popular half a
century ago. In the latter portion of the twentieth century, the LCD—liquid
crystal display—has made possible inexpensive timepieces of unprecedented
accuracy.
Perhaps the most important scientific result from the investigation of
crystals occurred because of a controversy surrounding the nature of X-rays.
Were they particles, like cathode rays, or longitudinal waves, like sound, or
transverse waves, like light? By 1910, the balance of opinion had shifted to
the third point of view, but the problem lay in measuring the wavelength of
X-rays.
With ordinary light, the wavelength was measured by a diffraction
grating, in which light was bounced off a piece of metal having lines that
were separated by precise distances etched in the metal. The shorter the
wavelength of the light, the closer the lines had to be, and it simply was not
possible to make the lines close enough to diffract the X-rays.
Max von Laue, a German physicist who had been Max Planck’s assistant,
realized that, in crystals, nature had already manufactured the perfect diffrac-
tion grating for X-rays. In 1912, he shone X-rays on a crystal of zinc sulfide,
and the diffracted X-rays were bounced onto a photographic plate, where
they could be detected. The regular crystal pattern of the zinc sulfide was
revealed by the spots of light where the X-rays had struck the plate.
So X-ray crystallography could be used to determine the wavelength of
an X-ray if the spacing of a crystal were known. Far more important, though,
was that the reverse was also true. If the wavelength of an X-ray is known, it
can be used to determine the structure of a crystal. This technique has been
one of the most important tools in discovering the structure of complex
substances.
76    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Two extremely significant developments in unearthing the structure

of complicated substances have been greatly aided by two of the best X-ray
crystallographers—Rosalind Franklin and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.
Franklin’s X-ray studies of crystals of DNA molecules were critical in helping
Watson and Crick determine the structure of DNA. During World War II,
the incredible antibiotic properties of penicillin were realized by the British
government, but the difficulty in procuring it from natural sources made it
the most expensive substance on Earth. Hodgkin used X-ray crystallography
and a primitive electronic computer to discover the structure of penicillin. In
so doing, she made possible its synthesis, and the resulting mass production
has saved millions of lives.

ATOMIC NUMBERS

Long before the concept of a “Dream Team” had come into existence, the
great experimental physicist Ernest Rutherford had assembled his version
of one. Rutherford, his coworkers, and students represented the cream of
the early-twentieth-century crop of physicists, winning no fewer than seven
Nobel Prizes.
None of those Nobel Prizes went to Henry Moseley, whom many feel
might have been the greatest member of the Dream Team. Moseley joined
Rutherford at Manchester University in 1910, after having excelled as a stu-
dent at Eton and Oxford. After getting his feet wet studying beta emission
from radium, Moseley then began an X-ray study of the elements.
X-rays had been discovered less than twenty years earlier by Wilhelm
Roentgen, but already scientists were taking advantage of their extremely
short wavelength to probe the structure of matter. Two pioneers in this area
were the father-and-son team of William Henry Bragg and William Law-
rence Bragg. The Braggs had recently discovered that when elements were
excited by X-rays, the spectrum contained several bright lines that served as
a signature of the element.
Any work done with elements was performed against the background
of Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements. However, there were still
problems with the exact structure of the periodic table. When Mendeleev
originally compiled the table, he arranged the elements in increasing order
of atomic weight. Although there was no way for Mendeleev to know it, ar-
ranging elements in this order was to introduce both errors and complexities
into his periodic table. Because the atomic weight of an element depended
on the isotopic composition of the element that Mendeleev had studied,
 M atter    77

Mendeleev’s order had occasionally been shown to be incorrect. Also pre-

senting a problem was that no one could be sure two elements with a large
gap in atomic weights were adjacent in the table, as a new element might be
discovered that belonged between them.
Moseley decided to compare the atomic weights of the elements with the
spectral lines that the Braggs had discovered. He discovered that there was
a simple correspondence between the spectra and the atomic weights, as the
wavelengths of the signature lines in the spectra increased in a regular pattern
as the atomic weights increased.
Other physicists had suggested that there might be a correspondence be-
tween the number of protons in the nucleus and the atomic weight. Moseley
solidified this idea by proposing that the number of protons in the nucleus
actually accounted for the regular progression of the signature lines. He in-
troduced the term “atomic number” to describe the number of protons in
the nucleus of an element, and redefined the periodic table by arranging the
elements in increasing order of atomic number.
This turned out to be the secret to determining the correct structure of
the periodic table. It explained the elements that existed, and also predicted
which elements would be discovered to fill existing holes. Finally, because
atomic numbers are whole numbers, Moseley’s theory predicted what ele-
ments would not be discovered, because elements cannot have fractional
atomic numbers. The atomic number of hydrogen is 1 and that of helium is
2, so no element can be discovered between them.
Moseley reported his results in December 1913. In 1914 World War I
began, and the patriotic Moseley enlisted in the Royal Engineers. He sailed
for Turkey in June 1915, and lost his life to a sniper’s bullet at the Battle of
Gallipoli, a battle whose incredible loss of life was the result of stupid bun-
gling. Moseley would undoubtedly have won a Nobel Prize for his work on
atomic numbers, but Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. The value
of Moseley’s work can be seen from the fact that Karl Siegbahn, a Swedish
physicist who built upon Moseley’s ideas, did win the Nobel Prize.
In researching this book, two individuals in particular left a profound
impression on me. Henry Moseley died a senseless and unnecessary death at
age twenty-seven as cannon fodder at the Battle of Gallipoli, and Rosalind
Franklin, mentioned in the previous section, succumbed to cancer at age
thirty-eight. No A. E. Housman has written an ode to a scientist dying
young, but it seems to me that someone should, as we are all poorer for the
discoveries they might have made.
78    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

ANTIMATTER

The 1920s marked an incredibly productive decade in physics. The revolu-

tion that was quantum mechanics had been under way for more than twenty
years, achieving a significant triumph with Bohr’s quantum-mechanical
description of the hydrogen atom. In addition, 1919 had brought the con-
firmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. All this activity attracted
many bright young scientists to physics.
Louis de Broglie was a member of the French nobility. Nobility in
France was not always an asset; de Broglie’s great-great-grandfather had died
by guillotine during the French Revolution. After receiving a degree in his-
tory, de Broglie worked in radio communication during World War I, and
his interest turned to science.
Both Einstein and Planck had obtained important equations involving
energy. Einstein’s equation related energy to mass; Planck’s related energy to
wavelength. De Broglie did something almost childishly simple—he equated
the two expressions, obtaining a relationship between wavelength and mass.
Quantum mechanics had resolved the dilemma about light by showing that
light was both wave and particle; could the same thing actually apply to
physical objects?
The wavelength of an ordinary object, such as a grain of rice, was incon-
ceivably short and could not be detected, but the wavelength of the smallest
object then known, the electron, was long enough to be measured. In 1927
both Clinton Davisson and George Thomson managed to detect it. The
wave-particle duality that applied to photons, which existed as energy, had
now been shown to apply to electrons, which existed as mass.
Paul Dirac had begun his career as an electrical engineer, but found it
difficult to get a job, and switched to mathematics. This was clearly the right
move, as his talent was so evident that by the time he was thirty years old he
had attained what was arguably the most prestigious post in the mathemati-
cal world, the Lucasian Professorship at Cambridge that had once been held
by Newton. De Broglie’s work had interested many mathematicians and
physicists, and Dirac switched again, to mathematical physics.
This was yet another right move. Dirac derived equations that indicated
that the electron could have two different types of energy states, one positive
and one negative. If energy states were interpreted as electrical charge, the
obvious interpretation of the negative energy state was the electron, which
had a negative charge. Dirac’s equations suggested that there must exist a
particle identical in all ways to the electron, except that it would have posi-
tive charge.
 M atter    79

Such a particle had never been detected, and Dirac’s results were greeted
with skepticism. However, events shortly vindicated Dirac. Carl Ander-
son was an American physicist who was studying cosmic rays, immensely
energetic particles generated in interstellar space. These particles were so
energetic that they could not be studied with ordinary cloud chambers. An-
derson inserted a lead plate to slow down the particles, thus making them
accessible to study. One day Anderson was examining the track of a particle
that appeared to be identical to an electron, but where an electron curved
in one direction in response to a magnetic field, Anderson’s particle curved
in the opposite direction. Anderson’s particle was the first antimatter to be
discovered, and it was indeed the one Dirac had discovered in his equations.
When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other in a burst
of energy. One of the prevailing mysteries of physics is why the Universe is
mostly made of ordinary matter. Why don’t entire galaxies made of antimat-
ter, with antistars, antiplanets, and perhaps antipeople exist? In 1995 scien-
tists created antihydrogen, an atom with an antielectron orbiting around an
antiproton. The atom lasted for only a few millionths of a second before it
was annihilated in a collision with ordinary matter.

NUCLEAR FISSION

Leo Szilard, who had been born in Hungary of Jewish parents, was one of the
first to see the writing on the wall. A brilliant physicist whose work had taken
him to a position on the faculty of the University of Berlin, he recognized
that there was no future for him in Germany after Hitler came to power, and
went to England. In 1934, while walking the streets of London, he invented
the concept of the chain reaction. His original idea involved the fission of the
metal beryllium into helium atoms, and although he could not demonstrate
the process, he could describe it. Which he did, in the process taking out a
patent on the procedure. As he could see the military potential inherent in
the idea, he kept the patent secret.
Back in Germany, Lise Meitner felt relatively safe even though she was
Jewish, as she was an Austrian national. She stayed in Germany in order to
continue her research collaboration with Otto Hahn, with whom she was
to work for more than thirty years. One of the earliest women to pursue
a career in science, she had been the victim of antifeminist prejudices, as
the director of the laboratory in which she worked initially refused to let
her in the laboratory when men were working. She and Hahn were deeply
involved in the process of studying the behavior of uranium under neutron
80    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

bombardment when Hitler annexed Austria. Despite the fact that Meitner
had served as a nurse in the Austrian Army in World War I, she knew that
Germany was now extremely dangerous for her. Dutch scientists enabled her
to come to the Netherlands without a visa, and Niels Bohr then helped her
obtain a position in Sweden.
Fritz Strassmann replaced Meitner as Hahn’s partner, and in early 1939
they published a paper describing the results of their experiments with ura-
nium. Initially, they suspected that the bombardment had created the radio-
active element radium, which is chemically similar to barium. As a result,
they treated the bombarded uranium with barium. However, they could find
no evidence of radium. When they published the results of their work, they
carefully avoided the suggestion that the uranium atom had fissioned, with
the lighter barium as a result.
Reading their results in Stockholm, and of course being familiar with
much of the work, Meitner immediately reached the conclusion that the
uranium atom had indeed fissioned, and was the first to publish a report
concerning the possibility. Szilard, now in the United States, recognized that
uranium fissioning into barium made a much more realistic candidate for a
chain reaction than his proposed beryllium-helium reaction. He immediately
contacted two other expatriate Hungarian physicists, Eugene Wigner and
Edward Teller. The military potential that had led Szilard to keep his patent
secret was now grimly apparent. The three physicists visited Albert Einstein,
perhaps the only scientist in the world with the power to influence policy,
and persuaded Einstein to write a carefully worded letter to President Frank-
lin Roosevelt apprising him of the situation.
Roosevelt was sufficiently impressed that he took the initial steps that
were to culminate in the Manhattan Project, the multiyear, two-billion-
dollar effort that would produce the first atomic bomb.
Despite the plethora of scientific talent at America’s disposal, all those
involved realized that their German counterparts included not only Hahn
but Werner Heisenberg, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant physicists in
the world. Although the actual story is still not completely known, none of
the German scientists who worked on the German atom bomb project were
Nazi sympathizers, and as a result the project never received top priority
from Hitler. Hahn and Heisenberg were taken into custody by American
forces at the end of the war in Europe, and it was while being interned in
England that they were notified of the bombing of Hiroshima. Hahn felt
personally responsible, and for a while considered suicide. Like many (but
by no means all) of the scientists associated with nuclear fission, he became
 M atter    81

a staunch opponent of nuclear weapons, refusing to cooperate with a West

German project to manufacture them.

THE CREATION OF RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPES

When your mother is unquestionably history’s greatest female scientist, and

your father was also a brilliant scientist before his untimely death in a traffic
accident, your chances of becoming a great scientist yourself must be sub-
stantially better than average. So it was with Irene Curie, the elder daughter
of Pierre and Marie Curie. Educated privately and steeped in the scientific
tradition, Irene served as her mother’s assistant while Marie Curie continued
her lifelong investigation of radioactivity.
During this period, Irene met Frederic Joliot, a chemist of outstanding
promise who had been specially selected to become one of Marie Curie’s as-
sistants. They were married in 1926. Of course, it is standard practice for the
wife to take the husband’s name, but as Pierre and Marie Curie had no sons,
Frederic Joliot also took his wife’s name as a measure of his reluctance to let
the great name of Curie die. Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie lived together
and worked together, as had Marie and Pierre Curie before them.
After Marie Curie became too ill to continue her work, Irene succeeded
to her position. Over the next few years, the Joliot-Curies compiled a mad-
dening record of scientific near-misses. In 1932, they were on the verge of
discovering the neutron, but the English physicist James Chadwick beat
them to it. In 1933, they almost discovered the positron whose existence had
been predicted by Dirac, but the American physicist Carl Anderson found it
while studying cosmic rays.
In 1934, however, they hit paydirt—or rather, they created it. They
were investigating the results of colliding alpha particles with light elements
such as aluminum. This experiment, similar to the ones conducted by Ernest
Rutherford in his studies of the nucleus, knocked protons out of aluminum
nuclei. They discovered that even when they ceased bombarding the target
with alpha particles, the nuclei still emitted a form of radiation, even though
they were no longer emitting protons.
The Joliot-Curies soon realized that in bombarding the aluminum, they
had created phosphorus, but not the phosphorus that is usually found in
nature. Natural phosphorus is not radioactive; the phosphorus created in
the experiments was. The Joliot-Curies had artificially created isotopes that
could not be found in nature.
82    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

This discovery had both theoretical and practical implications. Prior to

these experiments, it had been thought that radioactivity was a phenomenon
confined to heavy elements such as uranium and thorium. Now it was real-
ized that any element could be radioactive if one only prepared the correct
isotope. Since then, more than a thousand different radioactive isotopes have
been prepared. These have been used in medicine, agriculture, industry, and
scientific research. Radioactive tracers can be prepared, and are much safer
to use than those radioactive elements that occur naturally. As a result, far
greater use has been made of artificially produced radioactive isotopes than
of naturally occurring radioactive materials. In 1935, the Joliot-Curies joined
the Curies as the second husband-and-wife team to receive a Nobel Prize.
During World War II, the Joliot-Curies rendered a service of inestima-
ble value to the Allied cause. Realizing the importance of heavy water to the
construction of an atomic bomb, they smuggled the entire French supply of
heavy water out of the country. This may have been one of the reasons why
the Nazi atomic bomb project, which was headed by the brilliant physicist
Werner Heisenberg, never really got off the ground.
During the war Frederic became an avowed Communist, and Irene
worked for many organizations with Communist affiliations. As a result,
when Irene applied in 1954 for membership in the American Chemical So-
ciety, the McCarthy-inspired paranoia that was sweeping the nation resulted
in her application being rejected.

Inside the Atom

Originally, Max Planck’s quantum hypothesis was viewed as more of a math-
ematical trick than anything else—it resolved the ultraviolet catastrophe, but
it was not viewed as anything more significant. When Einstein used it to
explain photoelectricity, it was clear that the quantum hypothesis was more
than simply a mathematical trick; it was able to explain phenomena that
other theories could not.
But the quantum theory did much more than explain physical phenom-
ena. It had a profound impact on one of the most basic of philosophical
questions: what is the nature of reality? What quantum theory had to say
about this question puzzled the greatest physicists of the era—and a century
later, many of the most fundamental questions raised by quantum theory are
still unresolved. Quantum theory has forever changed the world, from the
devices it has enabled to be constructed to the questions it has raised that
transcend the world of physics.
 M atter    83

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

Scientists tend to view the world either visually or symbolically, and there
have been brilliant scientists of each type. However, as physics probed ever-
deeper into the subatomic world in the first few decades of the twentieth
century, it became harder and harder to visualize the phenomena that were
occurring. As a result, some physicists, of which Werner Heisenberg was
one, preferred to attempt to treat the subatomic world through symbolic
representation alone.
Heisenberg had the good fortune of being one of Niels Bohr’s assistants,
and as a result was thoroughly familiar with Bohr’s “solar system” model
of the atom. However, Bohr’s model was running into certain theoretical
difficulties, and several physicists were trying to resolve them. One was
Erwin Schrödinger, whose solution entailed treating the subatomic world
as consisting of waves, rather than particles. Heisenberg adopted a differ-
ent approach. He devised a mathematical system consisting of quantities
known as matrices, which could be manipulated in such a fashion as to
generate known experimental results. Both Schrödinger’s and Heisenberg’s
approaches worked, in the sense that they accounted for more phenomena
than Bohr’s atomic model. In fact, the two theories were later shown to be
equivalent, generating the same results using different ideas.
In 1927, Heisenberg was to make the discovery that would not only win
him a Nobel Prize, but would forever change the philosophical landscape. In
the late eighteenth century the French mathematician Pierre Laplace made
a statement that would characterize scientific determinism. Laplace stated
that, if one knew the position and momentum of every object in the Uni-
verse, one could calculate exactly where every object would be at all future
times. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to know
exactly where anything is and where it is going at any given moment. These
difficulties do not really manifest themselves in the macroscopic world—if
someone throws a snowball at you, you can usually extrapolate the future
position of the snowball and maneuver to get out of the way. On the other
hand, if both you and the snowball are the size of electrons, you’re going to
have a problem figuring out which way to move, because you will not know
where the snowball will go.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is sometimes erroneously inter-
preted as an inability on the part of fallible humans to measure phenomena
sufficiently accurately. Rather, it is a statement about the limitations of
knowledge, and is a direct consequence of the quantum-mechanical view of
the world. As a fundamental part of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty
84    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

principle has real-world ramifications for the construction of such everyday

items as lasers and computers. Even more profoundly, it has banished the
simple cause-and-effect view of the Universe that had been unquestioned
since the Greek philosophers first enunciated it. Heisenberg stated one of the
consequences of the uncertainty principle as follows:

In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things

and facts, with phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena
in daily life. But the atoms or the elementary particles themselves
are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities
rather than one of things or facts. . . . Atoms are not things.

If atoms are not things, what are they? Seventy-five years after Heisenberg’s
revelation, physicists—and philosophers—are still struggling with this
question.
The description of Werner Heisenberg given above undoubtedly pres-
ents a picture of an intellectual struggling with deep and profound questions.
It would be hard to reconcile this image with the title of a song by the Roll-
ing Stones: “Street-Fighting Man.” Yet, at the end of World War I, Werner
Heisenberg was indeed a street-fighting man, engaging in pitched battles
with Communists in the streets of Munich after the collapse of the German
government following the war. Perhaps this can be regarded as a youthful
indiscretion, as Heisenberg was only a teenager at the time.

COMPLEMENTARITY AND THE

QUANTUM VIEW OF REALITY

From the moment we first began to engage in intellectual speculation, we

have wondered about the nature of reality. This question has preoccupied
every generation of thinkers, beginning with the first recorded works of the
great Greek philosophers. It is a question that could be posed by a child, but
a satisfactory answer has eluded all who have tackled it.
Ever since Isaac Newton incorporated mathematics as an essential part
of a description of natural phenomena, it has generally been easier for a
theoretician to sit down with pencil and paper and derive mathematical
consequences, than for an experimenter to devise and carry out a successful
experiment. As a result, there is sometimes the feeling that mathematics is
merely a convenient language to describe phenomena, but it does not give us
an intuitive insight into the nature of the phenomena.
 M atter    85

One such classic example was Dalton’s atomic theory. As a result of the
assumption that matter consisted of atoms, it was easy for chemists to work
out the bookkeeping of chemical reactions. A chemist could write down the
equations of a chemical reaction and predict in advance which substances,
and in what quantity, would be produced. However, for more than a century
after Dalton, individual atoms could not conclusively be shown to exist. To
some scientists, Dalton’s theory might have been simply a convenient math-
ematical description, a formalization that would tell you what would happen
without necessarily telling you the way things actually were.
The rise of quantum mechanics in the first quarter of the twentieth
century produced a more sophisticated version of this problem. The math-
ematical formulation of quantum mechanics viewed electrons as probability
waves rather than actual things. To some, this was merely a convenient
mathematical fiction. After all, a bunch of electrons constituted an electric
current, which ran motors, and the electrons in the outer shells of atoms
reacted chemically to form real substances such as water. How could they
not be real themselves?
Albert Einstein championed the “reality” point of view, and to illustrate
the problem, he and physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen devised a
thought experiment, which has come to be known as the EPR experiment.
According to the laws of physics, it is possible for two photons (call them A
and B) to be emitted so that the total spin (a quantum-mechanical property)
of the two photons is known. Quantum mechanics dictated that the spin of
a photon is not known until it was measured, and that the act of measuring
this photon is part of the input that determines the result of the measure-
ment. Consequently, once the spin of photon A has been determined, the
spin of photon B could be calculated.
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen objected to this. Before the measure-
ments, neither spin is known. Suppose two groups of experimenters, light-
years apart, set out to measure the spins of these photons. If the spin of
photon A is measured, and seconds later the spin of photon B is measured,
quantum mechanics predicted that photon B would “know” the result of the
measurement on photon A, even though there would not be enough time
for a signal from photon A to reach photon B and tell photon B what its
spin should be!
According to Einstein, this left two choices. One could accept the so-
called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, due primarily to
Niels Bohr, that photon B knows what happened to photon A even without
a signal passing between them. Alternatively, one could believe that there is
a deeper reality, manifested in some physical property as yet unfound and
86    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

unmeasured, which would supply the solution to the above dilemma without
having to believe in photons possessing faster-than-light intuition. Einstein
died holding firmly to this latter view—the physical property as yet unfound
and unmeasured would be called a “hidden variable.”
In 1964, the Irish physicist John Bell showed that if hidden variables
existed, then experiments could be performed in which mathematical rela-
tionships known as “Bell inequalities” would manifest themselves. Within
a few decades, hardware would be constructed enabling these experiments
to be performed. Since then, sophisticated experiments with ultrafast lasers,
which were not possible during Einstein’s lifetime, have all but shut the door
on Einstein’s belief. Recent versions of what are called “quantum eraser”
experiments have left only the narrowest of loopholes for Einstein’s views to
squeeze through. Maybe it really is true that the Universe is not only stranger
than we imagine—it is stranger than we are capable of imagining.

QUARKS

Science sometimes appears to be an endless series of revelations, as prevail-

ing explanations are succeeded by new ones. Often this is the result of a
three-step procedure of collecting data, organizing the data into a pattern,
and constructing a theory that explains the reason for the pattern. Examples
of this from chemistry would be the search for new elements, Mendeleev’s
construction of the periodic table, and Bohr’s description of the atom.
Man has been searching for the ultimate constituents of matter since the
Greeks first conjectured them to be air, water, earth, and fire. After atoms
were revealed to have structure in the first quarter of the twentieth century,
it appeared that the question might have been solved: atoms consisted of a
cloud of electrons orbiting a nucleus of protons and neutrons. However, it
was quickly apparent that this model of matter was incomplete.
In order to probe structure, it is necessary to use more and more energy
the deeper one goes. To pry electrons away from an atom does not require
much energy; this is the level at which ordinary chemical reactions take place.
To break up the nucleus requires substantially more energy. By the middle of
the century, particle accelerators capable of delivering ever greater amounts
of energy had been built for precisely this purpose.
The results were fascinating from an experimental standpoint but dis-
turbing from a theoretical one. More than a hundred different particles
were found, a virtual “zoo” waiting for a modern Mendeleev to come along
and organize them. In the early 1960s, both Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval
 M atter    87

Ne’eman arrived at an organizational chart called the Eightfold Way. In

almost a repeat of the Mendeleev story, there was a gap in the chart that de-
manded the existence of a particle with specific properties; that particle was
quickly discovered. The Eightfold Way was the periodic table of particles,
but was there an underlying idea that could explain it?
In the late 1950s, Robert Hofstadter had conducted probes of protons
and neutrons at the highest energy levels then available. He discovered that
protons and neutrons were not hard, point-like particles, but rather appeared
to have some sort of internal structure. This made it appear possible that
neutrons and protons could be composite particles themselves.
Gell-Mann and George Zweig, another physicist from Caltech, inde-
pendently devised a system of particles that would account for this. These
particles would combine in sets of three to make protons and neutrons, and
other combinations could account for the other particles. Gell-Mann called
them “quarks,” based on a line in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, “Three
quarks for Muster Mark.” The appellation stuck.
Decades of experimentation have confirmed that there are three families
of quarks. The first family, the up and down quarks, make up the protons
and neutrons of ordinary matter. The other two families are the charm and
strange quark, and the top and bottom quark, and they make up the more
exotic particles that are produced in high-energy processes, either by particle
accelerators or as cosmic rays. Accompanying the three families of quarks are
three families of leptons. Each family consists of an electron and a neutrino.
This arrangement of particles comprises what is called the Standard Model.
The last of the particles in the Standard Model, the Higgs boson (which is
responsible for particles having mass) was predicted to exist by the Australian
physicist Peter Higgs in 1964. Nearly half a century later, in 2012, the Large
Hadron Collider confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, and in 2013
Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize. Better late than never!
It used to be possible for a Mendeleev or a Rutherford to reveal the most
intimate secrets of nature in a small laboratory, in a reasonably short time, for
not too much money. This happy situation seems to have come to an end.
To discover the top quark required the efforts of thousands of scientists and
technicians, working for more than a decade, and an expenditure of billions
of dollars. If there is an even deeper level of organization than the Standard
Model, how many people will have to work on it, how long will it take, and
can we afford it?
CHAPTER 5

Forces and Energy

One of the great triumphs of science is the Standard Model of physics, which
has taken centuries to formulate. It tells us what the components of matter
are, and the forces that enable matter to interact with other matter. Work,
in physics, is a measure of how much of an interaction has taken place, and
energy is the capacity for doing work. A good measure of technological and
scientific progress is how much work we are able to do, and how well we are
able to harness and store energy to do that work.

The Industrial Revolution

For most of our history, work was done either by physical labor—human or
animal—or by flowing water. Fire had been harnessed for cooking, heating,
and a few industrial processes such as the smelting of ore or the making of
glass, but it wasn’t until the invention of the steam engine that heat was uti-
lized to substitute for tasks that previously had required physical labor. Steam
engines enabled heavy lifting and rapid transportation, and their importance
to society prompted scientists to examine more closely the nature of heat.

THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS

In the summer of 1847 William Thomson, a young British scientist, was

vacationing in the Alps. On a walk one day from Chamonix to Mont Blanc,
he encountered a couple so eccentric they could only be British—a man
carrying an enormous thermometer, accompanied by a woman in a carriage.
89
90    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Thomson, who later became known as Lord Kelvin, engaged the pair in con-
versation. The man was James Prescott Joule, the woman his wife, and they
were in the Alps on their honeymoon. Joule had devoted a substantial por-
tion of his life to establishing the fact that, when water fell 778 feet, its tem-
perature rose 1 degree Fahrenheit. Britain, however, is notoriously deficient
in waterfalls, and now that Joule was in the Alps, he certainly did not intend
to let a little thing like a honeymoon stand between him and scientific truth.
A new viewpoint had been arising in physics during the early portion
of the nineteenth century: the idea that all forms of energy were convertible
into one another. Mechanical energy, chemical energy, and heat energy were
not different entities, but different manifestations of the phenomenon of
energy. James Joule, a brewer by trade, devoted himself to the establishment
of the equivalence between mechanical work and heat energy. These experi-
ments involved very small temperature differences and were not spectacular,
and Joule’s results were originally rejected by journals and the Royal Soci-
ety. He finally managed to get them published in a Manchester newspaper,
which might have published them because Joule’s brother was the paper’s
music critic. Joule’s results led to the first law of thermodynamics, which
states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but only changed from
one form to another.
Some twenty years before Joule, a French military engineer named
Nicolas Carnot had been interested in improving the efficiency of steam
engines. The steam engine developed by James Watt was efficient, as steam
engines went, but nonetheless still wasted about 95 percent of the heat used
in running the engine. Carnot investigated this phenomenon and discovered
a truly unexpected result: it would be impossible to devise a perfectly efficient
engine, and the maximum efficiency was a simple mathematical expression
of the temperatures involved in running the engine. This was Carnot’s only
publication, and it remained buried until it was resurrected a quarter of a
century later by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), just one year after his
chance meeting with Joule in the Swiss Alps.
Carnot’s work was the foundation of the second law of thermodynamics.
This law exists in several forms, one of which is Carnot’s statement concern-
ing the maximum theoretical efficiency of engines. Another formulation of
the second law, due to Rudolf Clausius, can be understood in terms of a
natural direction for thermodynamic processes: a cube of ice placed in a glass
of hot water will melt and lower the temperature of the water, but a glass of
warm water will never spontaneously separate into hot water and ice.
The Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann discovered an altogether dif-
ferent formulation of the second law of thermodynamics in terms of prob-
 F orces and E nergy    91

ability: systems are more likely to proceed from ordered to disordered states
(which explains why a clean room tends to get dirty, but dirty rooms do not
tend to become clean). The first and second laws of thermodynamics seem to
appear in so many diverse environments that they have become part of our
collective “understanding” of life: the first law says you can’t win, and the
second law says you can’t even hope to break even.
Carnot, Joule, and Boltzmann came at thermodynamics from three
different directions: the practical (Carnot), the experimental (Joule), and
the theoretical (Boltzmann). They were linked not only by their interest in
thermodynamics, but by difficult situations bordering on the tragic. Carnot
died of cholera when he was only thirty-six years old. Joule suffered from
poor health and a childhood spinal injury all his life and, though the son of
a wealthy brewer, became impoverished in his later years. Boltzmann was
bipolar, and suffered from depression so severe that despite a rich circle of
family, friends, and admiring students (among whom was Lise Meitner, who
helped discover nuclear fission), he committed suicide because he feared his
theories would never be accepted. Sadly and ironically, his work was recog-
nized and acclaimed shortly after his death.

Electricity and Magnetism

Six hundred years before the birth of Christ, Thales of Miletus discovered
that he could create sparks of static electricity by rubbing amber with fur.
In fact, the word “electricity” comes from elektron, the Greek word for amber.
Four hundred years later, the Chinese were using lodestones to create primi-
tive magnetic compasses by rubbing an iron needle with a lodestone, which
would cause the needle to be magnetized and point to indicate true north.
But it took almost another two thousand years before science reached a full
understanding of these phenomena, and how they were related.

THE NATURE OF ELECTRICITY

There are basically two types of discoveries in science. Some discoveries are
carefully planned, the results of well-designed experiments or lengthy obser-
vation of a particular phenomenon. Some discoveries, however, happen al-
most entirely by chance. Perhaps it is not surprising that most of the amusing
anecdotes surrounding a discovery relate to those that happened by chance.
92    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

One of the most well-known discoveries in science occurred as a result of

chance to the Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani. One day in 1771, he noticed
that some dissected frog legs twitched excitedly when struck by an electric
spark. The anecdote surrounding this particular incident concerns a possible
reason that the dissected frog legs were there in the first place: they were to
be one of the main items of Galvani’s evening dinner.
At first, Galvani was interested but not too surprised, because it was
well-known that muscles would twitch when struck by an electric spark.
Such demonstrations were used as part of an evening’s entertainment. Then
Galvani realized that he could use this to obtain confirmation of Benjamin
Franklin’s discovery that lightning was electrical in nature. He then attached
the frog muscles to brass hooks outside his window so that they rested against
some iron bars. As Galvani expected, the muscles twitched when a lightning
bolt split the sky.
However, they also twitched on a perfectly clear day, as long as they
made contact with two different metals. Electricity was certainly appearing
from somewhere, but was it being generated by the metals or by the muscle?
Galvani reached the conclusion that the electricity was being generated by
the muscle, and called this type of electricity “animal electricity.”
Alessandro Volta was a friend of Galvani; in fact, Galvani sent Volta
copies of his papers. Like many other scientists of the period, Volta was
interested in electricity. Early in his career, he invented a device called an
electrophorus, which could be used for storing electrical charge. The prin-
ciple behind the electrophorus is still used in today’s electrical condensers.
Upon reading of Galvani’s experiments with frog muscles, Volta decided
to try to resolve the problem of whether the current Galvani had observed
came from the muscle or from the metals. His experiment was simple; he
decided to use only the metals and eliminate the frog muscles altogether. He
immediately discovered that an electric current was produced, and naturally
concluded that the difference in metals was the source of that current. Gal-
vani disagreed, and a furious debate ensued.
In 1800, Volta provided the definitive proof by constructing devices
that would produce electricity by means of two different types of metals. He
constructed three types of discs: copper, zinc, and cardboard dipped in salt.
He then stacked these discs in the following order, reading from the bottom
up: copper, zinc, cardboard, copper, zinc, cardboard, and so on. When a wire
was connected from the bottom disc to the top one, a sustainable electric
current would pass through the wire. This device was called a “Voltaic pile”
by Volta’s contemporaries. We call it a battery.
 F orces and E nergy    93

Both Galvani and Volta are immortalized in language—we speak of

being galvanized into action, and the unit of electromotive potential is the
volt. However, the conquests of Napoleon had a drastically different effect
on the lives of the two scientists. Galvani lost his job when he refused to
swear allegiance to a government installed by Napoleon. He then lost his
professorship, and died shortly thereafter. Volta felt that science was more
important than politics, and visited Napoleon in France to demonstrate his
experiments. Even after Napoleon fell, the resilient Volta prospered under
the succeeding government.

THE LAWS OF ELECTROSTATICS AND ELECTRODYNAMICS

Scientific investigation is a product of the intellect. Political events are often

products of everything but the intellect, yet scientific investigation is often
greatly affected by political events. At the end of the eighteenth century, the
key political event was the French Revolution, which had a vastly different
impact on the lives of Charles Coulomb and André Ampère.
Coulomb was living in Paris when the Revolution began, and promptly
moved to the provincial town of Blois where he could work without being
disturbed by the uproar. He had already made his initial contributions to sci-
ence by then, which included having invented an extremely delicate torsion
balance, which he used to measure the effects of electrical charge. In Principia,
Newton gave the defining property of a force as its ability to cause accelera-
tion, and Coulomb was able to show that electricity was a force very much
like gravity: its strength varied inversely as the square of the distance between
charged objects. Although gravitation is always an attractive force, electricity
can be both attractive or repulsive depending on whether the two charged
objects have like or unlike charge. This result is known as Coulomb’s law.
The effect of the French Revolution on André Ampère was much more
drastic. A child prodigy who had mastered advanced mathematics by the age
of twelve, his world was shaken when his father, who was a city official, was
guillotined. Tragedy was again to dog Ampère’s footsteps, as his wife died
after a few years of marriage. Nonetheless, he was able to pursue a successful
career as a professor of mathematics.
In 1820, word of Danish physicist Hans Oersted’s experiment, which
showed that a compass needle could be deflected by a nearby wire carrying
an electrical charge, reached the French Academy of Sciences. Ampère, who
was also interested in physics, decided to analyze Oersted’s experiment in
order to predict in which direction the compass needle would move. Within
94    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

a week he had formulated the right-hand rule known to all physics students.
Ampère was the first to attempt a mathematical treatment of electrical and
magnetic phenomena, which would reach fruition with Maxwell’s analysis
some forty years later.
Georg Ohm was affected by the French Revolution only in the most
indirect fashion. Raised in a poor family by a father who was a mechanic,
Ohm’s highest aspiration was to receive an appointment to teach in a uni-
versity. After the French Revolution, the French mathematician Jean Fourier
had accompanied Napoleon on an expedition to Egypt, where he had de-
vised a novel theory on the nature of heat flow. Ohm decided to apply Fou-
rier’s ideas on heat flow to the flow of electric current in a wire. He was able
to show that the amount of current was directly proportional to the potential
difference and inversely proportional to the amount of resistance in the wire.
This relationship, known as Ohm’s law, was not initially recognized as
an achievement that would merit a university position. As a result, Ohm was
forced to endure both professional disappointment and financial hardship.
Gradually, his work began to be more appreciated outside his native Ger-
many, and he was made a member of the Royal Society in England. Eventu-
ally, Ohm’s law was recognized (even in Germany) as one of the key results
in the theory of electrostatics, and he became a professor at the University
of Munich.
Coulomb, Ohm, and Ampère each received one of the highest forms of
praise that the scientific community can bestow, having units of measure-
ment named in their honor. Electrical charge is measured in coulombs,
resistance in ohms, and current in amperes.
There is a curious link connecting Coulomb and Ohm—Henry Cav-
endish, one of the most eccentric scientists who ever lived. Cavendish com-
pletely avoided women, even to the extent of ordering his female servants to
stay out of his way or else they would be fired. He never left his house except
to attend meetings of the Royal Society. He never changed his style of dress,
which was extremely old-fashioned for that era (although everything from
that era seems old-fashioned to us). There is only one portrait of Cavendish
extant, and it looks as if he was wearing clothes that were a century out of
date. Cavendish was a brilliant scientist, but his notebooks and manuscripts
remained hidden for nearly a century after his death. When they were discov-
ered, it was found that he had anticipated both Coulomb’s law and Ohm’s
law, the latter by almost fifty years.
 F orces and E nergy    95

THE PRINCIPLE OF ELECTROMAGNETIC INDUCTION

Shortly after 4:00 p.m. on November 9, 1965, at a Queenston, Ontario,

power station, an automatic control device that regulated and directed the
flow of electric current abruptly failed. As a result, a circuit breaker that
should have closed remained open, and a huge surge of electricity suddenly
poured into the grid supplying power to the northeastern United States.
From Boston to Rochester, generator safety switches automatically tripped,
taking the generators offline so that they would not be damaged. In a dom-
ino effect, huge portions of the network simply “shorted out” to prevent the
system from being permanently crippled, much as a blown fuse in a house
will prevent an electricity overload from starting a dangerous fire. With the
exception of buildings such as hospitals, which had generators for emergency
situations, the electrical lifeblood of the entire Eastern seaboard was suddenly
cut off. Lights went out, elevators stopped, and subways ceased to move. As
night fell, New York was plunged into a darkness deeper than any it had
experienced for more than a century.
The almost complete dependence of civilization on electrical power is a
consequence of one of the most important experiments in the history of sci-
ence. In 1831, Michael Faraday demonstrated that, if a magnet were moved
through a coil of wire, an electric current would flow in the wire. This is
known as the principle of electromagnetic induction, and is the basis for the
production of electricity.
Faraday’s experiment was the result of a simple but brilliant idea. In
1820, Oersted had shown that turning an electric current on and off near a
compass would cause the compass needle to move. Faraday reasoned that if
an electric current could affect a magnet, perhaps a magnet could be made
to affect an electric current.
The vast increase in the wealth of our society, made possible by cheap
and widely available electric power, occurred because Faraday’s discovery has
enabled us to tap into the power of both the gravitational force and the Sun.
The Sun’s heat evaporates water from the ocean. It rises, cools, and falls as
rain or snow at high altitudes. Gravitational force causes water to run down-
hill, where we take advantage of the falling water to rotate large magnets in
machines known as dynamos. This induces an electrical current, which can
be efficiently transported far from the source by transmission lines. When
we plug a device using an electric motor into an outlet, the electric current
causes magnets to move, and it is this motion that enables the appliance to
operate. The Sun’s heat eventually evaporates the water that powered the
dynamos, and the cycle starts again.
96    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Faraday also possessed a keen intuition regarding the electrical and mag-
netic forces he was studying. Many of the great scientific advances are made
possible by new ways of conceptualizing phenomena. Faraday visualized
electricity and magnetism as consisting of lines of force permeating space,
with stronger forces creating a greater concentration of lines in a particular
region. This method of visualizing electricity and magnetism led to the idea
of a field, a type of mathematical description that occupies a central position
in physics.
Michael Faraday’s parents apprenticed him to a bookbinder in London,
so that he might learn a trade. This turned out to be an ideal situation for
Faraday, as it gave him plenty of opportunity to read, especially about the
subject that most appealed to him, science. In 1812 the famous chemist, Sir
Humphry Davy, gave a series of lectures on chemistry for the general public.
Faraday attended these lectures, and took copious notes. He then wrote the
equivalent of a fan letter to Davy, who was so impressed that he gave Faraday
a job as his assistant. Though lacking the formal education possessed by most
scientists, Faraday was quick to make his mark in both chemistry and phys-
ics. He was made a member of the Royal Society, and when Davy retired,
Faraday was given Davy’s professorship.
At the age of forty-eight, Faraday joined a long line of scientists, includ-
ing both Davy and Isaac Newton, who had suffered a nervous breakdown.
Some of these nervous breakdowns were undoubtedly psychological in na-
ture, such as Boltzmann’s. Quite possibly, though, Faraday’s may have been
brought on by exposure to toxic chemicals, as the chemists of the day had no
idea of the hazards of the chemicals with which they were in daily contact.

THE FIELD THEORY OF ELECTROMAGNETISM

By the end of the eighteenth century, scientific investigation of both elec-

tric and magnetic phenomena was well under way. From a strictly qualita-
tive standpoint, the two phenomena have things in common: both appear
to come in two varieties (positive and negative charge, north and south
magnetic poles), and obey the law that opposites (positive–negative, north–
south) attract and likes (positive–positive, north–north) repel. Indeed, when
Coulomb discovered late in the eighteenth century that both electricity and
magnetism obey inverse-square laws similar to the one obeyed by gravity,
the search for theories of electricity and magnetism analogous to Newton’s
theory of gravitation had begun in earnest.
 F orces and E nergy    97

Half a century after Coulomb’s discoveries, two significant experiments

revealed that electricity and magnetism must be related in some fashion.
Oersted had shown that a compass needle would deflect in the presence
of an electric current, and Faraday had demonstrated that motion inside
a magnetic field would induce an electric current. Coulomb’s discoveries,
and the Oersted and Faraday experiments, spawned numerous attempts to
create satisfactory mathematical theories of electricity and magnetism. Each
of the competing theories had its strengths, but no one theory successfully
described the full range of phenomena.
Into this arena came James Clerk Maxwell, probably the most brilliant
theoretical physicist to live between Newton and Einstein. Maxwell had
already made remarkable contributions to various areas of physics. He had
demonstrated that the rings of Saturn could not be completely solid, as the
tidal interactions would tend to tear them into smaller, asteroid-type bodies,
a prediction that was visually confirmed in the 1980s by the Voyager satel-
lites. He had also done significant work on the theories of gases, heat, and
statistical mechanics.
His crowning achievement, however, was the unification of electric
and magnetic phenomena—a set of four vector equations relating electric
and magnetic fields, which were to become known as Maxwell’s laws. The
hallmark of a great mathematical theory in science is that mathematical de-
ductions can predict new physical phenomena. In Maxwell’s theory, electro-
magnetic waves could be shown to travel with a speed equal to the measured
speed of light, causing Maxwell to predict that light would be shown to be an
electromagnetic phenomenon. In addition, the oscillation rate of the waves
could vary significantly, leading Maxwell to predict the existence of types
of electromagnetic waves, beyond the infrared and the ultraviolet, which
had not yet been detected. Shortly after Maxwell’s death, Heinrich Hertz
detected the radio waves that Maxwell’s theory had predicted.
Newton described gravity in terms of a force exerted instantaneously be-
tween two objects, whereas Maxwell described electromagnetism in terms of
vector fields throughout space. Maxwell’s success in creating a field theory of
electromagnetism sparked an upswing of interest in creating field theories to
describe other phenomena. Maxwell himself tried unsuccessfully to develop
a field theory of gravity, but this was not achieved until the work of Einstein.
Interestingly enough, Einstein’s work superseded much of classical physics,
but Maxwell’s laws remained inviolate even in an Einsteinian Universe. Ein-
stein then began his unsuccessful quest for a unified field theory, a quest that,
under the name “theory of everything,” continues to this day.
98    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

While it is easy to produce extreme heat, it is not so easy to produce extreme

cold, and extreme cold is what is needed in order to liquefy many gases.
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes broke through the cold barrier in 1906, liquefy-
ing hydrogen at about 20 degrees above absolute zero, and again in 1908,
liquefying helium at only 4 degrees above absolute zero. Helium was the last
of the gases to be liquefied, and Kamerlingh Onnes decided to investigate the
properties of materials at extremely cold temperatures.
His most startling discovery was that, at extremely low temperatures,
metals lost their resistance to electricity, a phenomenon he named super-
conductivity. Resistance causes electric current to dissipate as heat, and it
enabled the development of such useful gadgets as the electric heater and the
electric toaster. However, resistance has a major disadvantage; it creates loss
of current when current is transmitted through cables and wires. The mere
existence of superconductivity hinted that it might be possible to transmit
electricity long distances without loss.
Kamerlingh Onnes also discovered that each metal had a characteristic
temperature at which it became superconducting. He called this the transi-
tion temperature, and the goal was to find high-temperature superconduc-
tors. Progress in this direction was agonizingly slow. There was no theoretical
understanding of superconductivity, and for a long time the highest known
transition temperature was in the vicinity of 20 degrees above absolute zero.
In 1957, John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer developed
a theory of superconductivity that appeared to explain the phenomenon.
Although it was a valuable theoretical insight, it had no immediate practical
impact. The materials with the highest transition temperatures were niobium
compounds, and niobium is relatively hard to obtain. Investigation into
superconductivity was moribund for decades.
In 1986, Karl Müller and his student Georg Bednorz, working at the
IBM laboratories in Zurich, came up with a startling discovery. They dis-
covered a material with a transition temperature 50 percent higher than
the previous record—an astonishing 35 degrees above absolute zero. Even
more startling was the fact that the superconducting material was a ceramic
oxide—not even a metal.
The next few months saw transition temperature records falling on an al-
most daily basis. One immediate goal was to push the transition temperature
past 77 degrees above absolute zero, as that is the point at which nitrogen be-
comes liquid. At low temperatures, liquid helium is needed, and this is quite
expensive, whereas liquid nitrogen is commercially available and inexpensive.
 F orces and E nergy    99

As a result, superconducting ceramic oxides are currently being exploited in

a variety of devices, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners.
At present, history is repeating itself. There is still no universally agreed-
on theoretical understanding of the ceramic superconductors, and to make
matters worse, ceramics cannot easily be shaped into wires or cables, the pri-
mary means of transmitting electricity. The highest transition temperature is
currently a subject of controversy, as an as-yet-unconfirmed experiment has
pushed the threshold of superconductivity to close to room temperature. But
room temperature superconductivity has tremendous potential technological
and economic benefits, and efforts to find such materials are ongoing and will
doubtless continue until they are either found or shown to be nonexistent.
The name John Bardeen is not well known, yet he holds two Nobel
Prizes. The second of his Nobel Prizes was for the theory of superconductiv-
ity that has been described above. The first (which he shared with Walter
Brattain and William Shockley) was for the invention of the transistor, a
device that has revolutionized the second half of the twentieth century.
Winning two Nobel Prizes puts one in a league with such titans of science as
Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.

Light
Light is not just a phenomenon; it is a metaphor. “Let there be light,” ac-
cording to the Bible, was the first thing God did after creating the heavens
and the earth. Light is seen as good, as contrasted with the evil represented
by darkness.
Probably no question in science has created more controversy over a lon-
ger period of time than the nature of light. Greek and medieval philosophers
alike puzzled over it, alternating between theories that light was a substance
and that light was a wave, a vibration in a surrounding medium.

THE DOUBLE-SLIT EXPERIMENT

The debate found two great physicists in the seventeenth century to cham-
pion each viewpoint—perhaps the first of the really great scientific debates—
as it takes great concepts and great scientists to make for a really epic scientific
debate. Isaac Newton, when he wasn’t busy with mathematics, mechanics, or
gravitation, found time to invent the science of optics. Newton believed that
light consisted of tiny particles, as that would explain the nature of reflection
100    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

and refraction. The eminent Dutch scientist, Christiaan Huygens, however,

championed the point of view that light was a wave.
What are some of the characteristics of waves? Sound, one classic ex-
ample of a wave, can go around corners. Light doesn’t. Water waves, another
obvious type of wave, can interfere with each other. When two water waves
collide, the resulting wave can be either stronger or weaker than the original
waves, stronger if the high points of both waves reinforce each other, and
weaker if the high points of one wave coincide with the low points of the
other wave.
Such was the almost universal reverence in which Newton was held that
few efforts were made to either validate or dispel the wave theory of light
for over a century. The individual who would finally perform the definitive
experiment was Thomas Young, a child prodigy who could read by age two
and who could speak twelve languages by the time he was an adult. In addi-
tion to being a child prodigy, fortune had favored Young in other respects,
as he was born into a well-to-do family. After a brilliant performance as a
student at Cambridge, Young decided to study medicine.
Young was extremely interested in diseases and conditions of the eye.
While still a medical student, he discovered how the shape of the eye changes
as it focuses. Shortly after, he correctly diagnosed the cause of astigmatism, a
visual fuzziness caused by irregularities in the curvature of the cornea.
Young’s fascination with the eye led him to begin investigations into
color vision and the nature of light. In 1802, he performed the experiment
that was to show once and for all that light was a wave phenomenon. Young
cut two parallel slits into a piece of cardboard and shone a light through the
slits onto a darkened background. If light were a substance, there should have
been bright patches directly opposite the slits, with the intensity diminishing
to either side of the slits. This is what one would expect if one were to spray
paint or some other substance at the slits.
What Young observed, however, were alternating bright bands of light
interspersed with totally dark regions. This is the classic signature of wave
interference. The bright bands occurred where the “high points” of the light
waves coincided, the dark regions where the “high points” of one light wave
were canceled out by the “low points” of the other.
Young’s double-slit experiment was unquestionably important to estab-
lish the wave nature of light, but its significance goes substantially beyond
that. With the advent of quantum mechanics, the wave or substance nature
of many subatomic phenomena became a subject of debate. Double-slit
experiments have been employed in different guises to answer many of the
subtle questions that occur in this most perplexing area of physics.
 F orces and E nergy    101

Thomas Young was a polymath whose accomplishments extended into

many of the realms of science, and even beyond. In addition to the achieve-
ments that have already been noted, he constructed a theory of color vision,
observing that in order to be able to see all colors, it was only necessary to
be able to see red, green, and blue. He made significant contributions to
the theory of materials; Young’s modulus is still one of the fundamental
parameters used to describe the elasticity of a substance. Young was also an
Egyptologist of note, and was the first individual to make progress toward
deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics.

THE INVISIBLE ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUM

There are two complementary pleasures that an experiment in science can

elicit. The first is to discover a phenomenon that you had no idea existed.
The second is to discover one that you predicted should exist, but has not
yet been observed.
Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel was born in Hannover, Germany. At the
time of his birth, Hannover was a British possession, and Herschel moved
to England at the age of nineteen and changed his name to William. A suc-
cessful career as a musician made him financially secure, and he decided to
pursue his interest in astronomy. Since a good telescope cost far too much
for him to purchase, he decided to grind his own lenses. He had returned to
Hannover to bring his sister Caroline to England, and Caroline had acquired
William’s addiction to astronomy.
Anything having to do with lenses and optics interested Herschel. One
day in 1800 he decided to use thermometers to measure whether there was
any difference in the temperature associated with the differing colors of the
spectrum. He used a prism to spread sunlight out into the familiar ROY G
BIV colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, and so on. In the process,
he accidentally left a thermometer beyond the red of the spectrum. Examin-
ing the setup sometime later, he was surprised to find that the thermometer
outside the visible colors was also registering an increase in temperature. The
obvious conclusion was that there existed a color beyond red that was invis-
ible to the naked eye. This color is now called infrared.
One year later, Johann Ritter, a German physicist, was experimenting
with photography. It had been discovered that silver chloride turned black
in the presence of light, and that blue light was more efficient than red light
in causing this reaction. Ritter discovered that there was a light beyond violet
102    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

that was even more efficient at turning silver chloride black. This color is
now known as ultraviolet.
More than eighty years later, Maxwell had explained that visible, infra-
red, and ultraviolet light were all examples of electromagnetic radiation. In
theory, electromagnetic waves of any length should be detectable. Heinrich
Hertz had constructed an electrical circuit that generated an oscillating spark
across a gap between two metal balls. Maxwell’s equations predicted that
such an oscillating spark should produce electromagnetic waves. Using a
simple detector consisting of a loop of wire terminating in two small metal
balls separated by an air gap, Hertz was able to pick up the wave by moving
around the room; at various points a spark would jump across the gap in the
detector loop at the moment another spark was generated in the primary
circuit.
Hertz calculated that the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation
generated by the spark was 66 centimeters, a million times the wavelength
of visible light. This experiment served to confirm Maxwell’s theories, but
it was to have an even more far-reaching effect. Within fifteen years, Gug-
lielmo Marconi was able to devise a practical way to communicate with these
“Hertzian waves.” Nowadays, “Hertzian waves” are much better known as
radio waves, and Marconi’s invention was, of course, the radio. You may well
have found yourself slightly annoyed by a modern version of Hertz’s experi-
ment when you accidentally generate a spark while your radio is on, as your
radio will then act as a detector for the spark by emitting static.
William Herschel was unquestionably the outstanding observational as-
tronomer of his day, but of course his astronomy was limited to visible light.
He would have been extremely pleased to know that the infrared radiation
he discovered has been exploited in observational astronomy, as have ultra-
violet radiation and radio waves. In fact, observational astronomy is currently
conducted throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Many of the
great discoveries in astronomy over the past three decades have been made
by telescopes built to observe electromagnetic radiation outside the range of
visible light. WMAP, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, placed
the age of the Universe at 13.8 billion years and its composition at 27 per-
cent ordinary matter and 63 percent dark matter. SOFIA, the Stratospheric
Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, discovered that helium hydride was the
first molecule to be formed in the Universe.
 F orces and E nergy    103

THE DOPPLER EFFECT

The phrase “the Doppler effect” sounds like the title for a thriller or science-
fiction movie. It is a phenomenon familiar to all of us, and it lies at the heart
of a variety of everyday—and not-so-everyday—devices.
Christian Doppler was an Austrian physicist in the first half of the
nineteenth century. It was not a good time to be an Austrian physicist, and
Doppler had a difficult time obtaining an academic position. As many did
at that time, he made plans to immigrate to the United States, the land of
opportunity. Just as he was getting ready to leave, he received an offer of a
professorship in Prague. As a result, Doppler stayed in Europe.
The Doppler effect was originally discovered in conjunction with sound
waves. Early in the seventeenth century, it had been noticed that sound failed
to travel through a vacuum, but would travel through air and water. Such
behavior was characteristic of waves, and in the eighteenth century, Marin
Mersenne had computed the speed of sound in air to an accuracy of 10 per-
cent. Newton had actually been the first to attempt a mathematical analysis
of sound, and by the early nineteenth century the behavior of sound waves
as generated in organ pipes or vibrating strings was fairly well understood.
Doppler, along with many others, had observed that the pitch of a
sound, which is the aural perception of its frequency as a wave, varies if the
sound is being generated from a moving source. The sound seems more
highly pitched as the moving source approaches the listener, and more deeply
pitched as it moves away from the listener. This phenomenon can easily be
observed by listening to the whistle of an approaching train or, since trains
are not as common as they used to be, the siren of an approaching police car.
Doppler correctly reasoned that the moving source should impart its
motion to the waves. As the moving source approaches, the wave crests
reach the listener more rapidly, thus increasing the frequency and raising the
pitch. As the moving source departs, the wave crests take longer to reach the
listener, with the opposite effect.
Once he had worked out the equations, Doppler conceived of one of the
most charming experiments in the history of science to test his conclusions.
He managed to get several trumpeters to sit on top of a flat car that was being
pulled by a locomotive. The trumpeters were instructed to play a particular
note, and the train would proceed at a set speed either toward Doppler or
away from him. Two days of experiments confirmed his deductions.
Although the Doppler effect was first applied to sound waves, it can be
used for light waves as well. In everyday life, the Doppler effect is used in
“speed guns,” which can determine not only the speed of a thrown fastball,
104    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

but also the speed of a moving car. More importantly—at least from the
standpoint of this book—is that the Doppler effect is responsible for one of
the most profound deductions in the history of science. In the 1920s, Edwin
Hubble observed that the light from the majority of galaxies has been “red
shifted”—that is, the frequency of the emitted light waves had decreased.
From this he deduced that most galaxies are moving away from the Earth,
and was able to derive a relationship between their speed of recession and
their distance from us. This has not only helped us determine the size and
age of the Universe, it also was an important step on the road to realizing
that the Universe began in a big bang.
As of this writing, the Doppler effect is one of several ways to search for
planets outside the solar system. The gravitational effect of large planets on a
star causes that star to wobble slightly, and the light from that star is Doppler-
shifted by the wobble. This can be picked up by sensitive instruments. As
of this writing, almost five thousand exoplanets have been discovered, nearly
one thousand of them through the use of the Doppler effect.

THE NONEXISTENCE OF THE ETHER

Unexpected results from experiments force scientists to think more deeply

about the validity of their present theories, and to construct new explana-
tions that fit the unexpected results. The question of whether light consisted
of particles or waves appeared to have been settled in 1803 when Thomas
Young performed his famous double-slit experiment showing that light pro-
duces interference patterns. Since waves in a liquid also produce interference
patterns, this seemed to clinch the case for the wave theory.
Water waves move through water, and sound waves move through air
(sound waves cannot be transmitted through a vacuum), so the obvious ques-
tion was: what was the medium through which light waves were transmitted?
The French physicist Augustin Fresnel, who performed extensive investiga-
tions of the wave theory of light, named this substance “ether.” Although no
one had ever been able to isolate and study ether, the prevailing view through
the middle of the nineteenth century was that waves could not exist without
something to travel in, and therefore the ether must exist.
In 1887 the American physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley
decided to measure how the Earth moved through the ether by using Michel-
son’s newly invented interferometer, a sensitive measuring device based on
interference patterns. They assumed the Earth was stationary, and measured
the speed of light in two perpendicular directions. To everyone’s surprise, the
 F orces and E nergy    105

two speeds were identical, implying that the Earth was standing still. This
result was obviously wrong, since it had been known from the time of Galileo
that the Earth moved through the Universe.
This totally unexpected result forced scientists to think again about the
nature of light. Two European physicists, George Fitzgerald and Hendrik
Lorentz, found that they could resolve the problem under the apparently
absurd assumption that objects contracted as they moved more rapidly. This
would explain the Michelson–Morley result, as the measuring device would
contract in the direction the Earth was moving, and thus the speed of light
would appear to be the same no matter how the Earth moved.
In 1905, Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity, which
explained how the hypothesis offered by Fitzgerald and Lorentz was war-
ranted. Einstein assumed that the laws of physics were the same in any two
systems moving at a constant velocity relative to each other. This forced the
speed of light to be the same in any two such systems. In the same year,
known to physicists as Einstein’s “Miracle Year,” he also explained the photo-
electric effect by assuming that light behaved as a particle. Special relativity
showed that there was no need for the ether to exist as a frame of reference,
and the particle theory of light eliminated the need for a medium through
which light waves would travel. The current thinking of physicists is that
light is both wave and particle; and the resolution of this apparent paradox
is one of the foundations of modern physics.
Michelson’s interferometer has proved to be one of the most important
measuring devices ever invented. Indeed, one of the staples of modern radio
astronomy is the technique of VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry), in
which radio telescopes at opposite ends of the Earth are linked by computer
to resolve the structure of extremely distant objects. Interferometers are
similar to telescopes in that the larger the lens, the more powerful the tool,
and VLBI enables astronomers to create interferometers whose “lenses” are
effectively as large as the Earth itself.

Other Forces
By the last decade of the nineteenth century, physicists had identified two
major forces—gravity and electromagnetism. There were similarities between
the two—both could easily be seen to be manifested in everyday life, and
both obeyed an inverse-square law; objects three times as distant from one
another exerted forces that were only one-ninth (1 divided by 32) as strong.
106    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

However, in the manner of a novel of the supernatural, unseen forces

were at work, and much of the twentieth century would be devoted to un-
derstanding how these unseen forces help to shape not only the world we
inhabit, but the Universe itself.

THE DISCOVERY OF X-RAYS

Every scientist dreams of discovering a new phenomenon. New phenomena

open up unsuspected possibilities, changing the ways we think and the things
we can do. Luck undoubtedly plays a role in the discovery of new phenom-
ena, but, as has been said, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” It may be
added that fortune favors the observant eye as well.
In this case, the observant eye belonged to Wilhelm Roentgen, head of
the department of physics at the University of Wurzberg in Bavaria. The
fact that Roentgen had attained this position reveals that he was already a
respected scientist. Roentgen had experienced rebelliousness as a youth, hav-
ing once been expelled from school for making fun of a teacher, but after
finally obtaining a degree in mechanical engineering he switched to the study
of physics, and had established a solid reputation. On November 5, 1895,
he was experimenting with cathode rays and the luminescence they induce
in certain materials.
So that he could more clearly see the faint luminescence, he darkened
the room and covered the cathode ray tube (which emitted light) with black
cardboard. He turned on the cathode ray tube, and a flash of light some
distance from the tube caught his eye. Searching for the source of the light,
he discovered a piece of paper coated with barium platinocyanide glowing in
the dark. Roentgen was puzzled, because he was aware that cathode rays, the
type of ray produced by the cathode ray tube, were incapable of penetrating
the black cardboard surrounding the tube.
He turned off the tube, and the sheet of paper darkened. Turning the
tube on again caused the paper to glow again. Obviously something ema-
nating from the tube was causing the paper to glow. Then Roentgen did
something that indicated he was a first-class experimenter: while holding the
paper, he walked into the next room, and darkened it. With the cathode ray
tube still on in the adjacent room, the paper continued to glow. Whatever
was emanating from the cathode ray tube could actually pass through walls.
You can imagine Roentgen’s excitement—nothing even remotely like this
had ever been observed before.
 F orces and E nergy    107

Roentgen now found himself facing the classic scientist’s dilemma: to

rush findings into print to make sure of being first, or to nail down the
phenomenon through rigorous experimentation. He chose the latter course,
burning the midnight oil for almost seven weeks. When he submitted his
first paper on what he called X-rays (X is often the mathematician’s choice to
describe something unknown), it was not merely a preliminary report, but in-
cluded many of the important physical properties of X-rays. Later, when be-
ing questioned by a naive interviewer who asked Roentgen what he thought
when he discovered X-rays, he replied, “I didn’t think, I experimented.”
On January 23, 1896, Roentgen delivered his first lecture on the new
phenomenon. At the end of the lecture, he asked for a volunteer from the
audience, and an octogenarian walked up to the stage. An X-ray photograph
was taken of his hand, developed, and displayed to the audience, showing the
bones clearly. It brought down the house. Four days after the news reached
America, X-ray photographs were used to locate a bullet in a man’s leg.
Within a year, a thousand papers had been published on X-rays.
It is known today that X-rays are an extremely powerful, and potentially
dangerous, form of electromagnetic radiation. Properly used, X-rays have
made tremendous contributions to medicine and dentistry. Among the de-
velopments that would have undoubtedly surprised and delighted Roentgen
is X-ray astronomy, a recent field that has revealed dramatic insights into
some of the most energetic events occurring in the Universe.
So revolutionary were X-rays that, when the Nobel Prizes were estab-
lished, Roentgen won the first such prize for physics. Roentgen was a scien-
tist to the core, refusing to accept a title for his accomplishment from the
King of Bavaria, and made no attempt to obtain what would have been an
extremely lucrative patent for X-rays, an action that shocked the financially
astute inventor, Thomas Edison. Unfortunately, this philanthropic decision
came back to haunt Roentgen. After World War I, the subsequent inflation
financially destroyed many Germans, including Roentgen, who died in near
poverty.

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIOACTIVITY

When something is passed from father to son for several generations, the
assumption is that what is being passed is either control of the family busi-
ness or the old homestead. In the case of the Becquerels, however, it was the
professorship of applied physics at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.
108    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Antoine Becquerel’s grandfather had fought side by side with Napoleon.

After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, he switched from a military career to a
scientific one, eventually becoming the first Becquerel to hold the aforemen-
tioned professorship of applied physics. Antoine Becquerel’s father succeeded
to this position, spending much of his time studying fluorescence and phos-
phorescence. These two phenomena occur when matter absorbs light at one
wavelength and emits it at another; it is especially beautiful when a mineral
absorbs invisible ultraviolet light and emits it in a different, and visible, color.
When Becquerel succeeded to the family business (physics) in 1892, he
continued his father’s investigations of these subjects. Then, in 1895, Wil-
helm Roentgen’s startling discovery of X-rays commanded Becquerel’s (and
almost every other scientist’s) attention. Becquerel wondered whether any
of the fluorescent materials he had been studying might be emitting X-rays.
This was a reasonable conjecture, as Roentgen had discovered X-rays because
they caused certain materials to fluoresce.
In February 1896, Becquerel wrapped photographic film in black paper,
placed a crystal of potassium uranium sulfate on top of it, and placed the
entire assemblage in direct sunlight. It was known that sunlight caused potas-
sium uranium sulfate to fluoresce. If the fluorescence contained X-rays, the
X-rays might penetrate the black paper, which visible and ultraviolet light
could not, and fog the photographic film. Sure enough, when Becquerel
developed the film, it was fogged. Becquerel reached the natural conclusion
that fluorescence involved X-rays.
He was understandably anxious to continue his experiments, but Nature
intervened with a series of cloudy days. Becquerel prepared his experiment
of film, black paper, and crystal, but the weather would not cooperate by
delivering the sunlight necessary to induce fluorescence. Overcome by im-
patience, he one day decided to develop the film anyway, perhaps hoping
that some faint fogging would show up; this would at least enable him to
correlate the degree of fogging with the amount of sunlight.
On developing the film, Becquerel was astounded to discover that
the plate was as strongly fogged as when the crystal had been exposed to a
substantial amount of direct sunlight. With the instincts of a top-flight ex-
perimenter, Becquerel realized that the fogging was being produced by the
crystal rather than the sunlight. He experimented with other uranium com-
pounds, and even with metallic uranium itself. The results were always the
same, enabling Becquerel to realize that it was not a chemical phenomenon
he was encountering, but an atomic one related to the atomic structure of
uranium itself.
 F orces and E nergy    109

Becquerel had discovered the phenomenon of radioactivity, one of sev-

eral turn-of-the-century discoveries that were to revolutionize physics. As a
result of Becquerel’s discovery, scientists realized that vast sources of energy
were obtainable not only through chemical and mechanical processes, but
through atomic ones as well.
As all great discoveries do, Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity stimu-
lated many other scientists to investigate the phenomenon. Two other sci-
entists who were so motivated were Pierre Curie and his wife, Marie. The
Curies soon discovered that thorium, radium, and polonium were also radio-
active. In 1908, the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded jointly to Becquerel
and the Curies. Marie Curie’s life was to be inextricably intertwined with
radioactivity—she not only studied it extensively and named the phenom-
enon, but her death was due to its cumulative effects.

SEMICONDUCTORS AND TRANSISTORS

As the experimenters of the seventeenth and eighteenth century discovered,

although both gravity and electricity obey an inverse square law, there are
many significant differences between them. While gravity acts equally on all
substances, different substances can have vastly different electrical proper-
ties. A copper wire and a glass rod fall at the same rate, but electrical current
passes easily through a copper wire and not through a glass rod.
A copper wire is called an electrical conductor; the term is thought to
have originated with that most daring of electrical experimenters, Benjamin
Franklin. The reason that the copper wire conducts electricity so well was not
known until the structure of the atom was discovered early in the twentieth
century. Electrical current is simply the flow of electrons, much as a current
of water is the flow of drops of water. In a metal atom, such as copper, the
electrons in the outer shell of the atom are easily induced to leave the atom
by the presence of an electric field. In a molecule of glass, the electrons are
so tightly secured that it requires an electrical field of incredible strength to
induce them to move. Materials such as glass are called insulators.
In a copper wire, the flow of current can proceed in either direction
along the wire; this behavior is characteristic of a conductor. However,
physicists had discovered certain substances during the nineteenth century,
such as silicon, germanium, and gallium, having the unusual property of
permitting current flow in one direction only. These substances are called
semiconductors.
110    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

In 1929, the Swiss physicist Felix Bloch studied these substances, and
formulated a theory involving the population of different bands by electri-
cal charge. According to Bloch, under normal circumstances the electrons
of a semiconductor’s atoms were trapped in what he called valence bands.
However, if the semiconductor received the right amount of energy from an
outside source, electrons can jump from the valence bands to what Bloch
called forbidden bands, and this enabled current to pass.
In 1945, three physicists at Bell Telephone Laboratory, John Bardeen,
Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, created the first transistor. The
name “transistor” was derived from the fact that the semiconductor could
be manipulated to transfer current across a resistor. A transistor could both
rectify current (allow it to pass in one direction only), but even more im-
portantly, it could amplify current—if a small electrical charge was passed to
the transistor, a larger electrical charge would be emitted. These properties
allowed the much simpler, stabler, and cheaper transistor to perform func-
tions that had previously been done by the more complicated, erratic, and
expensive vacuum tubes.
This is not a book about invention, but the importance of the transis-
tor to science, as well as to everyday life, simply cannot be overestimated. It
not only revolutionized consumer electronics, it made possible many of the
great achievements of science and engineering in the last half of the twentieth
century. The first transistor was an ungainly affair consisting of solid-state
devices soldered to a plate with protruding wires. By the end of the twentieth
century, millions of transistors would be combined in devices called micro-
processors, which are the “brains” behind practically every piece of advanced
electronics produced today.
The importance of the transistor was quickly recognized, as the 1956
Nobel Prize in physics went to Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley. Bardeen
was later to share a second Nobel Prize for his share in developing the BCS
(Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer) theory of superconductivity. Shockley was
to later become infamous for taking the controversial position that racial
differences on IQ tests might be the result of genetic factors, as opposed to
environmental ones.

THE WEAK AND STRONG FORCES

From the standpoint of physics, the Universe is described by particles and

the forces that act on those particles. There are four forces. A mathematical
description of gravity was first given by Isaac Newton, and the field theory
 F orces and E nergy    111

of electromagnetism by James Clerk Maxwell. Gravity and electromagnetism

are long-range forces; two particles placed at opposite ends of the Universe
will attract each other gravitationally, and if they have electric charges they
will attract or repel each other electrically.
As the twentieth century dawned, it became clear that atoms themselves
had structure, and a great deal of effort has been expended into probing this
structure. It became apparent that each atom consisted of a nucleus of pro-
tons and neutrons, surrounded by a cloud of electrons. There was an obvious
problem associated with this model of the atom. If the protons in the nucleus
had a positive electrical charge, why didn’t the nucleus simply fly apart as the
protons all repelled each other?
In 1935 Hideki Yukawa, a Japanese physicist, came up with a solution
that seems almost obvious in retrospect. There had to be some force stronger
than electrical repulsion holding the protons together. Another characteristic
this “strong force” must display was that it acted only over very short dis-
tances; if it acted over longer distances, it would certainly have already been
detected.
According to our understanding, forces act by exchanging particles
whose mass increases as the distance over which the forces act decreases. The
photon is the particle whose exchange makes electromagnetism possible.
Photons act over infinite distances, and have zero mass. Yukawa was able to
calculate the approximate mass of the particle whose exchange would make
possible the strong force. In 1947, experiments confirmed Yukawa’s predic-
tion, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1949.
The fourth force is the weak force, which is responsible for the phenom-
enon of radioactivity. It, too, is a subatomic force, acting over very short dis-
tances. Although theories have been constructed to hypothesize a fifth force,
no experiments have ever confirmed its existence—at least, to the satisfaction
of the scientific community.
Many physicists operate under the assumption that, at the instant of
the big bang, there existed only one force in the Universe. As the Universe
cooled, other forces came into existence, much as water and ice form as steam
cools. Showing that two forces are actually aspects of the same phenomenon
is known as unification. James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism
was a unification of electricity and magnetism.
Throughout the 1960s, independent work by Sheldon Glashow, Ab-
dus Salam, and Steven Weinberg suggested that at higher temperatures,
electromagnetism and the weak force would be unified into an “electroweak”
force. Just as Yukawa had predicted the existence of a particle to carry the
strong force, Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg predicted the existence of three
112    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

distinct particles to carry the electroweak force. In order to observe these

particles, it was necessary to create extremely high temperatures, which could
only be done in massive particle accelerators. Using a radical new particle
accelerator, a team of physicists at CERN (the European Organization for
Nuclear Research) discovered all of these particles in 1983.
Now that electroweak unification has been achieved, the search is on
to unify all four forces. A theory that unifies the electroweak force with the
strong force is known as a GUT (grand unified theory), and a theory that
unifies all four forces is known as a TOE (theory of everything). However,
in order to verify a TOE, using current technology it would require building
a particle accelerator almost as large as the Universe! This raises the intrigu-
ing, though highly nonscientific, question: was our Universe the result of an
attempt to prove a TOE in some other Universe?
CHAPTER 6

Life

Life is probably the biggest mystery in the Universe. Its unanswered

questions—such as “How did life begin?” and “Is there life elsewhere in the
Universe?”—are among the most tantalizing questions that have ever been
asked. But within the next few decades science will almost certainly answer
the former, and there is a good chance it can answer the latter as well.
Of course, these questions have been asked long before there was such a
thing as science. Because these questions are so profound, and there is such
a need for answers, nonscientific answers have occupied a central position in
philosophy and religion. When science has come up with answers to these
questions, conflicts have arisen between science and religion—and these
conflicts continue today.

Varieties of Life
Even before written records, man undoubtedly noticed the other forms of
life that could be seen by the naked eye—plants, insects, animals, fish, and
birds. Life existed in abundant varieties, and an obvious first move was to
categorize the various forms of living organisms.

CLASSIFICATION OF LIVING ORGANISMS

It is impossible to truly appreciate Aristotle unless one either reads a bio-

graphy or at least examines an encyclopedia. Only then will it become clear
that he was one of history’s most brilliant thinkers. He is perhaps best known
113
114    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

as a philosopher, but he is responsible for creating and systematizing the

development of logic, and was a first-rate scientist as well. Aristotle’s works
were lost for several centuries following the fall of Rome, and it is perhaps
not coincidental that these were the darkest of the Dark Ages. When his
works were rediscovered, the power of his thought was so astonishing that
for centuries he was the unquestioned authority on practically everything.
Aristotle spent a great deal of time and effort observing the different
animal species. In so doing he displayed the attributes of both a naturalist
and a scientist. He was especially interested in species that lived in the sea,
and recorded the ability of the torpedo fish (also known as the electric eel)
to stun its prey, even though he knew nothing of electricity. Noticing that
dolphins gave birth the same way as mammals, he correctly classified them
as mammals rather than fish. In fact, Aristotle’s primary contribution to
biology was that he devised a hierarchical classification scheme for over five
hundred different animal species.
In so doing, he may have been one of the first scientists to have an
intimation of the ideas of evolution. Aristotle’s hierarchies progressed from
simpler to more complex forms, and he was aware that this may have oc-
curred as the result of some progressive change. However, it would have been
impossible for him to stumble upon the mechanism of natural selection, and
he was far too good a scientist to have endorsed such a theory without being
able to devise a way to support it.
Nearly two thousand years after Aristotle, the explorations of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries discovered many species unknown to Aris-
totle, stretching his classification scheme past the breaking point. The im-
portance of a useful classification scheme cannot be overestimated, as there
are many instances in science where such schemes and great breakthroughs
have gone hand in hand.
Carl Linnaeus, a Swede who combined the roles of naturalist and biolo-
gist in the same way as Aristotle, devised the system that we still use today.
For each species of living thing, he wrote down a clear description that
pointed out how that species differed from other, similar species. He also
popularized the binomial nomenclature that is still used, in which each spe-
cies is given a generic name and a specific name. Modern man, for instance,
is homo sapiens—homo denotes the group (“man”), and sapiens the specific
characteristic (“knowing”).
Linnaeus was not content merely to classify; he organized as well. Species
with many similar traits were organized into a group called a genus. Similar
genera were organized into an order, and similar orders into a class. The
basic idea of this system is still being used, although it has been expanded
 L ife    115

somewhat to accommodate not only the new animal and plant species that
are continually being discovered, but life-forms such as bacteria and viruses
of which Linnaeus was entirely unaware.
Linnaeus lived in an era in which religion, philosophy, and science were
not as separate as they are today, and his life reflects this. He believed that
he had been directed by God to oversee this project, and thought of people
who did not agree with him as heretics. Despite these traits, reminiscent of a
religious zealot, he was known to be a caring and inspirational teacher who
trained many future scientists to continue his work.

THE DISCOVERY OF BACTERIA

If there is one quality associated with science in the public mind, it is doubt-
less intellectual brilliance. A person who is brilliant is sometimes described
as “an Einstein,” and to indicate that you don’t need to be a genius to do
something, we say, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to . . .” We know that
the achievements of Newton and Einstein transcend our abilities—even if we
had been given Kepler’s data or the results of the Michelson–Morley experi-
ment, we wouldn’t have come up with the theory of universal gravitation (in
the former case) or the theory of special relativity (in the latter).
So it may be surprising that one of the most significant achievements
in the history of science could have been performed by anyone with good
eyesight who had happened to look in the right place at the right time. It
was actually a Dutch grocer, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who had the curios-
ity to examine a drop of rainwater under the lens of a microscope, and it
was Leeuwenhoek who thus became the first person to observe the world of
bacteria—the invisible zoo.
Leeuwenhoek was an extremely competent observer who thought noth-
ing of observing the same object as much as a hundred times to make sure
that he had assimilated all the details. His skill was such that he had become
a “foreign correspondent” for London’s Royal Society, communicating his
observations along with detailed drawings. Nonetheless, his first description
of the invisible zoo must have been hard for the members of the Royal So-
ciety to credit. “They stop, they stand still as ’twere upon a point, and then
turn themselves around with that swiftness, as we see a top turn around,
the circumference they make being no bigger than a fine grain of sand.”
The Royal Society promptly commissioned Robert Hooke, England’s finest
microscopist, to build a microscope sufficiently powerful so that Leeuwen-
hoek’s findings could be confirmed—as, of course, they were.
116    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

What makes Leeuwenhoek’s discovery so significant is its impact on

medicine. The average life span nowadays is decades more than it was in
Leeuwenhoek’s era, and most of that increase is due to the ability to elimi-
nate or cure disease. In Leeuwenhoek’s day, disease was believed to be caused
by evil spirits, and the attempts to cure disease often bordered on what we
would call witchcraft today. Although it would be nearly two centuries until
bacteria were actually associated with disease, without the observations Leeu-
wenhoek made, medicine would never have emerged from the Dark Ages.
So did Leeuwenhoek’s discovery simply come as a result of being in the
right place at the right time? Or was it the result of having the “highest tech”
available in the form of the best microscopes of the era, which he himself had
constructed? Undoubtedly, both were factors. However, microscopes were
widely available at the time, and many observers were doing what Leeuwen-
hoek himself had also done—looking at the fine details of things too small
to be seen with the naked eye, such as the hairs on a fly or the sting of a bee.
It did not take much of an imagination to use a microscope to look more
closely at such objects. Nevertheless, it must have taken a substantial amount
of imagination to use a microscope to look more closely at a drop of ordinary
rainwater—either imagination, or the curiosity that has always characterized
the great scientists.
Leeuwenhoek was well aware that the quality of his microscopes gave
him the edge as an observer that high tech usually does. Even though he was
willing to allow others to use some of his lesser instruments, he once wrote,
“I keep some for my own use and through these no men living hath looked
save only myself.” During his lifetime, he resisted even the pleas of the Royal
Society. However, three months after his death, Isaac Newton received, on
behalf of the Royal Society, a cabinet containing twenty-six of Leeuwen-
hoek’s finest microscopes.

THE DISCOVERY OF ANAEROBIC ORGANISMS

It would probably not be a difficult task to write a book entitled Louis Pas-
teur’s Top 20 Contributions to Science. Pasteur appears here yet again, as he
is undoubtedly one of the seminal figures in the history of science. Here
we examine one of Pasteur’s lesser-known contributions, which would have
made the career of almost any other scientist.
Pasteur was one of those rare individuals who view adversity as simply
another challenge. After suffering a stroke in 1868 that almost killed him,
 L ife    117

and left him partially paralyzed, he still managed to produce some of his fin-
est achievements.
By this time, the process of respiration was fairly well understood. It was
known that plants use sunlight to manufacture carbohydrates from water and
carbon dioxide, and produce oxygen as a waste product during this process.
Animals breathe the oxygen and consume the carbohydrates, producing car-
bon dioxide as a waste product. This is the great cycle involving plants and
animals, the two primary kingdoms of life. It was felt that all forms of animal
life were oxygen-breathers.
One of Pasteur’s major interests throughout his life was the process of
fermentation. It had been Pasteur who discovered that fermentation was
caused by microorganisms. He had also saved the French wine industry by
recommending that wine be heated in order to sterilize the organisms that
were responsible for souring the wine.
In 1872, Pasteur happened to observe that air inhibited the movements
of the bacteria that were responsible for changing sugar solution into butyric
acid. Pasteur, whose intuition was legendary, immediately realized he had
discovered an extremely interesting phenomenon. Further investigation re-
vealed that oxygen was the inhibiting factor. Pasteur coined the word “anaer-
obic” to describe bacteria whose actions are limited by air. Today we know
that there are two types of anaerobic organisms—those that function poorly
in air, and the “obligate anaerobes” that are killed by exposure to oxygen.
We have also found that anaerobic bacteria exist in environments where
one might suspect life does not exist. Anaerobic bacteria can be found in
extremely salty environments, as well as extremely hot ones. Anaerobic
bacteria are often found in hot springs, and some strains can even survive at
temperatures close to that of boiling water.
One of the most interesting discoveries of anaerobic bacteria occurred
in 1977. John Corliss and Robert Ballard, aboard the submersible Alvin,
discovered the first “black smokers” near the Galapagos Islands. These are
deep-sea vents that belch out superheated streams of hydrogen sulfide. This
hydrogen sulfide was the energy source for a strain of anaerobic bacteria, and
the bacteria formed the base of a food chain that involved large, ornately
gilled tube worms and giant clams. This thriving community was located so
deep in the ocean that it was impossible for sunlight to penetrate. The “black
smoker” communities are the first known assemblage of life that does not
rely on energy produced by the Sun, and might conceivably be descendants
of the original life-forms to inhabit Earth. It also prompted many to consider
that similar forms of life might have arisen elsewhere in the Universe.
118    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

Anaerobic bacteria have come to play an important role in forensic sci-

ence. One of the key developments in DNA analysis was the discovery by
Kary Mullis of the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, which can create large
quantities of DNA from very small samples by successive doubling. Mullis’s
original idea worked extremely slowly, because the heat needed for each
doubling cycle killed the organisms involved in PCR, and so more organisms
had to be added at each cycle. A major improvement in making PCR practi-
cal was to use Taq bacteria, an extremely heat-resistant anaerobe that could
survive without needing to be replaced. This speeded up PCR substantially,
turning it into a formidable tool. It has also, in the period of the coronavirus
pandemic, supplied a major tool for the rapid analysis of whether someone
has COVID-19.

THE DISCOVERY OF VIRUSES

The story of viruses, like so many of the great discoveries in biology, is a

story spanning generations and continents. It starts in 1885, when the bril-
liant French chemist Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine to protect against
rabies. Pasteur, who had spent much of his career working to prove the germ
theory of disease, was unable to observe the germ that caused rabies. One of
Pasteur’s characteristics was a profound intuition concerning scientific phe-
nomena, and he concluded correctly that the germ that caused rabies was so
small, his microscope was unable to detect it.
Several of Pasteur’s assistants would go on to make noteworthy contribu-
tions of their own. One of these assistants was Charles Chamberland, who
in the course of working with Pasteur developed a series of filters for isolat-
ing bacteria. These filters, or variations of them, became standard tools in
bacteriological research.
Several years later Dmitri Ivanovsky, a Russian botanist, was working
with tobacco mosaic disease, a disease that caused the leaves of tobacco plants
to become mottled. He used filters to try to isolate the bacteria causing this
disease, but no matter how small the pores of the filter, the infective agent
of the disease was able to slip through them. Ivanovsky, whose intuition was
a notch or two below Pasteur’s, reached the conclusion that the filters were
defective, and had simply been unable to trap the bacteria.
A few years later Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutch botanist, performed
a similar set of experiments relating to tobacco mosaic disease as had Iva-
novsky. Beijerinck, however, came to a much different conclusion: the to-
bacco mosaic disease was caused by a living, though nonbacterial, agent that
 L ife    119

was small enough to pass through the pores of the filter. Moreover, whatever
caused the disease was alive, as the infective agent would grow in a healthy
plant and could be passed on to another healthy plant. Beijerinck named the
unseen agent a “filterable virus,” virus being the Latin word for “poison.”
Beijerinck went on to demonstrate that numerous diseases, among
which were polio, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, and the common cold,
were caused by viruses. However, the nature of viruses remained unknown
until Wendell Stanley, an American biochemist, performed an experiment
whose results were completely unanticipated: he managed to crystallize the
tobacco mosaic virus. This was not only an extraordinary experimental
achievement, but one that raised a question still being debated today: are
viruses alive? One of the criteria for life is that it be able to reproduce. Viruses
can reproduce, but they cannot do so on their own. They must have a host
cell whose reproductive machinery they can commandeer for this purpose.
The development of the electron microscope, which can magnify more
powerfully than can optical microscopes, finally made it possible for scien-
tists to see viruses and confirm Pasteur’s intuition. Recent developments have
made it possible to deduce the structure of viruses. A typical virus consists
simply of a molecule of DNA surrounded by a protective protein coat. It is
the smallness and simplicity of viruses that make them so difficult to defeat;
there are only a limited number of strategies available to destroy a virus or
prevent it from reproducing. This explains why, even though science (actu-
ally technology) can put a man on the moon, it can’t cure the common
cold—yet.
Had Wendell Stanley been born forty or fifty years later, he might have
led the New England Patriots to their many Super Bowl victories, rather than
Bill Belichick. As an undergraduate at Earlham College, Stanley played foot-
ball and expected to be a football coach. While visiting the University of Il-
linois, he got involved in a conversation with a chemistry professor, and soon
found himself more interested in chemical equations than football diagrams.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

Perhaps if science were conducted by computers and not by human beings,

there would be no such thing as a pecking order among scientists. But sci-
ence is conducted by human beings, and a pecking order has been in exis-
tence for more than a century.
Lord Kelvin, one of the foremost physicists of the nineteenth century,
delineated the pecking order succinctly when he described naturalists and
120    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

paleontologists as stamp collectors. If it could not be made into an equation,

Kelvin didn’t really consider it as science.
That prejudice exists even now. If one looks down the list of Nobel Prize
winners in the category of physiology or medicine, the first true naturalists
show up in 1973. Even then they were all grouped together, as if the Nobel
Committee felt that by giving an award to one naturalist, they might as well
give it to several so they wouldn’t have to do it again soon. Each of these
naturalists has a lifetime of achievement, but we will recount one of the ca-
reer high points for each.
Karl von Frisch is best known for his brilliant investigation of com-
munication in bees. One of the most important activities of a beehive is the
discovery of sources of food. In order to expedite this, the colony sends out
scout bees. If a scout bee finds an attractive food source, it brings pollen and
nectar back to the hive. The next item on the agenda is to inform the hive of
the location of the food source. Although the obvious thing would be for the
scout to simply fly to the source, the scout’s energy reserves are depleted and
time is short. The scout communicates the location, in terms of distance and
direction, by engaging in a complicated dance known as the “waggle” dance.
The scout describes the distance by the time spent in waggling, and the direc-
tion relative to the sun by the angle the waggle is to vertical. Communicat-
ing such information is a pretty impressive accomplishment for insects; one
wonders how it arose and got passed from generation to generation.
Konrad Lorenz is the author of a classic study on instincts in geese.
When baby geese emerge from the egg, they recognize their mother not by
sight but by a specific combination of sounds. Lorenz discovered that baby
geese will assume that anything emitting these sounds is the mother, no mat-
ter how unlike a goose the author of those sounds might be. This procedure
is known as imprinting. To demonstrate this, Lorenz himself emitted the
appropriate sounds, and the baby geese imprinted on him as their mother.
It is quite amusing to see a movie of Lorenz, in winter coat and galoshes and
smoking a pipe, being followed by a number of baby geese.
Niko Tinbergen demonstrated the instinctive behavior of the stickle-
back, a type of fish, in defending its territory against intruding sticklebacks.
Tinbergen discovered that the stickleback did not recognize other stickle-
backs, but instead instinctively attacked anything with a characteristic patch
of red on its underside (sticklebacks have red bellies). Male sticklebacks
exposed to a stickleback-shaped dummy with a white patch on its underside
showed very little reaction, but when they were exposed to circles or squares
with red on the lower portion, they attacked viciously.
 L ife    121

These discoveries have shed light on the complexities of animal behavior.

In so doing, perhaps they can also illuminate some of our own.
One of the most intriguing studies in animal behavior would have satis-
fied even Lord Kelvin as to its scientific merits. The behavior of altruism
in human beings can be understood from an emotional and intellectual
standpoint—a man will risk his life to save a drowning child, even though
he does not know the child. However, social insects such as wasps also dis-
play altruism; they will sacrifice their lives for others. William Hamilton
performed a brilliant mathematical analysis to demonstrate that this behavior
confirms Darwinian theory. He showed that the probability that an animal
will display altruism increases with the number of genes the animal shares
in common with the animal to which it is displaying the altruistic behavior.

The Science of Life

One of the reasons that the Dark Ages were dark is that scientific inquiry was
largely inhibited by the religious belief that all the great questions had been
answered—if not by Aristotle, then by the religious authorities. Most of what
was done in terms of science took place in the Middle East, and commu-
nication between European and Middle Eastern cultures tended to take the
form of military conflict. But, with the coming of the Middle Ages, people
started to see how knowledge about the world around them could make life
better in a measurable way, and the scientific inquiry that had started with
the Greeks resumed.
Additionally, two major technological innovations greatly accelerated
the advance of science—the telescope for astronomy, and the microscope for
biology. These two devices are right up there with Gutenberg’s invention of
the printing press as the technological developments that have brought major
advances to humanity.

THE DISCOVERY OF CELLS

If the personality of an individual is the result of his or her childhood expe-

riences, Robert Hooke’s childhood must have been a very unpleasant one.
We do know that he was scarred from smallpox, and that he suffered what
he deemed a humiliation when he went to Oxford, because he had to wait
on tables to put himself through college. In any case, Hooke became a quar-
relsome, jealous, and miserly individual. Despite his many achievements,
122    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

it is even possible that, on balance, his net contribution to science was

negative—he quarreled so violently with Isaac Newton that Newton had a
nervous breakdown.
While at Oxford, Hooke acquired a justly deserved reputation for me-
chanical ingenuity. As a result, he began to work with Robert Boyle, who
would eventually construct Boyle’s law, a mathematical relationship between
the temperature, volume, and pressure of a gas. It was Hooke who con-
structed an improved mechanical pump for Boyle to use in his investigations.
In 1662, Hooke’s mechanical prowess earned him the position of “cu-
rator of experiments” for the Royal Society, the only paid position in the
Society. A year later he was elected to the Royal Society. Instead of mellow-
ing Hooke, these honors gave him a sword to wield against those he felt had
wronged him, and he spent much of his career arguing that his ideas and
devices had anticipated the achievements of others.
There was some justification in this, as he had planted seeds for several
very important developments, but these seeds had not borne the significant
fruit others would harvest. He had some of the basic ideas on the theory of
gravitation that Newton eventually developed, and developed an erroneous
wave theory of light that anticipated some of Huygens’s thoughts. Hooke did
make significant contributions, though, to astronomy, physics, and biology.
In astronomy, he was one of the first individuals to discover double stars. In
physics, he made an extensive study of springs, culminating in Hooke’s law,
which states that the restoring force on a stretched spring is proportional to
the distance it is stretched from equilibrium. His investigation of springs
eventually led to their use in watches and clocks.
It was in the field of biology, though, that Hooke’s impact was greatest.
He was England’s greatest microscopist, using his mechanical ability to de-
velop the compound microscope, with which he confirmed Leeuwenhoek’s
discovery of bacteria. In those days, microscopists would grab anything
handy and put it under the microscope, and it was Hooke’s good fortune one
day to observe a thin sliver of dried cork. To his surprise, he observed a regu-
lar array of tiny rectangular pores. His father had been a clergyman, and the
holes reminded him of the small rooms, known as cells, inhabited by monks
in a monastery. Hooke named them “cells,” and cells they remain to this day.
Hooke had been looking at a piece of dead cork, and the cells he de-
scribed were actually what we now think of as live cells that had been drained
of fluid. Cells are the basic building blocks of life, and occupy a position in
biology similar to the one occupied by atoms in chemistry. Hooke made his
discovery in 1665. The next year, London burned down in the Great Fire,
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and Hooke, occupied by its rebuilding and other aspects of science, never did
any further work in microscopy.
Possibly because Hooke was such an unpleasant person, history has been
reluctant to credit him with another significant contribution: he anticipated
some aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution by almost two centuries. He
used his microscope to examine fossils and, noting that no such creatures
were still around, he wrote, “There may have been divers Species of things
wholly destroyed and annihilated, and divers others changed and varied,
for we find that there are some Kinds of Animals and Vegetables peculiar
to certain Places and not to be found elsewhere.” Although speculation is a
useful adjunct to science, science requires proof, and Darwin (and Wallace)
amassed the evidence to confirm Hooke’s ideas.

THE CELL THEORY

Biology is in many respects a more complicated science than physics or

chemistry. The structures with which it deals are more intricate, and the
relationships between them sometimes exceedingly complex. As a result,
biological theories are a little like biological objects; they tend to exhibit slow
growth and arrive at maturity after a rather lengthy process. Such was the
case of the cell theory.
When Robert Hooke first observed and named cells, he did so by look-
ing at thin slices of dried cork. Since the cork was dead, the cell fluid was
no longer present, and Hooke saw only the dried cell walls, not the activity
that went on in the room. Over the next century and a half, microscopes
improved to the point where biologists were able to observe living cells, and
they noted that these cells were filled with fluid. Biologists of this period
recognized that living things consisted of organs and tissues, but even though
they could see cells within these structures, they did not regard cells as the
building blocks.
Plant cells are easier to observe than animal cells because plant cells,
unlike animal cells, have cell walls. The improving power of microscopes
started to make itself felt in 1831, when the Scottish botanist Robert Brown
first noticed a small dark body, which he named the nucleus, that appears
in all plant cells.
Around this same time, a German lawyer named Matthias Schleiden was
so unhappy in his profession that he attempted suicide. As a cure for depres-
sion, he took up the study of botany first as a hobby, and then as a profes-
sion. Rather than concentrating on plant classification, as most botanists of
124    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

the time were doing, Schleiden preferred microscopic examination of plant

tissues. In 1838, he stated his cell theory for plants: all plant tissues are made
of cells. Moreover, Schleiden recognized the importance of the nucleus that
Brown had discovered in the construction of new cells, although Schleiden
erroneously thought that new plant cells budded from the nucleus.
One year later Theodor Schwann, a respected German physiologist,
independently arrived at virtually the same conclusions for animal cells.
Schwann also proposed that eggs are cells, and that all life starts as a single
cell. Schleiden and Schwann had formulated the basics of cell theory, a
theory that occupies roughly the same position in biology that the atomic
theory does in chemistry.
Two decades later Rudolph Virchow, a respected German physiologist,
was to unite the separate theories of Schleiden and Schwann under the pithy
axiom “all cells arise from cells.” This was the first theoretical broadside
aimed at the theory of spontaneous generation, which Pasteur’s experiments
a few years later would completely demolish.
Nonetheless, even after Virchow, the process of the production of new
cells still remained to be discovered. It would require a new generation,
armed with even more powerful microscopes, to discover that cells actually
divide by a process called “mitosis,” and that it is this cell division that is
responsible for the construction of new cells.
Virchow is one of many noteworthy scientists who have succumbed to
the trap of falling in love with their own theory. He attempted to extend the
cell theory to a theory of disease, hypothesizing that disease is caused when
cells revolt against the organism to which they belong. Although one might
regard forms of cancer in this light, diseases caused by germs obviously do
not fall under its scope. As a result, Virchow refused to accept Pasteur’s germ
theory of disease, and Virchow also made it difficult for Robert Koch to
obtain a position to continue the investigations in which he had attributed
specific diseases to specific germs.

PHOTOSYNTHESIS

There are two great kingdoms of life on Earth: plants and animals. They exist
in glorious harmony with one another, each quite literally existing by taking
in the other’s dirty laundry. Animals take in oxygen, the waste product of
plants, and produce carbon dioxide via respiration, or breathing. Plants take
in this carbon dioxide and produce both oxygen (which animals breathe) and
starch (which animals eat) via photosynthesis.
 L ife    125

The end of the eighteenth century witnessed dramatic developments

in both politics and science, and many of the scientists of the time were
involved in both. Inoculation as a preventive measure for smallpox was just
becoming a recognized medical procedure, and Dutch physician Jan Ingen-
housz lived in England long enough to become an expert in this area. As a
result, he was called to Vienna to administer inoculations to the royal family,
and eventually became the personal physician of the Empress Maria Theresa.
He returned to England in 1779, where he was made a member of the Royal
Society. At the same time, he began investigating the chemistry of plants.
Ingenhousz established the broad outlines of what is undoubtedly the
most important chemical reaction on Earth, as it is the chemical reaction
without which the animal kingdom would not exist. He established that
plants took in carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen, but that this reaction
would only take place in the presence of sunlight. To confirm this, Ingen-
housz placed plants in a lightless environment, and established that the pro-
duction of oxygen ceased. The term photosynthesis, which is used for this
reaction, means “production in light.”
The next major step in the investigation of photosynthesis was taken
by Julius von Sachs, a German botanist. By the middle of the nineteenth
century, the green pigment chlorophyll had been discovered and shown to
be distributed throughout the green portion of the plant. Von Sachs showed
that chlorophyll was confined to certain portions of the cell, which were
later called chloroplasts, and it was within the chloroplasts that chlorophyll
catalyzed the reaction that transformed carbon dioxide in the presence of
sunlight to starch, in the process giving off oxygen as a waste product. This
also explained why plants appear green. Sunlight consists of all colors of the
spectrum, but chlorophyll does not use green light in the photosynthetic
reaction, and the green light is thus reflected for us to see.
But what sequence of chemical reactions enabled chlorophyll to trans-
form carbon dioxide into starch? Because the reactions could not be du-
plicated in a test tube, photosynthesis proved difficult to analyze until the
American chemist Melvin Calvin began work in 1949. Calvin manufactured
carbon dioxide with radioactive carbon and allowed plants only a few seconds
to make use of the carbon dioxide. He then mashed up the plant cells and
identified the individual components by a newly invented procedure known
as paper chromatography. Those compounds containing radioactive carbon
must have been manufactured very early in the photosynthetic process.
By 1957 Calvin had established the complete chain of chemical reactions
by which photosynthesis is accomplished. Ingenhousz had established that
plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, von Sachs had shown that
126    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

this was done by chlorophyll inside the chloroplasts, and Calvin had deter-
mined the precise chemical reactions. From the discovery of photosynthesis
to its complete description had taken almost two centuries.
The study of photosynthesis illustrates how critical technology can be
to scientific advance. It took Calvin the better part of a decade to obtain
his results, and he was using radioactive tracers and paper chromatography,
the high-tech tools of his day. Modern technology can perform the same
tasks thousands of times faster. Today, scientists use lasers that deliver light
pulses lasting less than a billionth of a second to determine precisely how
photosynthesis proceeds inside chlorophyll and bacteriorhodopsin, another
light-sensitive molecule.

MITOSIS AND MEIOSIS

Every so often science stalls after an obviously great advance. This happened
around 1840, after Schleiden and Schwann had put forth the theory of cells.
The primary difficulty was that cells are composed mostly of transparent
material, which made observation of the crucial details of cell processes ex-
tremely difficult.
However, just as there are times when progress stalls, there are also those
times when a fortuitous discovery in another area turns out to be a catalyst
for extremely rapid advance. The discovery by William Perkin of synthetic
dyes in the early 1860s turned out to be a boon for cytologists, the scientists
engaged in the investigation of cells.
Perkin, of course, thought of his discovery of synthetic dyes from the
commercial standpoint of making colorfast fabrics. The cytologists, most
notable Paul Ehrlich and Walther Flemming, soon learned that certain dyes
were selectively absorbed by different portions of the cell. This technique
was called staining.
Ehrlich and Flemming each used staining in a different fashion. Ehrlich,
who was a student of Robert Koch, the father of bacteriology, used staining
first in the identification of the germs responsible for different diseases. He
then adapted the chemistry of dyes to the treatment of disease.
Flemming, however was a biologist, and he used the technique of stain-
ing to investigate processes within the cell. He coined the term “chromatin”
from the Greek word for color, to describe the material within the cell that
absorbed the dye.
Flemming dyed a large number of cells in growing tissue, and it was
inevitable that some of these cells would be caught in different stages of the
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cell division cycle. As the process of cell division began, the chromatin orga-
nized itself into short, threadlike rods that Flemming called “chromosomes,”
a Greek term meaning “colored bodies.” Whenever cell division took place,
the appearance of these chromosomes was so characteristic that Flemming
named the process “mitosis,” from the Greek word for thread.
The key feature of mitosis is that the chromosomes double in number in
the original cell. The chromosomes are then pulled apart to opposite ends of
the cell, with half the chromosomes going to each end. The cell then divides
into two cells. Because the chromosomes doubled in the original cell, each
of the two resulting cells now has the same number of chromosomes as the
original cell.
Mitosis ensures that, when cell division takes place, the two resulting
cells are duplicates of each other. However, this is not the procedure that
takes place in sexual reproduction, when the sperm cell and ovum join. The
chromosomes from each cell do not double, but rather one from the sperm
cell intertwines with the corresponding chromosome from the ovum cell in a
process called “crossing over.” The intertwined pair then splits up. This pro-
cess, discovered by the Belgian cytologist Edouard Van Beneden, is termed
“meiosis.” The key aspect of meiosis is that a chromosome resulting from the
union of sperm cell and ovum receives half of its genes from the sperm cell
and half from the ovum. The discovery of meiosis provided the biological
explanation for Mendel’s laws of genetics, and is the reason why a baby may
have her father’s eyes, but her mother’s nose.
Flemming actually realized that the process of mitosis did not occur in
sexual reproduction, but was unable to document what actually happened.
When Van Beneden worked out the details of meiosis, the two key parts of
the puzzle for the understanding of genetics were present: what happened
in meiosis, and Mendel’s laws. Unfortunately, Mendel had died a few years
previously, and his results had been ignored because statistics, with which
Mendel had worked, was an unfamiliar tool to botanists. It wasn’t until
fifteen years later that Mendel’s work was rediscovered, and its significance
might not have been realized had the explanation of meiosis not existed.

How Life Changes

Ernst Haeckel, like Thomas Young, was a polymath—a naturalist who was,
among other things, a physician, a philosopher, and a marine biologist.
Haeckel was aware of the importance of marketing in science as well as in
commerce, and he characterized one of his ideas with the catchy phrase
128    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” As Haeckel intended it, ontogeny—the

development of an individual organism—parallels the development of the
species, known as phylogeny.
Although this theory is no longer widely held, the idea that the individ-
ual life may in some way parallel something larger actually shows up in how
the changing of an individual occurs in the two primary ways that species
themselves change. The normal course of life is smooth—birth, childhood,
adulthood, aging, and death—corresponding to evolution. But sometimes
the life of an individual is cut short by disease or violence. The same thing
happens on a larger scale, and a species becomes extinct through a more
dramatic process.

THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

Almost everyone has heard of Charles Darwin, but hardly anyone has heard
of Alfred Wallace. Yet Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace had essentially
the same great idea, developed from similar experiences. If Wallace were alive
today, he would not be surprised to learn that his name is nowhere near as
widely known as Darwin’s, because Wallace’s life consisted of one piece of
bad luck after another.
Darwin had been fortunate to come from a well-to-do family; his father
was a wealthy doctor and his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood, was the head of the
famous Wedgwood pottery manufacturers. As a result, Darwin could afford
to take a position as unpaid naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle when it sailed for
the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador in 1831. Five years in this extraordinary
locale gave Darwin many of the ideas that were later to become part of his
epic book, The Origin of Species.
Alfred Wallace, however, had to earn a living, and so he became a
surveyor. He later decided that he would rather try to make a living doing
what he liked. In order to make a living as a naturalist he set sail in 1848 for
South America to collect rare species. Four years of observing the profusion
of life in the Amazon valley led Wallace to many of the same ideas that had
occurred to Darwin. Unfortunately, after he had assembled his collection, he
departed for England on a boat carrying a load of resin, a highly flammable
substance. With typical Wallace luck, the boat caught fire, and the results of
his four years of collecting were totally destroyed.
The parallels between their two lives were to continue. Both arrived back
from South America with ideas about how species came about, but both
initially could not conceive of a mechanism to generate new species. After
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returning to England, however, each happened to read Thomas Malthus’s

Essay on the Principle of Population, in which Malthus observed that popula-
tions multiply faster than food resources. It then occurred to both Darwin
and Wallace that the species best adapted to its environment would obtain
more of the resources necessary to support life. Thus was born the theory of
natural selection, the mechanism by which evolution occurs.
All this occurred in 1838 to Darwin, who wrote up a thirty-five-page
draft, which he expanded in 1842 to several hundred pages. Recognizing that
it would be an intellectual bombshell, he arranged to have it published post-
humously, possibly so that he could avoid the conflict he felt certain would
occur. However, his other researches made him a well-known naturalist, and
so when Wallace wrote up his own observations on evolution in 1858, he
submitted a “preprint” to Darwin for comment.
Darwin was thunderstruck. As he put it, “I never saw a more striking
coincidence; if Wallace had my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could not
have made a better short abstract!” Darwin now faced a dilemma, but friends
of the two men arranged for both Darwin and Wallace to read their papers
before a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. Hardly anyone noticed.
However, Darwin’s plans for a posthumous publication of his theory were no
longer feasible. A year later, The Origin of Species was published. Ironically,
Darwin, who would rather have avoided the fuss, would forever be the name
associated with evolution.
Both Wallace and Darwin were passionate naturalists who from child-
hood had preferred traipsing through the countryside observing and col-
lecting to more scholarly activities. Darwin had gone to Cambridge, but
preferred collecting beetles to attending class (Wallace had evidenced similar
preferences). As Darwin put it, “I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on
tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand;
then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I
popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth.” Wallace
could undoubtedly have related similar tales.

THE DEATH OF THE DINOSAURS

The first dinosaur fossil was discovered in 1822 in England by Mary Ann
Mantell. Twenty years later the British fossil hunter Richard Owen coined
the term “dinosaur” from the Greek words meaning “terrible lizard.” In
1854, Owen prepared an exhibit of dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace in Lon-
don. This exhibit captured the public’s fancy, beginning a love affair that
130    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

shows no sign of abating, as the box office receipts for Jurassic Park and its
sequels clearly demonstrate.
The first dinosaurs appeared approximately 225 million years ago, and
were the dominant life-form on Earth for over 100 million years. At the end
of the Cretaceous period, some 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs abruptly
vanished. It was one of the great mysteries of paleontology: what killed the
dinosaurs?
Numerous theories were advanced to explain their disappearance. One
possibility was that the newly evolved mammals, smaller and faster, ate the
eggs of the dinosaurs in such numbers that the dinosaurs perished. A weak-
ness of this theory was that crocodiles, which also lay eggs, survived. Another
possibility was graphically depicted in the Disney movie Fantasia, in which
the dinosaurs died of thirst under a scorching sun. A variant of this was the
explosion of a nearby supernova, which showered the Earth with ultraviolet
radiation that proved lethal to the dinosaurs. It was also known that massive
volcanic eruptions occurred shortly before the extinction of the dinosaurs;
perhaps this was in some way related.
In 1980, Walter Alvarez was examining a site in Italy, where the boundary
between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods (known as the K-T boundary)
was clearly evident. Walter asked his father, Luis, to help him analyze a
thin clay layer that marked the dividing line between the two periods. Luis
Alvarez was well-positioned to perform this task, as he was a physicist who
had won a Nobel Prize and was at the University of California at Berkeley,
where he had access to the necessary equipment. With the help of Frank
Asaro and Helen Michel, they discovered that the clay had a much greater
concentration of iridium than normal, and this iridium concentration was to
characterize the K-T boundary throughout the world.
The Alvarezes, Asaro, and Michel proposed that a large asteroid or
comet, enriched in iridium, had collided with the Earth just at the end of
the Cretaceous. The dust thrown up by this collision had stayed in the at-
mosphere, blocking the passage of sunlight and preventing plants from pho-
tosynthesizing, thus destroying the crucial first link in the food chain. With
the cessation of plant growth, many species would be forced into extinction.
This attractive theory generated widespread appeal, but much work
still had to be done to verify it. One vital link would be the discovery of a
large impact crater at the appropriate time, and one such candidate has been
found in the ocean off Mexico. Even though this theory has not yet been
completely accepted—volcanic eruptions still have their supporters among
paleontologists—it has forced a rethinking of the role played in the history of
the Earth by catastrophes such as meteor collisions. These catastrophes may
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well have prompted many of the great mass extinctions that have occurred
since the development of life on Earth.
This theory not only may explain the demise of the dinosaurs, but may,
in some small way, have helped to prevent the extinction of man. After this
theory was proposed, several scientists suggested that a nuclear war might
well produce a similar effect, throwing enough dust and soot into the at-
mosphere to lower the global temperature significantly. This would have an
extremely adverse impact on plant growth. This “nuclear winter” scenario
was (and still is) the subject of serious investigation and debate, and the real
possibility of such an occurrence may well have lowered the potential for a
nuclear war. Now, however, it is the other side of the coin—the possibility of
warmer weather produced by the greenhouse gases accompanying the burn-
ing of fossil fuels—that is of greater concern to the scientific community.
CHAPTER 7

Genetics and DNA

One of the great accomplishments of science has been to understand

genetics—the mechanism of inheritance. This accomplishment—and what
we do with it—may well be the standard by which our species will be mea-
sured. Understanding and controlling this mechanism enables us to make
crops more productive, and to direct the future evolution not only of other
species, but also ourselves.

The Laws of Genetics

Somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand years ago, mankind underwent
perhaps the most significant change in history: changing from a society based
on hunting animals and gathering edible plants to a society based on farm-
ing and domesticated animals. There is a tremendous advantage to be gained
by having stronger and more productive domesticated animals. It was no-
ticed early that larger and stronger animals tend to have larger and stronger
offspring. However, the mechanism that created this was unknown at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, at about the time that Johann Mendel,
son of a Czechoslovakian farmer, was born.
Mendel’s parents did their best to secure a good education for him by
placing him in a monastery, where he took the name Gregor. The monks
there sent him on to the University of Vienna to obtain a formal diploma as
a teacher. Mendel, however, was a poor student, and his examiner, observ-
ing that he “lacks insight and the requisite clarity of knowledge,” failed him.
At the time, it was generally believed that the mechanism governing in-
heritance worked by averaging: a red plant crossed with a white plant would
133
134    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

have pink offspring, pink being the “average”’ of red and white. On return-
ing to the monastery, Mendel pursued a different viewpoint. He hypoth-
esized that each inherited characteristic (now called “genes”), such as size or
color, came in two varieties, which he called dominant and recessive. If an
organism inherited a dominant gene from either parent, then that dominant
gene would be expressed in the organism. Only if the organism inherited
recessive genes from both parents would it display recessive characteristics.
To illustrate this principle, Mendel raised pure-bred tall and short peas,
and then crossed them. The first-generation hybrids were all tall, each having
inherited a dominant tall gene and a recessive short one. When the hybrids
were crossed, roughly three-quarters of the plants were tall, and one-quarter
were short; none were of intermediate height. Mendel constructed a math-
ematical model for this, pointing out that there were four possible second-
generation plants. One would have inherited a tall gene from both parents,
one would have inherited a tall gene from the male parent only, one would
have inherited a tall gene from the female parent only, and one would have
inherited a short gene from both parents. Since the tall gene was dominant,
three-quarters of the second-generation plants should be tall.
These brilliantly constructed experiments, along with Mendel’s expla-
nations, were published in the Journal of the Brno Natural History Society,
where they were immediately ignored by the scientific community. Mendel
attempted to publicize them by sending copies of the article to several distin-
guished scientists. He might have continued his efforts along this line, but a
rather unexpected development occurred: he was elected abbot of the mon-
astery. Mendel took his duties seriously and mostly abandoned his research
for the remainder of his life.
Then, in 1900, a remarkable coincidence occurred. Three investigators
(Hugo de Vries, Karl Correns, and Erich von Seysenegg) independently
rediscovered Mendel’s results. They each instituted a thorough search of
the literature, and all three discovered Mendel’s prior work in the obscure
journal in which it was published. In the best scientific tradition, when they
published their results, they all gave credit to Mendel.
Mendel apparently did have some interest in pursuing his work on ge-
netics, and after he was elected abbot of his monastery he tried to extend his
method of experimentation with pea plants to the animal kingdom, choosing
to work with bees. As a result, he developed a hybrid bee, which gave excel-
lent honey. Unfortunately these bees were extremely ferocious, being much
more prone to sting than the standard honeybee. The bees were subsequently
destroyed. Mendel apparently was not only the father of genetics; he was the
father of “killer bees” as well. One can only wonder if the Africanized “killer
 G enetics and D N A     135

bees” that invaded southern California toward the end of the twentieth cen-
tury would be doing so if Mendel’s work in this area had been adequately
publicized.

The Biochemistry of Genetics

Mendel’s laws of genetics explained how characteristics were inherited. What
was then needed was an explanation of the physical mechanism behind those
laws. This physical mechanism was molecular, and it took almost a century
before it was fully worked out.

CHROMOSOMAL INHERITANCE AND MUTATIONS

The middle of the nineteenth century saw two great revolutions in biology—
Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Mendel’s laws of genetics—although the
existence of the latter was only unearthed at the beginning of the twentieth
century. There was still a great deal of debate concerning the validity of these
theories, and much of it centered on the evolution of new species.
According to Darwin, natural selection was the driving force behind evo-
lution. Natural selection might explain why antelope species became swifter,
as the swifter antelopes would be the ones most likely to escape predators.
Mendelian genetics could explain the proportion of blue-eyed children born
to brown-eyed parents. However, neither theory seemed able to explain how
an entirely new species, such as human beings, arose.
The Dutch biologist Hugo de Vries had shown that in one generation,
large variations in plants could produce an entirely new species. De Vries felt
that these large variations, which were called “mutations,” could explain the
existence of new species of animals. Thomas Hunt Morgan, an American
geneticist who favored de Vries’s theories, decided to test them.
To do so, Morgan worked with fruit flies. These insects had many ad-
vantages from the standpoint of genetics. They were small and they prolifer-
ated extremely rapidly, so many generations could be studied in a short pe-
riod of time. Equally important, the cells of the fruit fly contained only four
chromosomes. At the time that Morgan began his work, the chromosomes
were suspected of carrying genetic information.
However, there was a problem with this theory. Humans have only two
dozen chromosomes, yet there are thousands of inherited characteristics. If
the chromosomes did indeed carry genetic information, there must be many
136    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

such characteristics, called genes, on each chromosome. By using fruit flies

and keeping careful track of the characteristics of each generation, and cor-
relating this with the physical makeup of the chromosomes, Morgan was able
to confirm that each chromosome did indeed carry a specific set of genes.
Morgan actually managed to do considerably more than confirm the
chromosomal theory of inheritance. He was able to show that pairs of chro-
mosomes occasionally switched portions of their material. This phenom-
enon, which Morgan called “crossing over,” introduced a new variability into
the biology of inheritance. Normal inheritance allowed for small changes
from generation to generation; “crossing over” provided a mechanism for the
significant changes de Vries had spotted in plants.
Through ingenious data handling and experimentation, Morgan was
also able to pinpoint the physical location on the chromosome where a
particular gene could be found. He was thus able to establish correlations
between various genes. Today we know there are many such correlations in
the human chromosomes. For instance, it is well known that men are much
more liable to be color-blind than women. In 1911, Morgan began drawing
up maps of the chromosomes of the fruit fly, becoming in the process the
first gene mapper. Gene mapping is even more important and significant to-
day in the era of genetic engineering; the successful Human Genome Project
is merely the latest extension of Morgan’s pioneering efforts.
Many individuals inherited not genes from Morgan, but his interest in
biology. His student Hermann Muller managed to induce mutations in fruit
flies by the use of X-rays, thus demonstrating yet another mechanism by
which mutations could occur. Finally, his niece Isabel Morgan performed
pioneering experiments in devising a vaccine to prevent polio in chimpan-
zees, and this work proved extremely important in Jonas Salk’s development
of a polio vaccine.

STRUCTURE AND SYNTHESIS OF AMINO ACIDS

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the investigation of the chemical

structure of molecules associated with living things was well under way. The
analytical techniques of the time could deduce the composition of molecules
such as sugars and fats, but the proteins would turn out to be substantially
larger, and consequently considerably more difficult to decipher.
Justus von Liebig, one of the great German chemists, had shown that the
proteins were necessary to life, as they supplied substances such as nitrogen,
sulfur, and phosphorus that are not present in fats or sugars. One chemical
 G enetics and D N A     137

technique used attempted to break down a molecule by heating it in acid;

this procedure decomposed cellulose into its glucose components. Henri
Braconnot tried the same procedure on gelatine, obtaining a sweetish, crys-
talline acid he called “glycine.” When he tried the same technique on muscle
tissue he obtained another crystalline acid he called “leucine.” Later analysis
would determine that both these acids had a similar structure, including an
amine group (NH3). They were named “amino acids.”
The list of amino acids grew. Liebig would also discover tyrosine. Threo-
nine, the last of nineteen nutritionally important amino acids, was discovered
by William Rose in 1935. By the end of the nineteenth century, the chemists
were certain that the building blocks of proteins were amino acids, just as the
building block of cellulose had been shown to be glucose. However, there
was only one glucose molecule, but there were many different amino acids.
All the amino acids had two features in common—the amine group,
and a carboxyl group. Emil Fischer, a brilliant German chemist, believed
that proteins were constructed by stringing together amino acids, the amine
group at the head of one amino acid joining the carboxyl group at the tail of
the next by means of a bridge he called a “peptide bond.” By 1907, Fischer
was able to synthesize a sequence of eighteen amino acids linked by peptide
bonds. However, this was not a true protein in the sense that it did not exist
in nature. Twenty-five years later Fischer’s student, Max Bergmann, con-
clusively demonstrated the truth of Fischer’s theory. Bergmann showed that
natural digestive enzymes, which broke down proteins into their component
amino acids, attacked Fischer’s synthetic molecules in exactly the same man-
ner. The digestive enzymes are specifically tailored to cut only one type of
bond, so the bond joining the amino acids in the synthetic molecules must
have been the same one that joined the amino acids in the proteins.
William Rose, who had discovered the last of the nutritionally important
amino acids, devoted his career to demonstrating which amino acids were
necessary for the diet, and precisely what quantities were needed. He also
discovered which amino acids the body could synthesize, and which must
be supplied through diet. Rose’s work was a classic example of science in the
public interest. As a result of Rose’s investigations, it is known that certain
amino acids are not present in vegetables, and anyone who follows a vegetar-
ian regime must be sure to supplement the diet with the missing amino acids.
Emil Fischer’s work was also one of the foundations of the modern
pharmaceutical industry. He synthesized barbituric acid, which is used as
a sedative, and many commonly used sedatives are barbiturates. Fischer,
whose professional career was marked by a string of successes, was to en-
counter great tragedy in his personal life. He organized food and chemical
138    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

production for the German government during World War I, during which
two of his three sons were killed. Depressed by this, as well as the fact that
he was suffering from cancer, he committed suicide in 1919.

THE STRUCTURE OF DNA

The search for the mechanism behind inheritance resembled the plot of
many of the classic movies of the last quarter of the twentieth century. It
was Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the prize the secret of life itself. It was The
Odd Couple, with as unlikely a pair of protagonists as the ones Neil Simon
constructed. It was Rocky, with the challenger going up against the reigning
champ. Throw in a little sex and a brilliant and talented woman doomed
to a tragically early death, and you have the elements of one of the great
dramas—scientific or otherwise—of all time.
The story starts, as previously discussed, with Gregor Mendel, the
Austrian monk who discovered the laws governing inherited characteristics.
Soon after, scientists began the long struggle to discover the mechanism by
which Mendel’s laws were enacted. In 1944, Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod,
and Maclyn McCarty demonstrated that deoxyribonucleic acid (soon to be
universally known as DNA) was the substance through which inherited char-
acteristics were transmitted.
This was only the first piece of the puzzle. Still to be determined was
precisely how DNA did what it did. By 1951, the chemical composition of
DNA had been ascertained—it consisted of sugars and phosphates, which
are fairly simple compounds, and four bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and
thymine. It was also known that, even though different samples of DNA
might have differing amounts of the four bases, the amount of adenine was
always the same as the amount of thymine, and the amount of cytosine was
always the same as the amount of guanine.
Hot on the trail of the structure of the DNA molecule was Linus Paul-
ing, unquestionably the world’s leading biochemist. Almost complete new-
comers to the problem were James Watson, a young American postdoctoral
student recently arrived in England, and Francis Crick, a somewhat older,
British graduate student with a background in mathematics. Despite the fact
that they knew Pauling was undoubtedly the frontrunner, Crick and Watson
decided to enter the race to decipher the structure of DNA.
They had two unusual allies: Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.
These two were trying to work out the structure of DNA by using X-ray
diffraction photographs of DNA crystals, a technique consisting of examin-
 G enetics and D N A     139

ing how X-rays bounced off DNA. While these four were trying to put the
pieces together, Pauling wrote an article in which he claimed to have worked
out the structure of DNA as a triple helix. When Watson and Crick recon-
structed Pauling’s model and showed it to Franklin, she pointed out that it
disagreed with her diffraction data. Since Pauling was backing triple helixes,
Watson decided that his best bet to beat Pauling would be to experiment
with double-helix models.
One day, in a flash of insight, Watson realized that the shape of an
adenine-thymine pair would be the same as the shape of a cytosine-guanine
pair. That would account for the equality between the amounts of adenine
and thymine, and cytosine and guanine. After several false steps, Watson
came up with a double helix model incorporating these features, and Crick
made the calculations to demonstrate the feasibility of the model. Wilkins
and Franklin made X-ray diffraction computations that substantiated the
model. Proteins do most of the work in an organism, and the secret of life—
how the cells know which proteins to produce—had finally been discovered.
After learning of the double-helix model, Pauling visited Cambridge in
the spring of 1953. He acknowledged the error in his thinking that had led
to his construction of an erroneous model, and agreed that the double-helix
model of DNA was undoubtedly correct. The very next year, Linus Pauling
would win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for previous work done on chemical
bonds. Crick, Watson, and Wilkins would share the Nobel Prize in Physiol-
ogy or Medicine in 1962. Franklin, whom all agreed had made substantial
contributions, had tragically passed away from cancer at the age of thirty-
eight, and was thus ineligible to share in an award that she richly deserved.

DECIPHERING THE GENETIC CODE

When Watson and Crick constructed the double-helix model for DNA in
1953, they also noted that the proposed structure would account for the
process of cell duplication. Each strand of the double helix would unwind,
and each of the approximately 4 billion bases on a strand would seek its
complementary partner (adenines with thymines, cytosines with guanines)
to reconstruct the other strand of the helix. Then, as a cell split into two,
each strand would be able to generate a new molecule of DNA for each of
the daughter cells.
The mechanism of heredity was now known. What was not known was
how the molecule of DNA directed the essential process of life: the manu-
facturing of proteins. The genes that Mendel had described a century earlier
140    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

were now known to have precise locations on a molecule of DNA, and each
gene had a specific function: to manufacture a particular protein. Somehow,
the sequence of bases in DNA directed the manufacture of proteins.
The obvious idea was that the 4-billion-long sequence of bases was a
kind of computer program directing how proteins would be manufactured.
Proteins were manufactured in a portion of the cell called a ribosome. Pro-
teins themselves are chains of simpler chemicals called amino acids; every
protein, from the hemoglobin in our blood to the pigments in our eyes, is
constructed in an assembly-line fashion from a fundamental stock of twenty
different amino acids.
The construction process actually involves more than just DNA itself.
When the two strands of the DNA helix separate, a strand may be used as
a template for the construction of another DNA molecule, but it may also
be used to construct a molecule known as messenger RNA (abbreviated
mRNA). The mRNA molecule is what is actually read by the ribosome, and
differs from the DNA molecule in that the base uracil is used in place of
thymine. As a strand of mRNA is fed to the ribosome, the ribosome sees a
sequence of approximately 4 billion bases, a section of which might look like
. . . UCGAGGUUCA . . . How does the ribosome know what to do with
this sequence of letters?
The simplest idea would be that the ribosome sees a group of letters as
a word, and each word as an instruction to attach a specific amino acid to
the growing protein chain. There were only sixteen (4 × 4) different possible
two-letter words made from the letters A, C, G, and U (AA, AC, AG, AU,
. . . UA, UC, UG, UU). Since there were twenty different amino acids used
in proteins, there would not be sufficient words in the instruction set to spec-
ify all the amino acids. There were sixty-four (4 × 4 × 4) different three-letter
words, which would later be known as codons, that could be made from the
letters A, C, G, and U, so the next step was to see whether a particular codon
caused a specific amino acid to be added to the protein chain.
Marshall Nirenberg, a biochemist at the National Institutes of Health,
was one of many scientists working on this hypothesis. In 1962, he managed
to construct a section of mRNA consisting only of uracil bases. When this
section of mRNA was read by a ribosome, it added the amino acid phenyl-
alanine to the protein chain. The first codon in the genetic code had been
deciphered: UUU stood for phenylalanine. Nirenberg would win the Nobel
Prize in 1968, and within a few years, the genetic code had been completely
deciphered.
One of the beautiful aspects of science is that information uncovered in
one area can easily have ramifications in other areas. There is no a priori reason
 G enetics and D N A     141

why each species cannot have its own genetic code: UUU could in theory
code for phenylalanine in aardvarks, leucine in roses, and glycine in zebras.
In reality, it does not work out that way: UUU codes for phenylalanine in
all forms of life. This is powerful evidence for the theory of evolution, as the
obvious way for this to occur is that the genetic code originally evolved in
the simplest life-form and was passed from organism to organism even as the
other genetic changes constituting evolution were taking place.

THE FUNCTIONING OF RNA

As might be suspected from the acronyms, DNA and RNA are closely re-
lated. The structure of DNA consists of a double-helix backbone to which
are affixed four bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. The struc-
ture of RNA is quite similar, but it uses uracil instead of thymine. The chief
functional difference is that, although DNA may get all the accolades, when
it comes to the actual manufacture of the proteins coded for by the DNA,
RNA does most of the work.
The existence of RNA has been known since the early portion of the
twentieth century, and its importance in genetics long suspected. Indeed,
even as James Watson and Francis Crick were on the verge of deciphering the
structure of the DNA molecule, they were speculating on the role of RNA
in the manufacture of proteins. They conceived of a sequence of operations
that has come to be known as the central dogma of molecular biology. The
DNA in the nucleus of the cell would act as a template for the manufacture
of RNA. The RNA would then go from the nucleus of the cell to the cyto-
plasm, where it would direct the manufacture of proteins. This picture of the
roles of DNA and RNA has been for the most part confirmed.
However, RNA has been discovered to play many other roles in the
drama of life. The simplistic picture that DNA is copied to RNA, which
is mechanically reproduced to create proteins, has had to be altered. The
first major change in this picture was discovered by the French biochemists
François Jacob and Jacques Monod, who discovered that chemical signals
inside the cell determine whether or not the instructions within a gene are
copied into RNA. This showed that the copying process from DNA to RNA
involves editing as well.
A major part of editing, both in a manuscript and in a genetic molecule,
is the removal of unusable material. The unusable material, called “introns,”
are cut out of the RNA message. The spliced segments must be rejoined,
142    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

and this is accomplished by another form of RNA; these molecules are called
“spliceosomes.”
It still remains for the proteins to be constructed. This is accomplished
by yet another form of RNA, called transfer RNA, whose job it is to read
the final edited RNA message, fetch the required amino acids from the cyto-
plasm, and string them together to form the appropriate protein.
The threat of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) that
emerged during the last two decades of the twentieth century brought about
intensive study of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that had been
shown to be the cause of the disease. HIV is one of a class of viruses called
retroviruses. A retrovirus is basically a strand of RNA encased in a coat of
protein. Like other viruses, it cannot reproduce on its own, and must com-
mandeer the genetic machinery of a cell to perform this task. In 1970, the
American molecular biologist Howard Temin showed that retroviruses
reproduce in a host cell by using the enzyme reverse transcriptase that is
present in a cell to copy the RNA to DNA. The cell then copies the DNA
into the RNA genetic material for the retrovirus, and also uses the DNA to
produce the protein coat in which the strand of RNA is encased.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In molecular biology, the
question is, which came first, DNA or RNA? Because RNA basically reads
DNA, the prevailing impression early on was that RNA-based life was im-
possible. However, Thomas Cech showed that RNA could act as a catalyst
and initiate changes on itself. This brought about the possibility of an RNA
world, in which a simpler RNA-based life existed prior to DNA. In this
scenario, DNA evolved later, and the more complex central dogma enabled
more complex life to evolve.

GENETIC ENGINEERING

The attempt to alter existing life-forms for the good of man has been going
on almost as long as recorded history. Breeding horses, dogs, and cattle date
from well before the birth of Christ, and the attempt to produce new variet-
ies of plants or ones that will grow better probably started at the same time
that agriculture was developed.
In a sense, all of the above qualify as genetic engineering, but it is genetic
engineering on a somewhat haphazard level, relying on the mechanism of
chance to produce an improvement, and choice (known as artificial selec-
tion) to use this improvement. When Watson and Crick discovered the
structure of DNA, the genetic material whose instructions are followed by
 G enetics and D N A     143

the cell to produce proteins, it was immediately realized that the ability to
manipulate DNA would greatly increase the power to improve existing life-
forms or create new ones.
In 1968, Werner Arber, a Swiss microbiologist, was investigating a fam-
ily of viruses called bacteriophages. These viruses actually eat bacteria (phage
is Greek for “eat”). In the eternal struggle that characterizes natural selection,
some bacteria are able to defend themselves against bacteriophages by pro-
ducing a substance that prevents the growth of the viruses. Arber was able
to show that the substance was an enzyme that actually cut the DNA of the
bacteriophage at a specific location. Arber realized that this substance, which
he called a restriction enzyme, located a specific sequence of molecules in the
DNA strand, and would work nowhere else. These restriction enzymes were
tools for cutting DNA at a precise spot, and are the workhorses of genetic
engineering.
Five years later, Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen of the University of
California at San Francisco performed the basic experiment that launched
the genetic engineering revolution. Working with the common bacteria
E. coli, they isolated a plasmid (a circular loop of DNA) containing genes en-
abling the bacteria to resist certain antibiotics. They used restriction enzymes
to cut the DNA, and then inserted sections of other plasmids. This created
a new plasmid, which contained genes from both of the original plasmids.
When this plasmid was reinserted into an E. coli bacterium, the bacterium
could be shown to display the genetic characteristics of both plasmids from
which the engineered plasmid had been produced.
We are a half-century into the science of genetic engineering, yet it is
already a multibillion-dollar industry with the promise to transform the
world. The gene is the unit of inheritance. Genetic engineering holds the
promise of producing plants that can manufacture their own fertilizer, flower
more frequently, and ripen faster. On the human level, genetic engineering
may make it possible to prevent a large number of so-called genetic diseases,
which are caused by the inability of a gene to perform a desired function.
Of all the developments in this book, this is the one that is most likely to
have a major impact on the ultimate development of the human race. Other
developments will make it possible for us to change the Universe, but genetic
engineering could make it possible for us to alter the evolution of humanity.
In her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley gave the world the caricature
of the mad scientist, out to experiment with forces beyond his control. In
general, scientists are much more conscious of the consequences of their ac-
tions than Shelley had suggested. Immediately after the discovery of genetic
engineering, the biochemists met and instituted an extremely stringent set
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of regulations governing experiments in this area. The fear that a mutant

strain of genetically engineered bacteria would wreak untold damage still
exists, but for the most part the products of genetic engineering have proved
more fragile than their naturally existing counterparts. As a result, the initial
stringent regulations governing genetic engineering experiments have been
substantially eased. GMO—genetically modified organisms—are now a
staple of everyday life.

The Big Question: the Origin of Life

If there is one question whose answer would interest both scientist and non-
scientist alike, it is this: How did life begin?
Until the nineteenth century, this question was not even in the scientific
domain, as it was assumed that life was created by a supreme being. With
the demise of vitalism, and the obvious age of the many fossils that were be-
ing discovered, the origin of life began to be the subject of serious scientific
inquiry.
It is still an unanswered question, but like much of science, it is a work
in progress. It involves exploration, experimentation, and theorizing.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, the oldest life-forms that
had been discovered were fossils whose age was estimated at approximately
500 million years. In 1954, Elso Barghoorn headed an expedition to study
the Gunflint chert, an ancient rock formation in Canada. When portions of
the rock were sliced and examined under a microscope, they revealed fossils
similar to modern bacteria and blue-green algae. This discovery pushed back
the earliest known appearance of life to approximately 2 billion years ago.
Almost fifteen years later, Barghoorn discovered amino acids in rock whose
age was 3 billion years. The limit has recently been pushed back even further
with the discovery of traces of bacteria appearing to be approximately 3.9
billion years old.
This is both encouraging and discouraging. The surface of the Earth
is believed to have been molten approximately 4.2 billion years ago, which
gives life only 300 million years to get going from a standing start. While it
is encouraging that life seems to have started fairly easily, it is discouraging
because organic molecules such as DNA are extremely complex, and it seems
highly unlikely that they could form by chance.
In 1953, Stanley Miller was a graduate student in the chemistry labora-
tory of Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist. Urey suggested that
Miller simulate the atmosphere of a prebiotic Earth in which no oxygen
 G enetics and D N A     145

existed, so Miller concocted an atmosphere consisting of chemicals presumed

to exist on the early Earth: water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. He also
assumed that there would have been plenty of lightning, so he supplied an
electrical spark to mimic lightning. He sealed the flask, waited a week, and
observed an orange gunk on the surface of the flask. The gunk proved to
contain amino acids, which are critical to life as we know it.
Miller’s experiment showed that complex organic molecules could arise
from relatively simple ones. Of course, amino acids are not alive, but a week
is not 300 million years, either. Many Miller-like simulations have been
done, with various atmospheres and varying conditions, but no one has yet
opened a flask and found a living entity.
There are numerous theories on how life could have arisen. The Russian
biochemist Alexander Oparin is the author of the “warm little pond” theory,
in which somehow enough organic molecules got trapped in a suitable en-
vironment for life to arise. Some theorists feel that underseas hydrothermal
vents, the “black smokers” described in the previous chapter, may have pro-
vided a suitable environment. There are those who feel that the evolution
of life was a two-step process, assisted by some transitional inorganic form.
The British crystallographer John Desmond Bernal favored mineral catalysis,
while A. Graham Cairns-Smith of the University of Glasgow believed that
inorganic clays could serve as a scaffold on which organic molecules could be
built—after the molecules were capable of self-reproduction, the scaffolding
disappeared.
One thing is certain: if the answer is discovered and proven to be cor-
rect, it will be one of the most interesting scientific achievements of all time.
An indication of how serious is the search for the answer to this ques-
tion can be found in the fact that NASA has funded interdisciplinary in-
vestigations on this subject. Whether there is life on other worlds is still an
unanswered question, and NASA’s thinking is that we will be more able to
recognize life on other planets if we know how it arose on this one. It’s been
nearly three-quarters of a century since the Miller–Urey experiment, and we
still don’t have an answer. We have to entertain the possibility that, although
we may be able to devise a scenario by which life could begin, we may never
know how it actually did begin.
CHAPTER 8

The Human Body

Our curiosity about the nature of our bodies begins almost immediately after
we are born, and continues throughout our lives. Our bodies are astounding
in so many ways—the conscious ways we can direct them, the systems that
billions of years of evolution make function so well—systems of which we
are largely unaware. What is also amazing is the range of human capability,
such as the abilities of a concert pianist or a topflight athlete. This range
also includes the incredible accomplishments of the human brain—some of
which are in this book.
Our bodies do many things well—but, as many have observed, there is
no physical ability that humans possess that is not exceeded in some other
species. We’re generally faster than turtles, and slower than cheetahs. But no
other species has the brain that enables us to surmount our inabilities—and
enrich our lives, a concept unknown to any other species.

Structure and Organs: What the Eye Can See

The science of the human body began with what was accessible to the human
eye—itself one of the most amazing products of evolution. This was essen-
tially the only tool available by which data about the human body could be
acquired. Knowledge of the structure and function of the various portions
of the human body was valued in many cultures for the obvious reason that
this knowledge could help to repair damage—but the acquisition of that
knowledge sometimes ran into societal and religious roadblocks. Such was
the case during the Dark Ages—a thousand-year period during which inves-
tigation into the structure and function of the human body advanced only
147
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infinitesimally, at least in Europe, although progress was made in this area

in other societies. Nonetheless, when the prohibitions—both actual and
tacit—were lifted, the value of acquiring such knowledge, long evident, was
encouraged.

ANATOMY

Considering how little was actually known about the body and the nature
of disease in ancient Greece, it is amazing how rational some of the ancient
physicians appear by modern standards. It is surprising to learn that the say-
ings, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” and “Desperate diseases
require desperate remedies,” are actually attributed to Hippocrates, the father
of medicine.
Hippocrates was in fact better known to the ancients because he founded
a school of medicine, rather than because he was a doctor. Perhaps his
greatest contribution to medicine was not the Hippocratic Oath, but rather
the view that disease was a physical phenomenon, rather than the result of
having incurred the wrath of some deity. However, the next great physician
would not appear until several hundred years after Hippocrates’s death. That
physician was Galen, who climbed the ladder of professional success until he
became court physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Galen was the greatest anatomist in the ancient world, but he had the
misfortune to live in an era in which human dissection was no longer being
practiced. As a result, Galen would dissect animals, observe what he could,
and generalize to human beings. He was the first to identify many of the
major muscles, and also showed the role of the spinal cord by severing it in
animals and noting the ensuing paralysis.
Galen was certainly the most influential physician of his time. His ex-
tensive writings were carefully preserved throughout the Dark Ages, partly
because his religious views were in line with the Christian thought that
everything in the Universe was designed for a purpose. When the search for
new knowledge ceased shortly after the fall of Rome, Galen represented the
state of medical art, and remained the unquestioned authority in the field for
more than a thousand years.
By the sixteenth century, though, there was a new willingness to doubt
some of the previously unquestioned authorities. One such doubter was
Andreas Vesalius. Though raised in France, he had relocated to Italy, where
there was a greater spirit of intellectual freedom. One consequence was that
 T he H uman B ody    149

the practice of human dissection, though nominally forbidden, was now

standard at Italian medical schools.
Vesalius eventually obtained teaching positions at many of the leading
Italian universities. However, the prevailing practice was for the teacher to
lecture while the assistants did the dissections. Vesalius was disgusted with
the poor job performed by his assistants, and took over the job of doing both
dissections and commentary himself.
Vesalius was a man of extraordinary skill as a lecturer and teacher, but
his greatest contribution was a single book that revolutionized anatomy.
This book, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human
Body), was not only the first great work on anatomy, but contained accurate
illustrations and was printed, rather than being handwritten. This enabled
many copies of the book to be produced, and printing assured that the re-
productions were accurate, which was not always the case when a book was
copied by hand.
As a result of this book, not only were many of Galen’s errors corrected,
but the reliance on Galen’s theories and practices ended as well. Before
Vesalius, medicine had been static for more than a thousand years. Vesalius’s
book, and the changes it brought about, made it possible for medicine to
advance.
By the time De Humani Corporis Fabrica was published, mechanized
printing had existed for almost a century, yet many books were still just
printed versions of handwritten manuscripts that had been around for cen-
turies. Vesalius’s book was published in 1543, which may have been the first
truly landmark year for the publishing business. In the same year, Coperni-
cus also published his book, in which he presented the heliocentric theory
of the solar system.

THE CIRCULATORY SYSTEM

The crucial role of the heart has been intuitively understood since the earliest
days of recorded history. In ancient Egypt, the fate of the soul was thought to
be determined by the weight of the heart. Egyptian priests would weigh the
heart of the dead on a scale against a feather, believing that those who had
hearts that were not “heavy with sin” went on to happiness in the afterlife.
Aristotle, one of the greatest intellectual giants in history, thought that
the heart was the seat of the soul, and attributed mystical powers to it. In
130 CE, Galen, personal physician to the Roman Emperor, advanced the
concept of a circulatory system through which blood flowed from the body
150    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

to the heart and back to the body. However, medical research did not occupy
an important place in Roman society, and when Rome collapsed and the
Dark Ages began, medical research was basically “put on hold” throughout
Europe.
As Europe emerged from the Dark Ages, people began displaying a
greater interest in medicine, spurred on by the carnage wrought by the Black
Death. Once again, though, interest in the functions of the human body ran
afoul of the proscriptions of the Church. Human anatomical investigations
and drawings were strictly forbidden—indeed, Leonardo da Vinci had been
forced to steal corpses in order to make his accurate anatomical drawings.
The Italian anatomist Vesalius had to have his groundbreaking book on hu-
man anatomy printed in Switzerland in order to avoid being condemned,
excommunicated, or worse by the Italian authorities. This fear was well-
founded. When Miguel Servetus published a book containing conjectures
on the role of the heart in pumping blood, he was burned at the stake by the
Spanish Inquisition, with a copy of his book tied to his body.
At the start of the seventeenth century, William Harvey, a well-to-do
Englishman who had studied at Cambridge, went to Padua to study medi-
cine, as Padua had for three centuries housed the finest medical school in
Europe. While Harvey was in Padua, Galileo’s experiments in mechanics and
astronomy were setting a new standard for science. On his return to England,
Harvey decided to apply Galileo’s methods to the study of the heart and the
circulation of the blood.
His principal tool was dissection; in his attempts to understand the heart,
he is said to have dissected over eighty species of animals. Harvey determined
that the heart is a muscle, and that it operated by contraction. He calculated
the rate at which the heart pumped blood, and determined that in one hour
the heart pumped a quantity of blood that was about three times the weight
of a human being. Since it seemed impossible to construct a mechanism that
would destroy and recreate blood at such a rate, the obvious conclusion was
that the blood was being circulated throughout the body.
Harvey further noted that the valves in the arteries and the veins were
one-way valves, and then observed that blood flowed away from the heart
through the arteries, and toward the heart through the veins. Although his
results initially met with substantial opposition from the medical establish-
ment, Harvey himself refused to debate the matter, publishing a book on
the subject and letting the facts speak for themselves. Within a generation,
his results were universally accepted, and the groundwork for the study of
physiology had been established.
 T he H uman B ody    151

There was an obvious problem in Harvey’s theory of blood circulation:

how did blood, which flowed from the heart through the arteries and to the
heart through the veins, make the jump from the arteries to the veins? Har-
vey, noting that both arteries and veins subdivided into blood vessels with
smaller and smaller diameters, applied inductive reasoning, deducing that
the actual connections were too fine to be seen. Four years after he died, the
Italian physiologist Marcello Malpighi observed the connecting blood vessels
with the aid of a microscope.

What the Eye Doesn’t See

It’s hard to imagine where science would be without the microscope. This
amazing tool not only revealed unseen worlds, but greatly aided our under-
standing of ourselves.
Life has had almost 4 billion years to evolve on Earth, and given that
much time, it isn’t surprising that it has come up with systems of amazing
complexity and functionality. Even though we think of the human brain as
the apex of the evolutionary pyramid, many of the systems that enable us
to live our lives take place without conscious direction. And a good thing,
too, because we are probably incapable of consciously directing even such a
simple process as the digestion of food, to say nothing of something so com-
plex as the functioning of the immune system.

NERVES AND NEUROTRANSMITTERS

The Greeks are widely recognized as having produced excellent playwrights,

philosophers, and geometers, but it comes as a surprise to realize that their
knowledge of anatomy was rather sophisticated. The anatomist Herophilus,
who lived three centuries before Christ, was quite interested in the brain and
nervous system. He classified nerves into two categories: the sensory nerves,
which received impressions from the five senses, and the motor nerves, which
stimulated motion. For more than two thousand years, this would represent
the most advanced thinking on the subject.
The Romans were not much interested in theoretical science of any sort,
and the Dark Ages produced almost no scientific advances. The Renais-
sance brought about a reawakening of interest in natural phenomena of all
sorts. In 1771, Luigi Galvani made one of the most important observations
in the history of science. He noticed that some dissected frog legs twitched
152    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

excitedly when struck by an electric spark. In a sense, this was not altogether
surprising, because live muscles were known to twitch when subjected to
electricity. Nonetheless, this discovery was to inaugurate many different lines
of research, one of which we have already seen in chapter 5.
One of these lines of research, which had been dormant for two thou-
sand years, was on the interaction of nerves and muscles, and the nature of
the nervous impulse. In 1826 Johannes Müller, a German biologist, was
experimenting with sensory nerves. It was well-known by that time that
light stimulated the optic nerve, and that this stimulus was interpreted by
the brain as visual brightness. Müller discovered that if the optic nerve was
stimulated by electricity, that stimulus would still be interpreted as visual
brightness. He later showed that this was true for any type of nerve; no mat-
ter how it was stimulated, the brain would always interpret it the same way.
Not only did this indicate that nerves functioned through electrical impulses,
it greatly simplified the investigation of the nervous system.
A century later, it would be discovered that the nervous system was not
simply an electrical circuit. Otto Loewi, a German physiologist, was study-
ing the nerves of a frog’s heart. He had discovered that certain chemical
substances were released when the nerve was stimulated. One morning he
awoke at 3:00 a.m. with the idea for a brilliant experiment, which he then
wrote down. The next morning he couldn’t read his own handwriting! That
evening, he again woke up at 3:00 a.m., and corrected his previous error by
immediately going to the laboratory and conducting the experiment, which
was to take the chemical substances that had been released and show that
these had the power to stimulate heart muscle without the intervention of a
nerve signal.
During the previous decade, the British biologist Henry Dale had been
working on fungi, and had isolated a compound called acetylcholine. This
substance had an effect on organs similar to the effects produced by recep-
tion of nerve impulses. When Dale read of Loewi’s experiment, he was able
to show that the substance Loewi had discovered was acetylcholine. Acetyl-
choline was the first neurotransmitter, a class of chemical compounds that
inhibit and excite the transmission of nervous impulses.
Neurotransmitters have been shown to be important components of
behavior. In 1972, a team of medical researchers discovered that bipolar dis-
order (often called “manic depression”) is the result of an imbalance between
two types of neurotransmitters. As a result of this discovery, it has been pos-
sible to treat several types of behavioral disorders by chemical means.
For their work on acetylcholine, Loewi and Dale received the Nobel
Prize, which probably saved Loewi’s life! Loewi was Jewish, and when Hitler
 T he H uman B ody    153

invaded Austria, he was arrested. However, the Nazis may have realized that
it would have been bad public relations to execute an eminent scientist, and
Loewi was allowed to leave the country provided he turn over his share of the
Nobel Prize money to the Nazis.

THE FUNCTIONING OF THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

The immune system is one of the great mechanisms of survival. Even before
AIDS and COVID-19, the importance of the immune system was clear. The
immune system is the body’s intricately organized defense against foreign
invasion, and learning how the immune system works, how to strengthen it,
and what its weaknesses are has been and will be critical to the advancement
of medicine.
The basic mechanism of the immune system is that, once it is exposed
to a foreign substance, it learns how to manufacture defenses against it.
Edward Jenner unwittingly exploited this mechanism when he inoculated
people against smallpox by giving them a mild case of cowpox. Once the
germ theory of disease became accepted, progress in the understanding of the
immune system accelerated.
One of the first great developments in understanding immunity was
the result of an experiment in 1890 by Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo
Kitasato. They injected guinea pigs with blood from other guinea pigs known
to be immune to diphtheria, and observed that the injected animals acquired
that immunity. As a result, they concluded that immunity was conferred by
protective substances in the blood, which von Behring called antibodies.
Paul Ehrlich, the originator of chemotherapy, was inclined to chemical
explanations for all biochemical phenomena. He suggested that an anti-
gen, a substance that provoked a reaction from the immune system, had
a specific molecular structure, and that the antibody manufactured by the
immune system fit the antigen much like a key fits a lock. This insightful
theory was later confirmed by Karl Landsteiner, who showed that in order
to combat a specific antigen, the immune system manufactures a specific
antibody. Landsteiner not only confirmed Ehrlich’s theory, but he also used
the antigen-antibody reaction to develop the system of blood typing that we
use today. Landsteiner’s blood typing makes it possible to give blood transfu-
sions without provoking an undesirable response from the immune system.
The antibody–antigen reaction is not always beneficial. Allergic reac-
tions occur when the immune system produces antibodies to substances that
are not intrinsically harmful. Skin grafts and organ transplants are frequently
154    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

met with a reaction known as rejection; the body tries to destroy the graft or
the transplant. Peter Medawar showed that rejection was an immune system
response to the new material. In studying this phenomenon, Frank Burnet
observed that a developing organism produced antibodies only in response to
antigens that it encountered later in its life, and suggested that the immune
system ignores antigens it encounters early in life. Although Burnet was un-
able to prove this, Medawar was able to do so.
Burnet eventually devised the clonal selection theory to explain immune
response. When a lymphocyte initially encounters an antigen, it multiplies
and produces identical lymphocytes, which manufacture the antibody neces-
sary to counteract that particular antigen. Later research has proved that Paul
Ehrlich, possessed of one of the keenest chemical intuitions, was correct: an
antigen recognizes an antibody by identifying specific patterns on the surface
of antigen molecules.
The 1980s saw the onset of the AIDS epidemic. AIDS is an insidious
disease caused by HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). Viral diseases are
especially hard to combat because they are often impossible for the immune
system to detect. A virus is simply a strand of genetic material enclosed in
a coat of protein. The coat itself is innocuous; but when the virus gets in-
side a cell, the genetic material of the virus can commandeer the cell’s own
genetic machinery and reproduce the virus. Worse, the HIV kills cells. The
year 2019 brought with it the COVID-19 pandemic, also a viral disease,
but fortunately one for which it was possible to develop a vaccine. HIV has
many more evasive strategies available to it than the COVID-19 coronavirus,
but as of this writing there is an ongoing trial for an AIDS vaccine based
on the same methodology as the successful mRNA vaccines used against
COVID-19.

Biochemistry of the Human Body

There has been a lot of cross-pollination in the sciences over the past fifty
years. Stephen Hawking, probably the best-known scientist of the last half-
century, was an astrophysicist—a discipline that didn’t exist until the second
half of the twentieth century. But biochemistry has existed for substantially
longer. As scientists came to realize, biology at its core is chemistry, and
many of the great advances in our understanding of how the human body
functions are essentially comprehending the structure and functions of the
highly complex molecules that are necessary for life.
 T he H uman B ody    155

THE STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION OF HEMOGLOBIN

The importance of blood to life has been known for thousands of years. To
the Greeks, who formulated the first theory of living organisms, blood was
one of the four humours, along with phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. It
was obvious to even a child that blood was important, but for thousands of
years, no one knew what function blood performed in an organism.
It was known that blood was not a simple liquid. A container of blood,
left unattended, would separate into a red liquid and a pale yellowish fluid,
separated by a thin layer of white. The first great breakthrough in discovering
the nature of blood could not be made until the seventeenth century, after
the microscope had been invented. Although the Dutch microscopist Jan
Swammerdam had observed red blood cells in frogs as early as 1658, he did
not publish his results. Fortunately for science, Anton von Leeuwenhoek had
observed red blood cells in human blood, and described his results in 1673.
The role that red blood cells played in the body was not discovered for
almost two centuries, when the idea of counting blood cells as a measure of
health was devised by François Magendie. This was a period right after the
vitalistic view of organisms had been overturned, and researchers were quan-
tifying many aspects of the diagnostic procedure.
Along with improved diagnosis came improved analytical methods.
One of the chief new analytical tools of the era was the spectrometer, an
instrument whose impact on both chemistry and physics has been profound.
While astronomers were attaching spectrographs to telescopes to decipher
the composition of distant stars, biochemists were using them to analyze
many of the substances that are found in organisms.
One of the leaders in this area was a German biochemist, Ernst Hoppe-
Seyler. It was Hoppe-Seyler who gave the name “hemoglobin” to red blood
cells, and who demonstrated that the function of red blood cells was to
transport oxygen. Hoppe-Seyler crystallized hemoglobin (many proteins can
be crystallized), and also was the first to notice the sinister fact that carbon
monoxide could readily be transported by hemoglobin. He was also the first
to notice chemical similarities between hemoglobin and chlorophyll.
Hemoglobin is an extremely complicated molecule. Its exact structure
could not be determined until 1960, when Max Perutz used X-ray crystal-
lography, high-speed computers, and the ingenious trick of adding a single
heavy atom of gold or mercury to the molecule to help clarify its structure.
Anyone who observes the molecular structure of hemoglobin and chloro-
phyll cannot help but come to the conclusion that, because their forms are
so similar, their functions must be as well.
156    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

In more than one sense, Hoppe-Seyler could be called the father of

biochemistry. In addition to his own work, he established the first journal
of biochemistry, and some of his students were pioneers in the field. The
most famous was probably Johannes Miescher, who was the first to discover
the nucleic acids (acids appearing in the nuclei of cells), of which DNA and
RNA are undoubtedly the most well-known examples.
There are actually three types of blood cells, and each has an important
role to play. The red blood cells transport oxygen. Élie Metchnikoff discov-
ered that white blood cells immediately move to damaged areas of the body,
and also attack and devour invading bacteria. The third type of cell, the
platelets (not surprisingly, these are shaped like little plates), were found by
Giulio Bizzozero to play a key role in blood clotting. All of the body’s blood
cells are created from parent cells in the bone marrow.

THE DISCOVERY OF HORMONES

Ivan Pavlov is one of the more well-known names in science. It is somewhat

ironic that he won a Nobel Prize for research with which very few people
are familiar, but nonetheless was indispensable to the work for which he is
best known.
Pavlov was the son of a priest, and initially studied to become a priest.
At the theological seminary, he read Darwin’s Origin of Species, and decided
to switch to science.
If you were a dog in Russia, you probably wanted to stay as far away
from Pavlov as possible, as most of his experiments used dogs as laboratory
animals. His initial work involved showing that the stomach’s gastric juices
were stimulated not by the arrival of food in the stomach, but by signals sent
from the brain. This research was crucial in establishing the importance of
the autonomic nervous system, and won Pavlov the Nobel Prize in physiol-
ogy and medicine.
The experiment for which he is best remembered was actually an off-
shoot of his previous work, which showed that the stimulation of nerves in
the mouth by food brought about a response in the stomach. This mecha-
nism is known as an unconditioned reflex, a class of behaviors with which
organisms are born.
Pavlov knew that the salivation of a hungry dog when shown food was
an unconditioned reflex. He decided to see whether it would be possible to
induce a reflex that was not present at birth. To do so, he rang a bell every
 T he H uman B ody    157

time the dog was shown food. Eventually, the dog would not only salivate in
response to the food, but in response to the bell. This is known as a condi-
tioned reflex, and conditioned reflexes would play a key role in the behavior-
ist theories of psychology.
Pavlov’s earlier studies came to the attention of William Bayliss and
Ernest Starling, two English physiologists. Pavlov’s earlier results had led
Pavlov to believe that many digestive reactions were controlled by the ner-
vous system. Bayliss and Starling studied how the pancreas began to secrete
its digestive juice when acidic food contents passed from the stomach to the
intestine.
Bayliss and Starling tried to confirm Pavlov’s hypothesis by cutting the
nerves to the pancreas. To their surprise, the pancreas continued to secrete its
digestive juice. Further investigation revealed that the lining of the small in-
testine secreted a substance, which they called secretin, when it was exposed
to stomach acid. It was secretin that stimulated the pancreas to react.
Starling realized that there were other instances of similar behavior, and
coined the word “hormone” (from the Greek, meaning “to rouse to activ-
ity”) to describe a substance released into the blood by one organ to prompt
a response in another organ.
The work of Bayliss and Starling cleared the way for the recognition of
diseases occurring from a hormone deficiency. Several years later another
English physiologist, Edward Sharpey-Schafer, theorized that the pancreas
produced a hormone that lowered the level of glucose in the blood. He
named this hormone insulin, from the Latin word for island, as he believed
it to be produced in the island cells of the pancreas. Within twenty years, the
Canadian team of Frederick Banting and Charles Best devised a procedure
for extracting a crude version of insulin from animals, and regular insulin
treatments are now the standard method of controlling diabetes.
Banting devised the original experiments, and persuaded John Macleod,
a physiology professor at the University of Toronto, to give him some labora-
tory space and find him a coworker. Macleod agreed, gave Banting the nec-
essary space, and found Charles Best to work with him, and then promptly
went off on a summer vacation. Banting and Best completed their work in
1922, and in 1923 Banting was one of two Canadians to share the Nobel
Prize in medicine and physiology—the other being not Best, but Macleod!
Banting was incensed, and almost refused to accept the Prize unless Best
would share in it. He was unable to achieve this, but when he finally relented
and accepted the Prize, he gave half of his share of the money to Best.
158    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

THE BIOCHEMISTRY OF METABOLISM

They met, fell in love, and married. Both were interested in the same aspect
of science, and so they decided to work together. Because of the prejudice of
the world of the early twentieth century against female scientists, she found it
difficult to get employment in her chosen field. Nonetheless she persevered,
and eventually managed to work alongside her husband. Their work was of
such high quality that it was deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize.
It certainly sounds like the story of Pierre and Marie Curie, but it is also
the story of Carl and Gerty Cori, whose lives (and names) parallel the Curies
in many important aspects.
All living cells share certain characteristics. One of these is the ability
to metabolize; to take in substances and use those substances to create both
energy and new substances. One of the most important types of metabolism
involves carbohydrates.
Over the past few decades, there has been a drastic change in the diet of
an athlete prior to an important event. Athletes used to have steak and eggs;
now they have pancakes or pasta. There is a sound reason for this. Pancakes
and pasta are carbohydrates. Not only are they more quickly metabolized
than protein-rich foods such as steak, but about half the carbohydrates are
stored in the liver and muscles in the form of the chemical glycogen. The
remainder is either stored as fat or burnt as fuel.
The biochemist Otto Meyerhof determined that, when a muscle con-
tracts, the glycogen it has stored is converted to lactic acid (lactic acid is the
source of the burning sensation to which the exercise instructor refers when
he or she says, “Feel the burn!”). The lactic acid is then resynthesized into
glucose, forming a cycle that enables the muscle to continue to contract. The
work for which the Coris received the Nobel Prize took place over the course
of many years, and consisted of a detailed analysis of this glycogen-to-lactic-
acid-to-glycogen cycle.
While the Coris were working out what happened to the pancakes and
pasta, the German biochemist Hans Krebs was doing the same thing for
steak and eggs. Proteins are strings of amino acids, and Krebs discovered that
metabolism removes the nitrogen atoms from the amino acids, eliminating
them in the form of urea, the organic chemical first synthesized by Friedrich
Wöhler.
The Coris, born in Czechoslovakia, had immigrated to the United States
because of employment opportunities, but the rise of the Nazis in Germany
compelled Krebs to immigrate to England. Like the Coris, Krebs became
interested in carbohydrate metabolism. The Coris had shown that glycogen
 T he H uman B ody    159

was converted to lactic acid without using oxygen, but released very little
energy. Krebs decided that the remainder of the energy must be generated by
chemical reactions that broke down the lactic acid and used oxygen, releasing
water and carbon dioxide in the process.
This analysis took Krebs over five years to complete. One of the key
intermediate products was citric acid, the same chemical that produces the
slightly sour taste in orange or grapefruit juice. The cycle Krebs discovered is
called the citric acid cycle, also known as the Krebs cycle. Later investigation
revealed that the Krebs cycle is also responsible for the way in which fats are
metabolized. The Krebs cycle is the major source of energy production in all
living organisms.
The Curies were the first husband-and-wife team to win a Nobel Prize,
and their daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, was part of the second such husband-
and-wife team. The Coris were the third, receiving their Nobel Prize in
1947. Since then, the environment for female scientists has improved sub-
stantially, and several have won Nobel Prizes—but no husband-and-wife
teams. One reason might be that female scientists are much more numerous
and much more a part of the scientific community than they were in the first
half of the twentieth century, and so have a much wider choice of colleagues.
CHAPTER 9

Disease

Every so often, someone writes a book on science for the ages. The Microbe
Hunters, written by Paul de Kruif and published almost one hundred years
ago, is such a book. It describes the efforts of the early bacteriologists, includ-
ing such legends as Louis Pasteur, as they landed the first real blows in the
fight against disease.
Disease is the common enemy of every man, woman, and child—and it
has only been in the last two or three centuries that we have come to recog-
nize that disease is the result of natural causes rather than our having incurred
the displeasure of the gods. Almost every generation for the last couple of
centuries lives longer and enjoys better health than the generation that pre-
ceded it, and that is due in large measure to the efforts of the scientific and
medical communities to understand, treat, and prevent disease.

Understanding Disease
It is impossible to imagine the terror that must have accompanied some of
the great plagues of the past, such as the Black Death, which killed between
75 and 200 million people in Europe, Asia, and Africa between 1346 and
1353. In the fourteenth century, people had no idea what caused it, how to
cure it, or how to prevent it. In 1894, Alexandre Yersin and Shibasaburo
Kitasato independently discovered that the disease was caused by bacteria
carried by fleas living on infected rats. There are few cases of bubonic plague
today, but the antibiotic streptomycin, discovered in 1943 by a team of bio-
chemists headed by Selman Waksman, is an effective treatment. Whenever

161
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a case of bubonic plague is detected today, the public is warned to stay away
from a particular area, which generally harbors plague-infected rodents.

THE BIRTH OF EPIDEMIOLOGY: THE 1854 LONDON

CHOLERA EPIDEMIC

John Snow is one of those individuals who deserves to be more widely

recognized. However, if he were alive, he would probably not seek such
recognition. Snow was a physician who was totally dedicated to his profes-
sion, spending a good portion of his career tending to the sick and injured
of London’s working class.
Not only was Snow a conscientious physician, he managed to stay
apprised of the leading developments in medicine. Of course, doctors are
supposed to do this routinely, but it is never easy. Communication in the
nineteenth century was not what it is today, and even though the commu-
nication is instantaneous today, developments occur so rapidly that it is very
difficult to keep up with them.
When Snow read of the use of the anesthetic ether in the United States,
he realized that this was a development of profound significance. He studied
the subject assiduously, and eventually wrote the definitive pamphlet, On
Ether, concerning its use. When chloroform was introduced for childbirth a
few years later, Snow was on top of that as well, and was the physician who
administered the drug to Queen Victoria when she gave birth. As a result,
Snow is recognized as the first anesthesiologist.
However, Snow’s finest contribution to medicine came during the 1854
cholera epidemic that devastated London. It is difficult for us to imagine
what the world must have been like before the introduction of antibiotics
and chemotherapy. It was continually wracked by epidemics of diseases that
are not a threat to westernized countries today, but that were capable of kill-
ing tens of thousands of people in the space of a few weeks. As COVID-19
has made abundantly clear, these still happen today, but not with the fre-
quency that they did in the mid-nineteenth century.
In 1854 physicians had already noticed that the incidence of cholera was
higher in dirty environments than in clean ones, but had leaped to the er-
roneous conclusion that the disease was caused by “miasmas,” the foul odors
associated with filth. Snow, on the other hand, believed that the disease was
caused by the filth itself. Snow embarked on the first statistical analysis of
an epidemic, keeping careful track of many items of data associated with
sick and healthy individuals. He was able to show that areas supplied by
 D isease    163

water from the Southwark and Vauxhall Company, which got its water from
the sewage-contaminated Thames, were nine times more likely to result in
cholera fatalities than areas supplied by the Lambeth Company, which got
its water upstream.
The most dramatic single bit of evidence concerned the Broad Street
pump. Snow, who was familiar with the Soho area of London from his own
practice, kept a complete record of the homes of those who perished of chol-
era. He noticed that more than five hundred fatalities occurred within a few
hundred yards of the Broad Street pump. Snow discovered that a sewer pipe
passed within a few feet of the well. After he managed to persuade the par-
ish authorities to remove the pump handle, the fatalities were substantially
reduced.
Although statistics had been invented more than two centuries earlier,
Snow was the first to realize its potential value in medical applications. The
man who was known as the first anesthesiologist was the founder of epide-
miology as well.
Despite the fact that Pasteur had not yet established the germ theory,
nor had Robert Koch shown that specific diseases were caused by specific or-
ganisms, Snow’s experiences led him to believe that cholera was caused by a
specific germ that lived and multiplied in water. With remarkable insight, he
also recommended numerous public health procedures that are still standard
practice: decontaminating soiled articles of clothing, washing hands, and
boiling cooking utensils to sterilize them. Perhaps he was also the founder
of public health.

THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE

The great actors or actresses who spend a career in the theater usually follow
a standard pattern. They start life with small parts and work their way up to
supporting roles. Then comes a period of leading roles, followed by an in-
evitable regression into character parts. In a lifetime in the theater of science,
Louis Pasteur never abandoned the leading role.
Pasteur began his career as a chemist. His first notable achievement was
to demonstrate that different forms of crystals of the same compound were
capable of polarizing light in different directions. His work on this subject
sparked his interest in microorganisms, and the rest of his extraordinary ca-
reer would be devoted to investigating these creatures.
In several instances, his investigations had profound economic ef-
fects. He discovered that the souring of both wine and milk was caused by
164    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

microorganisms, and that this could be prevented by heating prior to bot-

tling, a process now called pasteurization. His success was so remarkable
that when the French silk industry was threatened by a disease afflicting
silkworms, Pasteur was called on to pull another rabbit out of a hat. His
investigations established that the disease was hereditary, and the silkworm
colonies were then bred from eggs that had not been infected. This discovery
saved the entire industry from ruin.
Of all his achievements, the one that had the most profound impact was
his disproof of the theory of spontaneous generation. This theory held that
microorganisms, some of which Pasteur had investigated while puzzling over
the souring of wine and the disease of the silkworms, arose spontaneously in
the substances in which they appeared. In an elegant series of experiments,
Pasteur demonstrated that microorganisms were contained in the air, and
that if substances were placed in a sterile environment and prevented from
contact with air, microorganisms would not appear. This discovery gave
considerable impetus to the germ theory of disease, and stimulated interest
in microbiology.
Pasteur would not relinquish center stage. Fighting off the effects of a
stroke that nearly killed him and left him partially paralyzed, he developed
the theory of vaccine immunity, which held that it was possible to obtain
protection from a disease by exposure to a weakened strain of that disease. In
dramatic fashion, he demonstrated the validity of this theory by conducting
an experiment in which he immunized twenty-five sheep against anthrax,
and then injected them and twenty-five unvaccinated sheep with a strong
dose of anthrax. All the vaccinated sheep lived, and all the unvaccinated
ones died.
For his farewell appearance, Pasteur did what everyone said was
impossible—he developed a vaccine against rabies that would enable indi-
viduals who had been bitten by rabid animals to survive. For this he received
international acclaim, and funds were solicited to build the Pasteur Institute
in Paris for the investigation and treatment of disease. Many of the great
names in bacteriology, and many of the important developments in the fight
against disease, have come from the Institute.
Pasteur was not only a brilliant scientist and fervent patriot, but pos-
sessed of traditional Gallic romanticism as well. After being made a profes-
sor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, Pasteur fell in love with
the daughter of the dean. He promptly wrote her a letter in which he said,
“There is nothing in me to attract a young girl’s fancy, but my recollections
tell me that those who have known me very well have loved me very much.
Time will show you that beneath an exterior cold and timid, which may
 D isease    165

displease you, there beats a heart full of affection for you.” Searching for a
comparison with which to convince the young lady of the depth of his feel-
ings, he added, “I, who have been so in love with my crystals.” This had the
desired effect—Mademoiselle Laurent married him, and became not only
his lifelong companion but doubled when needed as laboratory assistant,
secretary, and coauthor.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE ANTHRAX BACILLUS

When Robert Koch met Emmy Fraatz, he was a romantic, a recently gradu-
ated doctor who wanted to roam the world, perhaps as a military physician
or a ship’s doctor. But Emmy was extremely practical, and since there would
be little chance to raise a family onboard a ship, she persuaded Koch to
enter private practice. They eventually settled in the small German town of
Wollstein. Emmy recognized that Robert, who had graduated from medical
school with highest distinction, felt the need of challenges beyond what a
small-town medical practice would provide. Germany had become a leader in
many industrial areas, including the production of precision scientific equip-
ment. For Robert’s twenty-eighth birthday, Emmy gave him a microscope.
Although nearly two centuries had passed since Anton von Leeuwen-
hoek discovered bacteria, medicine had made little progress. True, no repu-
table scientist believed that diseases were due to evil spirits, as was the case
in Leeuwenhoek’s day, but a fierce battle raged over two opposing points of
view: the “miasmatic” theory, which held that disease arose spontaneously in
individuals because of conditions in the external world, and the “parasitic”
theory, in which disease was believed to be caused by microorganisms.
Perhaps because he was a country doctor, the disease that first com-
manded Koch’s attention was anthrax, a disease contracted primarily by
cattle and sheep. Livestock contracting anthrax died quickly and horribly;
their blood turned a ghastly black. Koch examined this blood under a
microscope, and observed that it contained stick-like organisms that often
collected into long thread-like configurations. Others had conjectured that
these organisms were the cause of anthrax, but it was Koch, in a brilliant
series of experiments, who proved it.
Koch observed that these organisms were never found in healthy ani-
mals, but were always found in animals stricken with anthrax. He took blood
from animals with anthrax and injected it into healthy mice. Within days,
the mice contracted anthrax, and their blood contained the stick-like bacilli.
166    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

This proved that the blood of disease-ridden animals could be used to

transmit the disease, but not that it was necessarily due to the bacilli, which
might have been an effect rather than the cause. Koch therefore developed
methods to grow pure strains of the bacilli, so he could be certain there were
no other agents in the blood that might have been the cause of the disease.
More still remained to be done. Anthrax was obviously not transmitted
from animal to animal by direct infection. Years of careful observation and
experimentation were necessary to show that the bacilli changed into spores,
which could live for long periods in fields. When the animals grazed on the
spores, the spores would re-enter the bloodstream and change into the bacilli.
In the process of tracking down the cause of anthrax, Koch had not only
shown that a specific microorganism was responsible for a specific disease,
he established a methodology for the process of finding the causes of disease.
This methodology became known as “Koch’s postulates,” and are still in use
today.
It took some time for Koch’s achievements to be recognized (he was,
after all, an outsider as far as the medical establishment was concerned), but
when they were, he became one of the first scientists to become a media
celebrity. He then discovered, as other media celebrities would, that fame
comes with a high price tag. His marriage ended in divorce, and when Koch
married a much-younger actress, it was Koch’s personal life that was placed
under the microscope. Wanting only to continue his work, Koch became
embroiled in the politics of medical research, and in later life fled to Africa,
possibly as much to find peace and quiet as to investigate tropical diseases.
With minor variations, the story of Robert Koch would be repeated a little
more than half a century later when Jonas Salk developed a vaccine to pre-
vent polio, and just recently, when Dr. Anthony Fauci became the face of
the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Treating Disease
Curing disease has been one of the enduring concerns of mankind. All of us
have fallen victim to disease at one time or another, and many apparently
disparate cultures have discovered similarly effective ways of mitigating its
effects. The benefits of chicken soup are extolled on every continent. While
chicken soup may help assuage the miseries of the common cold, more seri-
ous diseases require more aggressive treatment.
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THE DISCOVERY AND TREATMENT OF

DEFICIENCY DISEASES

By the middle of the eighteenth century, England’s position as a world power

had become inextricably intertwined with its ability to maintain a strong
navy. In order to maintain a strong navy, it was necessary to find ways to
keep a ship’s crew healthy during long ocean voyages. A major problem faced
by the British Navy was scurvy, a disease characterized by swollen and bleed-
ing gums that weakened and then killed sailors.
James Lind began his medical career as a surgeon’s mate in the British
Navy, and immediately became interested in curing or preventing scurvy.
After reading extensively on the subject, he became convinced that scurvy
was the result of a monotonous diet lacking in fresh fruits and vegetables.
He began treating sailors who had scurvy with an assortment of fresh fruits
and vegetables, and discovered that the citrus fruits such as lemons and limes
actually had the power to cure scurvy.
At the time, the British Navy was as bogged down by hidebound bu-
reaucrats as many contemporary institutions. Lind persuaded Captain Cook
to stock citrus fruits on his round-the-world voyage in the 1770s. Cook only
lost one sailor to scurvy, but the British Navy remained unconvinced. Lind
became the personal physician to King George III in 1783, but still could
not persuade those in charge of the importance of citrus fruits in preventing
scurvy. Lind died in 1794, but a year later the British Navy finally saw the
wisdom of his idea, and adopted lime juice as a dietary staple, thus earning
British sailors the nickname “limeys.”
A century later, the brilliant discoveries of Louis Pasteur and Robert
Koch had convinced scientists that diseases were caused by germs. Koch had
been asked to go to the Dutch East Indies to find the cause of the disease
beriberi. Koch was occupied investigating other diseases at the time, but
recommended that Christiaan Eijkman, one of his students, work on the
project.
The results were extremely disappointing, as the team was unable to iso-
late the germ responsible for beriberi, for the very good reason that no germ
was in fact responsible. Most of the team returned, but Eijkman stayed on
to become the head of a new bacteriological laboratory.
Some time later, a disease broke out among the laboratory chickens that
looked suspiciously like beriberi. Once again, Eijkman tried to isolate the
germ responsible, again with no luck. Then he tried another approach. He
found that a cook had been feeding the chickens a diet of polished rice in-
tended for hospital patients. The cook had been transferred, and the person
168    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

who took over his job felt that chickens did not deserve to be fed specially
treated rice, and so had resumed feeding them unpolished rice. Eijkman
experimented along these lines, and discovered that diet was the difference—
chickens fed on polished rice would develop the disease, but the disease could
be cured by switching to unpolished rice.
The diseases for which Lind and Eijkman developed cures were defi-
ciency diseases. Lind was the first doctor to develop a cure for a specific
disease, and Eijkman was the first to discover that the absence of specific
dietary ingredient was responsible for a disease. We are reminded daily of
their contributions to our health, for the ingredient responsible for curing
scurvy was vitamin C, and for curing beriberi, vitamin B.
A typical multivitamin tablet now includes almost half the alphabet.
Initially these compounds were called “accessory food factors.” However,
when the chemist Casimir Funk investigated the compound responsible for
curing beriberi, he discovered that it was an amine compound. He jumped to
the conclusion that all of the accessory food factors vital to diet were amine
compounds, and suggested the name “vitamine” to describe them. It was
later discovered that not all such compounds were amines, and the terminal
“e” was dropped.

ANESTHESIA

Of all the sciences, the one that is generally the most appreciated is medicine,
because it most intimately touches our lives. There are very few develop-
ments in science that measurably affect the average human life span, but the
discovery of anesthesia unquestionably belongs to this category. Without
it, many of the operations that almost everyone will undergo at some point
would be impossible.
Throughout history, man has sought relief from the tyranny of pain.
Until quite recently, this relief could only be found either by the ingestion
of large quantities of alcohol or through the consumption of substances such
as morphine. While these achieve the effect of diminishing pain, they do it
imperfectly and with many side effects. As a result, they are generally unsuit-
able for medical procedures, although many a tooth has been pulled or bullet
removed after the consumption of significant amounts of alcohol.
The first great step toward the development of anesthesia was the dis-
covery in 1800 of nitrous oxide by Sir Humphry Davy, the famous British
chemist. Nitrous oxide exists as a gas, and its first “use” was at parties in
nineteenth-century England known as “frolics.” During these social occa-
 D isease    169

sions, Davy’s gas was used to befuddle the participants. The gas was not
only intoxicating, it made people hilarious—and soon came to be known as
“laughing gas.” It was noticed that people under the influence of “laughing
gas” were temporarily insensitive to pain.
The colonists in the United States were also doing some experimentation
along the same lines, although using different chemicals. The compound of
choice for the Americans was ether, one of the oldest manufactured organic
chemicals. Ether was undoubtedly developed by alchemists in the Middle
Ages, who heated ethyl alcohol and sulfuric acid. In 1841, Charles Jackson
of Plymouth, Massachusetts, discovered that ether had an anesthetic effect,
although he made no immediate use of it.
Meanwhile, down in Georgia, the equivalent of the English “frolics”
were taking place, using ether instead of nitrous oxide. During one of these
parties, Crawford Long, a surgeon, realized the potential value of ether in
medical procedures, and in 1842 removed a tumor from a patient’s neck
after first anesthetizing the patient. Although he used the procedure several
times over the next few years, he did not publish his results until 1849.
In the meantime, Jackson had become acquainted with William Mor-
ton, a dentist who became interested in Jackson’s observations concerning
ether. In 1846, in consultation with Jackson, Morton administered ether to
a dental patient and then removed a tooth. He also removed a tumor from
another patient’s neck, and published the results. Jackson and Morton ap-
plied for a patent on ether, but spent much of the rest of their lives quarrel-
ling over the credit for discovering anesthesia. Crawford Long later felt that
he should be similarly recognized, and this undoubtedly motivated his 1849
publication of his 1842 operations.
Alcohol, nitrous oxide, and ether may have been the first “recreational”
drugs, but the relationship between such drugs and useful medical com-
pounds continues to this day. Opium led to the development of such useful
opiates as morphine, and the novocaine that is often administered in a den-
tist’s office is very closely related to cocaine. Even cannabis is used in some
instances as a treatment for glaucoma.

SALVARSAN AND SYPHILIS

One of the most exciting feelings a scientist can experience occurs when
he or she gets an idea that no one has had before. Early in his career, Paul
Ehrlich, who was an inveterate reader, had seen an article about lead poison-
ing in dogs, in which the author had determined that different amounts of
170    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

lead accumulated in the tissues of different organs. This explained why lead
had a more toxic effect on some organs than others.
This led Ehrlich to develop the revolutionary idea of chemotherapy: that
a disease could be treated by finding a substance that was toxic to specific
disease-causing organisms. In order to begin work, Ehrlich made a hypo-
thetical connection between ideas he had come across in two other articles.
The first article stated that trypanosomes, which were responsible for diseases
such as African sleeping sickness, and spirochetes, which were responsible
for syphilis, were closely related. The second article showed that atoxyl, an
organic arsenic compound, had a toxic effect on trypanosomes.
As a result, Ehrlich formulated the hypothesis that an arsenic compound
could be developed to treat syphilis. This idea, so sensible in retrospect, was
regarded within the medical research community as laughable at best and
dangerous at worst. Ehrlich, however, was undeterred. By 1905, when he be-
gan his search for a “magic bullet” to kill the spirochetes that caused syphilis,
the synthetic chemical industry had advanced to a point where it was possible
to generate numerous variations on the atoxyl theme.
One can only wonder what would have happened if Ehrlich had been
employed, not by a German university at the turn of the twentieth century,
but by a modern pharmaceutical company with its emphasis on the bottom
line. For after one year of product development, no product had been de-
veloped. Nor after two years, nor three. More than four years and over six
hundred unsuccessful trials took place before Ehrlich’s Compound Six-Oh-
Six (later renamed Salvarsan), the 606th atoxyl variant to be tested, proved
successful.
Salvarsan proved to be successful beyond even Ehrlich’s expectations. In
many cases, it cured syphilis overnight. Ehrlich, whose modesty was legend-
ary, was once congratulated on his achievement by a colleague. He replied
that “for seven years of misfortune I had one moment of good luck.”
Ehrlich was perhaps even luckier with Six-Oh-Six than he knew. It was
later discovered that the cultures of syphilis continue to thrive almost nor-
mally on culture plates in laboratory experiments when exposed to concen-
trations of Salvarsan much greater than could possibly be given to patients.
From other evidence, we now also know that the complex arsenic compound
Ehrlich invented does not actually have the “magic bullet” effect for which
he searched. It breaks down in the body to a simpler substance that actually
produces the cure. If these experiments on culture plates had been made by
Ehrlich, the first magic bullet to combat bacterial infections might never
have been found. Perhaps fortune really does favor the bold, even in science.
 D isease    171

Many of Paul Ehrlich’s personal characteristics typified what we have

come to think of as the absentminded professor. He thought nothing of
scribbling chemical formulas on any available writing surface, including
those not expressly designed for the purpose, such as linen tablecloths.
Despite numerous personal idiosyncrasies, almost everyone found him a
man of great warmth and personal charm. When he died in 1915 during
the First World War, even as British and German troops were facing each
other throughout Europe, the London Times eulogized him: “He opened
new doors to the unknown, and the whole world at this hour is his debtor.”

THE DISCOVERY OF PENICILLIN

Discoveries in science are supposed to go “through channels”; they are writ-

ten up, submitted to professional journals, undergo peer review, and are
then published, assuming they meet the standards required for publication.
A scientist can also publicize his or her discovery within the confines of the
scientific community, usually by giving lectures or seminars. Indeed, if a
scientist feels that the discovery is noteworthy, it is important that he or she
make personal appearances to bring the discovery to the immediate attention
of the scientific community. But it doesn’t hurt to be a good promoter—
which Alexander Fleming was not.
In 1921, Fleming found himself a victim of what was probably a com-
mon cold. One day, while working with his bacterial cultures, some of the
mucus produced by this cold accidentally dripped into one of the culture
dishes. Examining this culture a few days later, Fleming noticed that the
bacteria had been destroyed; the liquid had been turned, as he later said,
“clear as gin.” He isolated the substance responsible for this phenomenon
and named it lysozyme. It turned out to be an enzyme that exists in tears,
saliva, and mucus.
Feeling that this was an important discovery, he arranged to deliver a lec-
ture before the prestigious London Medical Research Club. Unfortunately,
Fleming was a quiet, soft-spoken man who usually said little. His strength
was that of a keen observer, rather than a speaker or expositor. As a result,
when he concluded his lecture, his audience reacted with total indifference.
Seven years were to pass. In the summer of 1928, in the process of some
rather routine research on the growth and properties of staphylococcal bac-
teria, Fleming prepared a number of culture dishes, and covered them with
glass plates. He then went on vacation. Upon returning, he discovered that
one of the glass coverings had fallen off a dish. One of the molds that are
172    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

always present in dusty laboratories had gotten on to the bacteria dish and
“spoiled” it. He was just about to throw out the contaminated dish, when he
suddenly changed his mind. He examined the dish more closely and noticed
that a gaping hole appeared in the middle of the culture. Fleming analyzed
it and discovered that it was due to an accidental contamination of the dish
by a fungus. This mold was later identified as penicillium notatum, whose
active ingredient was penicillin. Fleming, calm and even-tempered as always,
duly recorded this observation. Despite the chilly reception he had endured
from the London Medical Research Club eight years previously, he felt his
discovery was sufficiently important to report it to them.
Once again, the enormous promise of Fleming’s discovery was obscured
by his inability to convince his audience of the importance of his discovery.
It required the stimulus of World War II, with its urgent need for antibiotics,
to recognize Fleming’s discovery for what it was: the single most powerful
weapon ever developed in the battle against microbial infection, a drug that
would save tens of millions of lives.
The value of penicillin was recognized by the beginning of World War
II, but there were major obstacles to mass-producing it. The British phar-
maceutical industry did not have the time or the resources to pursue the
problem, so the world’s entire supply of penicillin, which consisted of a few
test tubes derived from Fleming’s original discovery, was packed up and
shipped in secret to the United States. It was believed to be perhaps the most
valuable substance on the planet, and every single milligram was jealously
hoarded. When a laboratory technician at Merck, one of the drug companies
investigating ways to mass-produce it, requested a larger sample of penicil-
lin for an experiment, Dr. Max Tishler, the laboratory director, responded,
“Remember, when you are working with those 50 or 100 milligrams, you are
working with a human life.”

Preventing Disease
As of this writing, there is no cure for COVID-19—although there are
developments that show promise. But there is something even better than
being able to cure a disease, and that is being able to prevent a disease—or
to minimize its effects should it occur.
If the germ for a disease exists, there are people whose immune system
will protect them from contracting the disease, but the immune systems of
many people do not recognize the germ as hostile and thus do not mobilize
the body’s defenses to combat that disease. But one of the great discoveries
 D isease    173

in the history of science is that there is a way to get the body’s immune sys-
tem to recognize the germ without incurring the cost of first contracting the
disease—and that’s what vaccines do.

THE SMALLPOX VACCINE

A fierce debate has raged over the years on whether or not to execute one
of the greatest mass murderers of all time. This mass murderer remains
under constant guard in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as in a similar laboratory in Russia. The debate
centers around the last remaining specimens on Earth of the smallpox virus,
and the question is whether it would do more good to have it available for
study, or whether it should be destroyed to prevent it from ever again afflict-
ing mankind.
The last recorded case of smallpox was in 1977, and nowadays everyone
is routinely vaccinated against it. Since almost no one has even seen a case
of smallpox, we must rely on descriptions such as the following by the noted
author Thomas Macaulay:

That disease . . . was the most terrible of all the ministers of death
. . . the smallpox was always present, filling the churchyard with
corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet
stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces
of its power.

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the Turks had noticed that those
who survived an attack of smallpox developed immunity to the disease. They
developed a technique of smallpox inoculation, in which a person was given a
(hopefully) mild case of smallpox. Unfortunately, this technique, called vari-
olation, was highly erratic. If the individual being inoculated contracted too
severe a case, he or she could easily be scarred for life, blinded, or even killed.
Dr. Edward Jenner, an English country physician, was familiar with the
technique of smallpox inoculation. While inoculating villagers one day, he
was told not to bother inoculating one of the dairymaids. When Jenner asked
why, the villagers explained to him that she had previously contracted a case
of cowpox. While it was known that people who had contracted cowpox
never got smallpox, it was Jenner who formulated the critical hypothesis: if
one were to give people the mild disease of cowpox via inoculation, rather
174    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

than the dangerous disease of smallpox, one could achieve the immunity
against smallpox without risk.
Jenner took more than twenty years of experimentation to establish the
truth of this hypothesis. In the process, he coined the term “vaccine” (from
vacca, the Latin word for cow!). Nonetheless, when he presented his findings
to the Royal Society, he admitted that his investigations were incomplete,
stating that he hoped his results would “present to persons well situated for
such discussions, objects for a minute investigation. In the meantime, I shall
myself continue to prosecute this inquiry, encouraged by the hope of its
becoming essentially beneficial to mankind.”
It would be more than a century before the mechanism by which small-
pox vaccination worked would be understood. The immune system stores a
record of previous invasions by foreign bodies, so that future onslaughts may
be quickly repelled. Once the immune system has encountered the cowpox
virus, it is able to recognize and attack the highly similar smallpox virus
before the latter has time to multiply and overwhelm the body’s defenses.
Encouraging the immune system to destroy an invading virus is the basis of
all vaccines, including the vaccines recently developed against COVID-19.
Many of the great advances in science are the result of acute observation.
Good observers are doubtless made, not born, but there are probably certain
backgrounds that prepare one well for patient observation. Jenner found an
unusual one, as prior to becoming a doctor, he had been an ornithologist.
His chief claim to fame had been the observation that cuckoo chicks, which
hatch from eggs laid in other birds’ nests, physically eject the natural chicks
from their own nest, and are then “adopted” by the birds who raise the
cuckoo chick as their own.

ANTISEPSIS

Modern surgery, as it is currently performed in hospitals, owes its high rate

of success to two dramatic developments that occurred during the nineteenth
century. The first was the introduction of anesthesia, which made it possible
to perform surgical procedures of extended duration. The second was the in-
stitution of antiseptic precautions on the part of the surgeons, which greatly
reduced post-operative mortality.
Ignaz Semmelweis was a Viennese pre-law student who accompanied
a friend to an anatomy lecture. Anatomy impressed Semmelweis as being
far more interesting than law, and he eventually received a medical degree
from the University of Vienna. On graduation, he immediately became in-
 D isease    175

terested in childbed fever. He was startled by the fact that women who were
examined by a physician prior to childbirth were much more likely to die of
infection than those who were not examined. When a colleague died of an
infection after being cut by a surgical knife, Semmelweis reached the conclu-
sion that lethal infections were being caused by unsterile instruments and
physicians’ hands. Against fierce opposition, he required doctors in his de-
partment to wash their hands prior to performing surgery. This resulted in a
dramatic reduction in the number of women who died from post-childbirth
infection. Despite these clear lifesaving benefits, Semmelweis was fired from
the hospital, and was persecuted to such an extent that he suffered a nervous
breakdown. In a sadly ironic twist, Semmelweis suffered the same fate as his
colleague. While attending a sick patient, he accidentally wounded himself
and died of childbed fever.
Several years later a Scottish physician, Joseph Lister, became convinced
of the validity of Louis Pasteur’s theory that microbes caused infections.
The introduction of anesthetic procedures had enabled doctors to perform
more complex surgeries, but the gains made thereby were offset by a stun-
ning increase in gangrene and similar infections. Building on Pasteur’s ideas,
he decided to institute measures designed to kill any germs that might exist
in surgical wounds by treating them with carbolic acid. Although this had
the unpleasant effect of irritating the treated tissues, it greatly reduced post-
surgical infections. The reaction to Lister’s efforts by his surgical colleagues
paralleled the experiences of Semmelweis. The surgeons in Lister’s hospital
rejected his methods and refused to adopt his procedures. He was accused
of stealing the ideas of others, and had to struggle for more than a decade
before his antiseptic procedures finally gained credence. Although he did his
initial work in Scotland, he later moved to London in an attempt to convince
surgeons there of the validity of his techniques. His ideas met with stiff op-
position in England, but they were quickly adopted on the continent.
Lister was not only an excellent surgeon, he was a respected scientist
who stayed on the cutting edge (appropriate for a surgeon) of developments
in his field. He was one of the first scientists to accept Pasteur’s and Koch’s
theories, and did pioneering work in bacteriology.
Even though Semmelweis and Lister were basically attacking the same
problem, Lister had the enormous advantage of timing. The sterilization
techniques introduced by Semmelweis were successful, but at the time there
was no apparent reason why they should have been. Lister’s work occurred at
the time that both Pasteur and Koch were achieving great recognition, and in
the light of these developments it was easy to understand why Lister’s tech-
niques proved so effective. It would be nice to think that the scientific world
176    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

is one in which rationality always prevails, but the experiences of Lister dem-
onstrate that just because what you do works, and there is a valid reason that
it works, there is no guarantee that your ideas will be immediately accepted.
The admonition to “wash your hands thoroughly” came once again to
the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic. This antiseptic procedure helps
prevent both bacterial and viral infections by removing or killing the germs
responsible. Germs generally enter the body through openings, such as eye,
nose, and mouth, that we touch frequently. Even though it has been shown
that COVID-19 is primarily spread through respiratory droplets, it’s still a
good idea to substitute the fist or elbow bump for the common handshake
during the pandemic.

THE POLIO VACCINE

As of this writing, the battle against COVID has been going on for several
years, and progress has been remarkable. Such was not the case in 1949,
when the dreaded disease was not COVID-19 but polio. Like COVID, polio
was caused by a virus. Unlike COVID, whose victims tend to be the elderly,
polio primarily attacked children, and was also known as infantile paralysis.
It was not known precisely which behavior was most likely to result in a per-
son contracting polio, but the disease altered behavior much as COVID has.
During the summer, parents forbade their children from swimming in public
pools, and people slept with their windows closed to prevent the virus from
entering. Leading experts agreed that a cure or a vaccine was decades away.
The experts were wrong. On April 12, 1955, ten years to the day after
the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a well-known polio victim,
it was announced that a vaccine developed by a young medical investiga-
tor named Jonas Salk, from the University of Pittsburgh, had been proven
safe and effective in preventing polio. The efficacy of the Salk vaccine had
been confirmed in one of the largest field trials in medical history. Had Salk
discovered that chicken soup prevented polio, the news would have been no
less welcome, and the road to eventual success would have been substantially
easier, for no expert’s reputation depended upon the denial of the curative
power of chicken soup. Salk, however, decided to try to create a “killed vi-
rus” vaccine. At the time, the prevailing view of vaccine immunity was that
it was necessary to use “live virus” vaccines, of the type developed by the
nineteenth-century giants Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. In trying to cre-
ate a “killed virus” vaccine, Salk was challenging the wisdom of the medical
 D isease    177

establishment. Salk’s success was to be purchased at the high price of hostility

from many of his peers in medical research.
Salk had first come to doubt the validity of the “live virus” theory in
1936, while a twenty-one-year-old medical student at New York University.
During a lecture on immunization, he had heard the professor reiterate Pas-
teur’s theory that immunization against viral diseases required live viruses.
Yet, in another lecture, he also learned that the vaccine against diphtheria, a
bacterial disease, was created from killed diphtheria toxin. Salk was puzzled
by the paradox. Why should a vaccine against viral diseases be so radically
different from those successfully employed in the fight against bacterial
diseases?
With the advantage of hindsight, it is somewhat difficult to see why a
killed virus vaccine was such a heretical idea. Isabel Morgan, niece of the
famous geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, had shown that a killed virus vac-
cine could be developed to immunize monkeys against polio. At the time
it was thought that monkeys were so radically different from man that this
research had no bearing on the development of a vaccine for human beings.
DNA analysis performed during the 1980s has since shown that the chemical
structure of the blood of man and chimpanzee matches to within 1 percent.
Had this been known at the time, perhaps Salk’s strategy would not have
appeared so controversial.
Perhaps never in the history of science has an individual who did so
much good been so excoriated by his peers. The adulation heaped upon Salk,
which Salk tried desperately to avoid, created an unparalleled enmity among
his colleagues. Salk saw his achievement as the culmination of decades of
work by many scientists, and repeatedly tried to present that view, but the
public and the media didn’t buy it. Some of his colleagues saw Salk as com-
mitting the three cardinal sins of a scientist: challenging the wisdom of the
establishment, being correct in doing so, and becoming famous as a result.
Despite his monumental achievement, he never became a member of the
prestigious National Academy of Sciences—but there are a number of Salk
Institutes and schools named in his honor, and almost none for members of
that academy.
CHAPTER 10

Science in the
Twenty-First Century

We are only two decades into the twenty-first century, and already we have
seen some amazing discoveries. Gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein’s
theory of relativity, have not only been discovered but have shed light on
what happens when collisions occur between massive objects such as neutron
stars. The discovery of the Higgs boson, which gives mass to the various par-
ticles, was finally confirmed after a half century of searching. And, of course,
the rapidity with which the mRNA vaccines were created and produced
have helped to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, and hold the promise of
revolutionizing vaccine creation.
As amazing as these discoveries are, the promise of even more lies ahead.
The Webb telescope may show us the signature of life elsewhere in the Uni-
verse. We may finally discover the nature of the dark matter and dark energy
that appear to comprise most of the matter and energy in the Universe. We
may discover how life evolved on Earth, and there is a good chance that this
century will see the creation of life-forms from scratch, rather than by modi-
fying existing life-forms.
Already we can see three developing trends in science. What has changed
in the twenty-first century is how science is done, and who’s doing it. Sadly,
what has not changed are the negative and erroneous views with which sci-
ence is sometimes regarded.

HOW SCIENCE IS DONE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

When we look at the milestones of science, the vast majority to date are the
result of the work of individuals. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth
179
180    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

centuries, scientific developments occurred as the result of the investigation

or theorizing by a single individual. Granted, each individual did have the
ability to correspond with other scientists through the mail, and they might
even occasionally meet, but most of the work was done in isolation. Books
or articles would be published and read, but there would often be delays
of weeks or months before other scientists learned of new developments.
Almost all scientific discoveries took place in Europe, as communication
between Europe and the Americas required ocean voyages. For the most
part, science was pursued by men who had the financial resources and time
to pursue it.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of scientific collaboration. Nations
and industries saw the advantages that scientific developments brought, and
investment in science increased. Publishing became more widespread, and
railroad trains made travel substantially easier. As a result, scientists could
meet with others and learn of their work fairly rapidly. The speed of discov-
ery increased.
This trend accelerated during the twentieth century. Electronic commu-
nication made it possible for scientists to learn of new developments almost
instantaneously. The airplane made it possible for large groups of scientists to
easily congregate, and scientific conventions attended by hundreds or thou-
sands of scientists became usual events. Science became a major beneficiary
of government funding. Additionally, public awareness of science increased
immeasurably, and more people sought scientific careers in industry, govern-
ment, and academia.
The importance of the electronic computer to scientific progress cannot
be underestimated. In the middle of the twentieth century, a department in
a university or a business might have a single computer. By the end of the
twentieth century, it was common for every faculty member to have his or
her own computer. Although large-scale databases were not available to the
extent they are now, email enabled scientists to communicate with each other
overnight. The computer was capable not only of solving difficult problems,
but simulating situations that could not possibly be studied any other way.
These trends have, not surprisingly, continued. Major developments are
known instantaneously, and are often the result of large-scale collaborations
between scientists in many nations. This has been made easier by the de
facto adoption of English as the universal language of science. Additionally,
platforms such as Zoom have made it possible for scientists in one portion
of the world to visualize an experiment as it is taking place half a world
away. In the nineteenth century, scientists on different continents could
write to each other. In the twentieth century, they could talk to each other
 S cience in the T wenty - F irst C entury    181

via telephone. Now their computers enable them to see and actually work
with each other in real time. It’s the Golden Age of scientific communica-
tion and collaboration.

WHO’S DOING SCIENCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The short answer is—practically anyone that wants to.

Again, perusing the history of science makes it apparent that during
the seventeenth century, most of science was done by men—and European
men in particular. In the nineteenth century, science became more of an
international activity, and women started to contribute to the advancement
of science. Science was still regarded as an activity mostly pursued by men.
That began to change in the twentieth century. More women entered
scientific fields. Even though some women were recognized—Marie Curie
received two Nobel Prizes—some were ignored or suppressed, as we recall
from the story of the Nobel Prize Committee not realizing that Henrietta
Swan Leavitt had died some five years prior to their consideration of her.
But, as gender and civil rights movements made social progress, their impact
was felt in the sciences.
Nowadays, women are a significant part of the scientific workforce,
and are likely to become even more so in the future. The National Science
Foundation compiled statistics, and currently 43 percent of the scientific
workforce is female, and that percentage rises to 56 percent if one considers
only scientists under twenty-nine years of age.
Science is much more of an international effort than ever before. Most
governments support scientific endeavors, and—as mentioned previously—
the internet enables instantaneous communication between any two scien-
tists anywhere in the world. I’ve collaborated with scientists from Europe and
Asia whom I’ve never met—and probably will never meet—and this is the
rule rather than the exception.
Additionally, it is now possible for the public at large to make contribu-
tions to scientific research. The widespread availability of scientific data has
made it possible for amateurs to make useful contributions. In 2021, two
high school students combing through data discovered four exoplanets. It
would not be surprising if similar discoveries were made by amateurs sifting
through the mass of data currently made available through various genome
projects.
Developments such as these are extremely heartening. Scientific
knowledge should be available to everyone, and everyone should be able
182    T H E M I L E S T O N E S O F S C I E N C E

to contribute to amassing it and gleaning useful results therefrom. It is not

only beneficial; it is intellectually satisfying, and helps bring people closer
together. Everyone wins.

HOW SCIENCE IS PERCEIVED

Carl Sagan, an internationally respected scientist, was one of the great popu-
larizers of science in the twentieth century. His book Cosmos was made into
an extremely popular television miniseries, and Sagan himself was a staple
on television talk shows. Another of his books, The Demon-Haunted World:
Science as a Candle in the Dark, is a stark description of the dangers presented
by the antipathy to scientific thought that has existed throughout history.
Sagan would not have been at all surprised to learn that fully 20 percent
of Americans believe that the government is injecting tracking microchips via
the COVID vaccines. Here we are, in the midst of the first global pandemic
in a century. The population has been completely vaccinated against small-
pox and polio—and also receives periodic vaccination against tuberculosis,
shingles, and flu. Nonetheless, certain parties have found it of greater value
to spread lies about the mRNA vaccines and the motives behind those urging
vaccination than to implore their followers to take advantage of one of the
great achievements of medical science.
Science has faced many uphill battles in the past. In the Middle Ages,
scientists such as Giordano Bruno were burned at the stake for promulgating
the heretical notion that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. Such
a point of view brought science into confrontation with the Roman Catholic
Church, the most powerful organization of the times. Most of the battles sci-
ence now faces are fought on the field of the biological sciences. It’s hard to
imagine a development in physics or chemistry that would engender societal
conflict—and it is hard to believe that the development of the mRNA vac-
cines to ease a global pandemic would have done so. But it did, and unless
something is done in the way of counteracting the inaccurate information
that proliferates via social media, things will probably get worse.
Science is one of the great benefactors of humanity, but there is no ques-
tion that science opens Pandora’s box. Almost certainly this century will see
the creation of life from test tube ingredients—and given the array of DNA
analysis and engineering tools currently in existence, we will see the opening
of a Pandora’s box unlike anything we have ever witnessed. Let us hope that
we have the wisdom to accompany the knowledge that science has accumu-
lated and will accumulate.
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Oberg, Erik. Machinery’s Handbook. 29th edition. New York: Industrial Press, 2012.
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Scientists Who Changed History. London: D.K. Publishing, 2019.
Staley, Richard. Einstein’s Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Sykes, Christopher (Ed.). No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman.
New York: Norton, 1995.
Wali, Kameshwar. Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1990.
Watson, James. The Double Helix. New York: Scribner, 1998.
Weast, Robert (Ed.). CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (1981–1982). Boca
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Acknowledgments

There are several people that I’d like to thank who helped make this book
possible. First up are my parents, whose obvious contribution was supple-
mented by encouraging my love for science. My parents took me to muse-
ums, gave me presents such as a cherished chemistry set, and checked out
books that they felt might be of interest from the local library. Next is my
wife Linda, who returned from a trip to Taiwan just in time to realize that
what I thought was a cold might be more serious. It was pneumonia, and
without her efforts I might not be here to write this book. The third person
I would like to thank is my editor, Jake Bonar, for realizing that this might
be just the right time for a book like this, and I might be the right person to
write it. Last, I am grateful to Al Posamentier, a fellow mathematics professor
whose connections in the publishing world fortunately included Jake, and
who brought the two of us together.

185
Index

absolute magnitude, 13–14 antibiotics, 161, 171–72

absolute zero, 30, 67 antibodies, 153–54
acetylcholine, 152 antigens, 153–54
Adams, John Couch, 10 antimatter, 78–79
adenosine, 138 antisepsis, 174–76
Agassiz, Louis, 37–38 Apollo 11, 35
Agricola, Georgius, 29 apparent magnitude, 13
AIDS, 142, 154 Arber, Werner, 143
air, 44–45, 60, 66 arc lighting, 51
Airy, George, 10 Aristotle, 6, 113–14, 149
Albert, prince of Great Britain, 52 Arrhenius, Svante, 39, 56–57
alchemy, 44, 47, 73, 169 arsenic, 170
alcohol, 169 Asaro, Frank, 130
allergic reactions, 153–54 asteroids, and dinosaurs, 130
alpha particles, 70, 73 astigmatism, 100
altruism, 121 astronomy, 1–25, 101–2
Alvarez, Luis and Walter, 130 atmosphere, 35–37
amateurs, and scientific progress, 181 atomic numbers, 76–77
amino acids, 62, 140, 145; structure and atomic theory, xvi, 46–47, 57, 85
synthesis of, 136–38 atomic weapons, 17–18, 71, 74, 80–81
ammonium cyanate, 59 atoms, 67–82; structure of, 70–71
Ampère, André, 93 atoxyl, 170
anaerobic organisms, 116–18 Avery, Oswald, 138
analysis, 50–51 Avogadro, Amadeo, 47
anatomy, 148–49 Avogadro’s hypothesis, 47–49
Anderson, Carl, 79, 81 Avogadro’s number, 48
anesthesia, 162, 168–69, 174
animal behavior, 119–21 bacteria, 60; discovery of, 115–16
anthrax, 164–66 bacteriophages, 143

187
188    I N D E X

bacteriorhodopsin, 126 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 90–91

Ballard, Robert, 117 Boyer, Herbert, 143
ballpark estimates, 3 Boyle, Robert, 66–67, 122
Banting, Frederick, 157 Braconnot, Henri, 137
Bardeen, John, 98–99, 110 Bragg, William Henry and William
Barghoorn, Elso, 144 Lawrence, 76
barium, 80 Brahe, Tycho, 5–6
battery, 92 brain, 151
Bayliss, William, 157 Brattain, Walter, 99, 110
Becquerel, Antoine, 107–8 Bronowski, Jacob, 12
Becquerel, Henri, 57 Brown, Robert, 123
Bednorz, Georg, 98 Bruno, Giordano, 7
bees, 120 bubonic plague, 8, 150, 161–62
Behring, Emil von, 153 Buchner, Edward and Hans, 60–61
Beijerinck, Martinus, 118–19 Bunsen, Robert, 68–69
Bell, Jocelyn, 17 Burke, James, xiv–xv
Bell, John, 86 Burnet, Frank, 154
Bell inequalities, 86 butterfly effect, 41
benzene, 55
berberi, 167–68 Caignard-Latour, Charles, 60
Bergmann, Max, 137 Cairns-Smith, A. Graham, 145
Bernal, John Desmond, 145 Calvin, Melvin, 125–26
Berzelius, Jöns Jakob, 59 cannabis, 169
Bessel, Friedrich, 13, 68 Cannizzaro, Stanislao, 48
Best, Charles, 157 carbohydrates, 158
beta particles, 73 carbolic acid, 175
Bethe, Hans, 15 carbon, 48
Big Bang theory, 20–21, 111 carbon dioxide, 124–25
binomial nomenclature, 114 carbon monoxide, 62–63
biochemistry: foundations of, 57–63; of Carnot, Nicolas, 90–91
genetics, 135–44; of human body, Carson, Rachel, 39–40
154–59 catalysis, 56–57
biology. See disease; life cathode rays, 75, 106
Biot, Jean-Baptiste, 61–62 Cavendish, Henry, 94
bipolar disorder, 152 Cech, Thomas, 142
Bizzozero, Giulio, 156 cells: discovery of, 121–23; theory on,
Bjerknes family, 36 123–24
blackbody, 72 Cepheid variables, 13–15, 19
Black Death, 8, 150, 161–62 ceramic superconductors, 98–99
black holes, 16–17 CERN, 112
black smokers, 117, 145 CFCs, 40
Bloch, Felix, 110 Chadwick, James, 74, 81
blood, 155–56 Chamberland, Charles, 118
Bohr, Niels, 12, 71–72, 78, 80, 83 Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan, 15
Boltwood, Bertram, 30 chaotic phenomena, 40–41
 I ndex    189

Charles, Jacques, 67 Coriolis, Gaspard de, 36

chemical bonds, 54–56 Coriolis force, 36
chemistry, xv–xvi, 43–63; analysis and Corliss, John, 117
synthesis, 50–51; biochemistry, 57– Correns, Karl, 134
63; organizing principles of, 44–50; cosmic rays, 79
physical, 56–57; synthetic, 52–54 cosmology, 3
chemotherapy, 153, 170 Coulomb, Charles, 93, 96
chlorine, 49 coumarin, 54
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), 40 covalent bond, 55
chloroform, 162 COVID-19, 118, 166, 174, 176, 179
chlorophyll, 125–26 cowpox, 153, 173–74
cholera, 162–63 creationism, 58
Christianity: and age of Earth, 29; and Crick, Francis, 63, 76, 138–39, 141
anatomy, 148, 150; and origins of life, Crookes, William, 70
113 crossing over, 136
chromatin, 126 crust, of Earth, 33
chromatography, 62, 125 crystallography, 74–76
chromosomes, 127; and inheritance, Curie, Irene, 81–82
135–36 Curie, Marie, 81, 109, 181
circulatory system, 149–51 Curie, Pierre, 75, 81, 109
citric acid, 159 cytosine, 138
class, 114
Clausius, Rudolf, 90 Dale, Henry, 152
climate change, 131 Dalton, John, 46–49, 57
clonal selection theory, 154 Dark Ages, 4, 114, 121, 147–48, 150
coal tar, 53 dark matter, 22–23, 102
Cohen, Stanley, 143 Darwin, Charles, 12, 32, 123, 128–29
cold, 98 Davisson, Clinton, 78
collaborative science, 180–81 Davy, Humphry, 51–52, 97, 168–69
color vision, 101 DDT, 39–40
comets, 9, 18–19 de Broglie, Louis, 78
complementarity, 84–86 deficiency diseases, 167–68
computers: and chaotic phenomena, 40– de Kruif, Paul, 161
41; and scientific progress, 180–81; deterministic phenomena, 41
and weather forecasting, 37 de Vries, Hugo, 134–35
Comte, Auguste, 68–69 dinosaurs, 129–31
conductors, 109 Dirac, Paul, 78–79, 81
Connections (Burke), xiv–xv disease, 8, 116, 161–77; genetic
continental drift, 34–35 engineering and, 143; germ theory of,
Cook, James, 167 118, 153, 163–65, 175; Hippocrates
Cooper, Leon, 98 on, 148; immune system and, 153–54;
Copenhagen interpretation, 85 prevention of, 172–77; treatment of,
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 4–5 166–72
core, of Earth, 33 dissection, 148–50
Cori, Carl and Getty, 158–59 distant early warning (DEW), 41
190    I N D E X

DNA, 55, 62–63, 141; structure of, 138–39 El Niño, 36

Doppler, Christian, 103 energy, 89–112
Doppler effect, 103–4 environmental movement, 39–40
double helix, 138–39 enzymes, 57, 61, 137
double-slit experiment, 99–101 Epicurus, 45
dyes, synthetic, 53–54, 126 epidemiology, 162–63
dynamos, 95 EPR experiment, 85
Eratosthenes, 28–29
Earth, 27–41, 44, 60; age of, 15, 29–30, ether, 104–5, 169
144; interior structure of, 32–33; man ethyl alcohol, 54
and, 39–40; measurement of, 28–29; evolution, 29–30, 58, 114, 127–31;
surface of, 35–41 genetic code and, 141; Hooke and,
earthquakes, 32–33, 35 123
eclipses, 1–4, 12, 28 exoplanets, 23–25, 27, 69, 104, 181
ecology, term, 39 experiments, xiii, xv–xvii
Eddington, Arthur, 12, 15
Edison, Thomas, 107 Faraday, Michael, 52, 95–97
Ehrlich, Paul, 68, 126, 153–54, 169–71 Fauci, Anthony, 166
Eightfold Way, 87 fermentation, 43, 59–61, 117
Eijkman, Christaan, 167–68 Ferrel, William, 36
Einstein, Albert, 9, 15, 80, 97; and Feynman, Richard, xvi–xvii, 46, 67
photoelectricity, 72, 82; and quantum field theory, of electromagnetism,
view of reality, 85–86; and relativity, 96–97
11–12, 18, 78, 105, 179; and unified fifth force, 111
field theory, 97 fire, 43–44, 60, 65; nature of, 44–45
Ekman, Vagn, 36 Fischer, Emil, 137–38
Ekman layer, 36 fission, 79–81
electricity, 68, 91–99; conduction of, Fitzgerald, George, 105
109–10; nature of, 91–93 flatness problem, 22
electrochemistry, 51–57 Fleming, Alexander, 37, 171–72
electrodynamics, 93–94 Flemming, Walther, 126–27
electrolysis, 52 fluorescence, 108
electrolytes, 56 forces, 89–112
electromagnetic induction, 95–96 forensic science, 118
electromagnetic spectrum, 101–2 fossils, 34, 74, 129, 144; term, 29
electromagnetism, 70, 105–6; field theory Fourier, Jean, 94
of, 96–97 Fraatz, Emmy, 165
electron microscope, 119 Franklin, Benjamin, 35–36, 92, 109
electrons, 55, 57, 70–71, 74 Franklin, Rosalind, 76–77, 138–39
electrophorus, 92 Frederick II, king of Denmark, 5
electrostatics, 93–94 Fresnel, Augustin, 104
electroweak force, 111 Frisch, Karl von, 120
elegance, theory and, xvii fruit flies, 135–36
elements: Greeks on, 44, 60; periodic Funk, Casimir, 168
table of, 49–50, 76–77 fusion, 15–16
 I ndex    191

galactic habitable zone, 20 Hahn, Otto, 79–80

Galen, 148–50 Halley, Edmund, 9, 18
Galileo Galilei, 6–7, 66, 150 Hamilton, William, 121
Galle, Johann, 10–11 Harvey, William, 150–51
Galvani, Luigi, 92–93, 151–52 Haüy, René, 75
Gamow, George, 22–23 Hawking, Stephen, 154
gases, 51, 65 heart, 149–50
Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis, 47–49, 67 heat, 57, 68, 94
geese, 120 heavy water, 82
Gell-Mann, Murray, 86–87 Heisenberg, Werner, 69–70, 80, 83–84
gene mapping, 136 heliocentric theory, 4–7
genes, 134, 136 helioseismology, 33
genetically modified organisms (GMOs), Helmholtz, Hermann von, 15
144 hemoglobin, 155–56
genetic code, 139–41 Heron, 66
genetic engineering, 142–44 Hero of Alexandria, 66
genetics, 133–45; biochemistry of, 135–44 Herophilus, 151
genus, 114 Herschel, Caroline, 9–10, 101
geology, 31–35 Herschel, William, 9–10, 101–2
geometry, 28 Hertz, Heinrich, 97, 102
George III, king of Great Britain, 167 Hertzsprung, Ejnar, 13
germ theory of disease, 118, 153, 163– Hess, Harry, 34–35
65, 175 Hewish, Anthony, 17
glaciers, 36–37 hidden variable, 86
Glashow, Sheldon, 111–12 Higgs, Peter, 87
glycine, 137 Higgs boson, 87, 179
glycogen, 158 Hippocrates, 148
Gödel, Kurt, 70 HIV, 142
grand unified theory (GUT), 112 Hodgkin, Dorothy Crowfoot, 76
gravitational force, 95, 105–6 Hofmann, August von, 52–53
gravitational waves, 179 Hofmeister, Franz, 61
Great Hercules Cluster, 19 Hofstadter, Robert, 87
Greeks: and anatomy, 151; and homeostasis, 57–58
astronomy, 9; and atomic theory, Hooke, Robert, 115, 121–23
46; and blood, 155; and chemistry, Hoppe-Seyler, Ernst, 155–56
44–45; and elements, 44, 60; and hormones, 156–57
geometry, 28; and matter, 65–66 Hubble, Edwin, 20, 104
greenhouse effect, 39 human body, 147–59; biochemistry
guanine, 138 of, 154–59; initial investigation of,
Guericke, Otto von, 66 147–51
Gulf Stream, 35–36 Human Genome Project, 136
Guth, Alan, 23 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV),
142, 154
habitable zone: galactic, 20; solar, 27 Humboldt, Alexander von, 36
Haeckel, Ernst, 39, 127–28 Humboldt Current, 36
192    I N D E X

humours, 155 Krebs cycle, 159

Hutton, James, 31–32 K-T boundary, 130
Huygens, Christiaan, 100
hydrogen, 46, 48, 54 lactic acid, 158–59
Lagrange, Joseph-Louise, 46
ice ages, 37–38 Landsteiner, Karl, 153
immune system, 153–54. Laplace, Pierre, 83
See also vaccines lasers, 62
incompleteness theorem, 70 Laue, Max von, 75
induction, electromagnetic, 95–96 Lavoisier, Antoine, 45–46, 51, 60
Industrial Revolution, 31, 89–91 laws: of combining volumes, Gay-Lussac,
inflation, 23 47–48; of conservation of mass, 44–
infrared, 101–2 46; Coulomb, 93, 96; of electrolysis,
Ingenhousz, Jan, 125 Faraday, 52; of falling bodies,
inoculation, 125, 153, 173–74 Galileo, 6–7; of gases, Boyle, 66–67;
insulin, 157; structure of, 61–63 of genetics, 133–35; of gravitation,
interferometry, 24–25, 105 Newton, 5, 8–9; Maxwell, 97; Ohm,
introns, 141 94; of planetary motion, Kepler, 5; of
ionic bond, 55 radioactive displacement, Soddy, 73;
iridium, 130 of thermodynamics, 89–91
isomers, 54 LCD, 75
isotopes, 73–74; radioactive, creation of, lead, 169–70
81–82 Leavitt, Henrietta Swan, 14–15, 19, 181
Ivanovsky, Dmitri, 118 Leeuwenhoek, Anton van, 115–16, 155
Lehmann, Inge, 33
Jackson, Charles, 169 Leibniz, Gottfried, 9
Jacob, François, 141 Leonardo da Vinci, 150
Jenner, Edward, 153, 173–74 leptons, 87
jet stream, 36–37 leucine, 137
Joliot, Frederic, 81–82 LeVerrier, Urbain, 10
Jolly, Philipp von, 71 Lewis, Gilbert, 55
Joule, James Prescott, 90–91 Liebig, Justus von, 60, 136–37
Jupiter, 7, 9 life, 113–31; chemistry of, 57–63;
evolution of, 127–31; extraterrestrial,
Kamerlingh Onnes, Heike, 98 23–24; genetics and, 133–45; and
Kekulé, Friedrich von, 54–55 human body, 147–59; origins of, 113,
Kelvin, William Thomson, lord, 30, 144–45; science of, 121–27; varieties
89–90, 119–20 of, 113; viruses and, 119.
Kepler, Johannes, 5–6 See also disease
Kirchhoff, Gustav, 68–69 light, 99–105; polarization of, 61–62, 75
Kitasato, Shibasaburo, 153, 161 Lind, James, 167–68
Koch, Robert, 124, 126, 165–67 Linnaeus, Carl, 114
Koch’s postulates, 166 liquid crystal display (LCD), 75
Krebs, Hans, 158–59 liquids, 65
 I ndex    193

Lister, Joseph, 175 messenger RNA, 140; vaccines, 154, 182

living organisms, classification of, 113–15 Messier, Charles, 18–19
lodestone, 91 metabolism, 158–59
Loewi, Otto, 152–53 Metchnikoff, Élie, 156
Long, Crawford, 169 meteorology, 3, 36–37, 40, 47
Lorentz, Hendrik, 105 meteors, 68
Lorenz, Edward, 40–41 Meyerhof, Otto, 158
Lorenz, Konrad, 120 Michel, Helen, 130
Lyell, Charles, 29–30 Michell, John, 17
lysozyme, 171 Michelson, Albert, 104–5
microscopes, 115–16, 121–22; and
Macaulay, Thomas, 173 anatomy, 151–54; electron, 119
MacLeod, Colin, 138 Miescher, Johannes, 156
Macleod, John, 157 Milankovitch, Milutin, 37
Magendie, François, 155 Milky Way galaxy, 18–20
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 99 Miller, Stanley, 144–45
magnetism, 70, 91–99; of Earth, 34–35 mitosis, 124, 126–27
malaria, 53 Mittag-Leffler, Gosta, 14–15
Malpighi, Marcello, 151 Mohorovičić, Andrija, 33
Malthus, Thomas, 129 molecules, structure of, 61–63
Manhattan Project, 17–18, 80–81 Molina, Mario, 40
Mantell, Mary Ann, 129 Monod, Jacques, 141
mantle, of Earth, 33 Montreal Protocol, 40
Marconi, Guglielmo, 102 Moon, 7
Marcus Aurelius, 148 Morgan, Isabel, 136, 177
Maria Theresa, empress of Austria, 125 Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 135–36
Mars, 9 Morley, Edward, 104–5
mass, 87; conservation of, 44–46; morphine, 169
wavelength and, 78 Morton, William, 169
mathematics, 6, 8, 28, 84 Moseley, Henry, 76–77
matter, 65–87; phases of, 65–67 motor nerves, 151
Matthews, D. H., 34 MRI, 99
mauve, 52–54 mRNA, 140; vaccines, 154, 182
Maxwell, James Clerk, 70, 97, 102 Muller, Hermann, 136
McCarty, Maclyn, 138 Muller, Johannes, 152
measurement, of Earth, 28–29 Müller, Karl, 98
Medawar, Peter, 154 Mullis, Kary, 118
medicine. See disease muscles, 152
meiosis, 126–27 mutations, 135–36
Meitner, Lise, 79–80, 91
Mendel, Gregor, 127, 133–35, 138 Napoleon Bonaparte, 93–94, 108
Mendeleev, Dmitri, 49–50, 76–77 Nasir-al-Din-al-Tusi, 45
mercury, 45 National Aeronautics and Space
Mercury, 9–12 Administration (NASA), 1, 35, 145
Mersenne, Marin, 103 naturalists, 119–21
194    I N D E X

natural selection, 129, 135 Owen, Richard, 129

Nazi Germany and scientists, 72, 79–80, oxygen, 45–46, 48, 54, 62–63, 117, 124
153–54 ozone layer, 40
Ne’eman, Yuval, 86–87
Neptune, 9–11 paper chromatography, 125
neptunism, 31 parallax, 13
nerves, 151–53 particle accelerators, 112
neurotransmitters, 151–53 Pasteur, Louis, 60–61, 116–18, 163–65
neutrinos, 23 pasteurization, 163–64
neutrons, 73–74 Pauling, Linus, 55–56, 138–39
neutron stars, 17–18 Pavlov, Ivan, 156–57
Newton, Isaac, 7, 12–13, 44, 78, 93; and PCR, 118
gravity, 5, 8–11, 97; and Hooke, 122; penicillin, 37, 76, 171–72
and optics, 69, 99–100; and Royal Penzias, Arno, 21
Society, 116; and sound, 103 peptide bond, 137
El Niño, 36 perfume industry, 54
niobium, 98 periodic table of elements, 49–50, 76–77
Nirenberg, Marshall, 140 period-luminosity curve, 13–15, 19
nitric acid, 57 Perkin, William, 53–54, 126
nitrous oxide, 51, 168–69 Perraudin, Jean-Pierre, 37
novocaine, 169 Perutz, Max, 155
nuclear fission, 79–81 pharmaceutical industry, 137, 169–70,
nuclear winter, 131 172
nucleic acids, 156 phenylalanine, 140
nucleus (atomic), 55, 71 phlogiston theory, 44–45
nucleus (cellular), 123 phosphorescence, 108
photochemistry, 69
Oberg, Erik, xvi photoelectricity, 72, 82, 105
observations, xiii, xv–xvii photons, 111
Occam’s razor, 4 photosynthesis, 124–26
ocean: Carson and, 39; dynamics of, phylogeny, 128
35–37; floor of, 34–35 physical chemistry, 56–57
Oersted, Hans, 93, 95, 97 physics, 65–87; forces and energy in,
Ohm, Georg, 94 89–112
Oldham, Richard, 32–33 piezoelectricity, 75
ontogeny, 128 plague, 8, 150, 161–62
Oparin, Alexander, 145 Planck, Max, 72–73, 78, 82
opium, 169 planets, 7, 9–11; extrasolar, 23–25, 69,
Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 17–18 104, 181
optic nerve, 152 plants, and photosynthesis, 124–26
optics, 99–100 plasma, 65
order, 114 plasmids, 143
organic chemistry, synthetic, 52–54 platelets, 156
organs, 147–51 plate tectonics, 34–35
Ostwald, Friedrich, 56 Pluto, 24
 I ndex    195

plutonism, 32 rift valley, 35

Podolsky, Boris, 85 Ritter, Johann, 101
polio, 136, 176–77 RNA, 140; functioning of, 141–42
polymerase chain reaction (PCR), 118 Roentgen, Wilhelm, 76, 106–7
Popper, Karl, 58 Roland, F. Sherwood, 40
potassium, 52 Roman Catholic Church, 5, 7
prism, 69, 101 Roosevelt, Franklin, 80, 176
proteins, 62, 140, 158 Rose, William, 137
protons, 74 Rosen, Nathan, 85
Proxima Centauri b, 27 Rossby, Carl-Gustaf, 36–37
Ptolemy, 56 Rubin, Vera, 22–23
pulsars, 16–17, 24–25 Rutherford, Ernest, 70–71, 73, 76
purple dyes, 53
P wave, 32–33 Sachs, Julius von, 125
Sagan, Carl, xvii, 182
quantum theory, 71–73, 82–87 Salam, Abdus, 111–12
quarks, 86–87 Salk, Jonas, 136, 166, 176–77
quasars, 16–17 salvarsan, 169–71
quinine, 53 Sanger, Frederick, 62–63
Sanger’s reagent, 62
rabies, 164 Saturn, 9, 97
radioactive dating, 30 Schleiden, Matthias, 123–24
radioactive decay, 73–74 Schmidt, Maarten, 17
radioactive displacement law, 73 Schrieffer, Robert, 98
radioactive isotopes, creation of, 81–82 Schrödinger, Erwin, 83
radioactivity, 57, 70, 107–9 Schwann, Theodor, 60, 124
radio waves, 102 science, xiii–xvii; in 21st century, 179–
radium, 80 82; as cumulative, xiii–xiv; perceptions
random phenomena, 41 of, 182
Ray, John, 29 scientific determinism, 83
Rayleigh-Jeans theory, 72 scientific theory, definition of, 58
reality: nature of, 82–84; quantum view scurvy, 167
of, 84–86 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
red blood cells, 156 (SETI), 24, 69
reflexes, 156–57 secretin, 157
rejection, 154 semiconductors, 109–10
relativity, 11–12, 18; special, 105 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 174–75
religion: and age of Earth, 29; and sensory nerves, 151
anatomy, 148, 150; and origins of life, Servetus, Miguel, 150
113 Seysenegg, Erich von, 134
respiration, 117 Shapley, Harlow, 14, 19–20
restriction enzymes, 143 Sharpey-Schafer, Edward, 157
retrovirus, 142 Shockley, William, 99, 110
Rheticus, Georg, 5 Siegbahn, Karl, 77
ribosome, 140 silk industry, 164
196    I N D E X

Silliman, Benjamin, 68 Temin, Howard, 142

smallpox, 125, 153, 173–74 temperature, 30
Smith, Bradford, 24 Terrile, Richard, 24
Snow, John, 162–63 Thales of Miletus, 2–4, 91
Soddy, Frederick, 73–74 theology, Einstein and, 12
sodium, 49 theory, xiii
solar system, 2–12; heliocentric theory theory of everything (TOE), 97, 112
of, 4–7 thermodynamics, laws of, 89–91
solids, 65 Thomson, George, 78
sound, 103 Thomson, J. J., 56–57, 70
species, 114 threonine, 137
spectrometer, 155 thymine, 138
spectroscopy, 68–70 Tinbergen, Niko, 120
spirochetes, 170 Tishler, Max, 172
spliceosomes, 142 Tombaugh, Clyde, 24
spontaneous generation, 60, 164 transfer RNA, 142
Stahl, Georg, 44, 58 transistors, 99, 109–10
Standard Model, 87, 89 trypanosomes, 170
Stanley, Wendell, 119 Turner, Joseph, 18
Starling, Ernest, 157 tyrosine, 137
stars, 13–18; composition of, 68; lives of,
15–16; magnitude of, 13 ultraviolet, 101–2
steady state theory, 20–21 ultraviolet catastrophe, 72
steam engines, 90 uncertainty principle, 70, 83–84
Steno, Nicolaus, 74 unconditioned reflex, 156
sticklebacks, 120 uniformitarianism, 31–32
Strassmann, Fritz, 80 Universe, 18–25; age of, 102; expansion
Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared of, 20–21; fate of, 21–23; size of,
Astronomy (SOFIA), 102 13–15
streptomycin, 161 uracil, 141
strong force, 110–12 uranium, 30, 74, 79–80, 108
subatomic physics, 70, 73 Uranus, 10
Sun: as center, 4–6; energy of, 95; fusion urea, 158; synthesis of, 58–59
and, 15–16; structure of, 33 Urey, Harold, 144–45
superconductivity, 98–99 Ussher, James, 29, 31
supernova, 16
Swammerdam, Jan, 155 vaccines, 118, 164, 179, 182; polio, 136,
S wave, 32–33 176–77; smallpox, 173–74
synthesis, 50–51 vacuum, 66
synthetic organic chemistry, 52–54 Van Beneden, Edouard, 127
syphilis, 68, 169–71 variolation, 173
Szilard, Leo, 79–80 Venus, 7, 9, 39
Very Long Basleine Interferometry
telescopes, 7, 9–10, 13, 16–18, 69, 121 (VLBI), 105
Teller, Edward, 80 Vesalius, Andreas, 148–50
 I ndex    197

Victoria, queen of Great Britain, 162 Wheeler, John, 16–17

Vine, F. J., 34 white blood cells, 156
Virchow, Rudolph, 124 Wigner, Eugene, 80
viruses, 118–19, 154; HIV, 142 Wilkins, Maurice, 138–39
vision, 100–101 Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
vitalism, 58–60 (WMAP), 102
vitamins, and deficiency diseases, 167–68 Wilson, Robert, Arno, 21
volcanoes, 130 wine, 59–61, 117
Volta, Alessandro, 51, 92–93 Wohler, Friedrich, 59
Wolszczan, Alexander, 24–25
Waksman, Selman, 161 women in science, 14–15, 23, 79, 158–
Wallace, Alfred, 32, 123, 128–29 59, 181
water, 44, 46, 54, 60, 65–66 Wordsworth, William, 9
Watson, James, 55, 63, 76, 138–39, 141 World War I, 57, 61, 77, 84, 138, 171
Watt, James, 90
wavelength, 72, 75, 78, 102 X-rays, 74–76, 106–7
wave-particle duality, 78, 99–101, 104–5
weak force, 110–12 yeast, 60
weather forecasting, 36–37 Yersin, Alexandre, 161
Webb (James) telescope, 69 Young, Thomas, 69, 100–101, 104
Wedgwood, Josiah, 128 Yukawa, Hideki, 111
Wegener, Alfred, 34–35
Weinberg, Steven, 111–12 Zweig, George, 87
Werner, Abraham, 31 zymase, 59–61