Here’s a challenge: Think about the literature you know and look for a quote you’d nominate as a theme for humankind. No rush, take your time.
The quote I find most apt for this assignment is Hamlet’s assertion at the end of Act I: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet had just had a chilling conversation with his father’s ghost. The shocking cause of his father’s death had been revealed. The horrible cost paid by sinners had been glimpsed. Horatio, a scholar and Hamlet’s closest friend, knew only what an educated 14th century Dane would know of the afterlife. Hence Hamlet’s assertion.
To me, Horatio is everyman, at any point in human history. Pick any time and place, and the people there will claim they know the cosmos in two different ways, from experience and from intuition. Of course, intuitive knowledge is no knowledge at all. In every age, intuitive knowledge is no more than the dreams in the philosophies of its Horatios.
Every so often, a fever of rationalism arises. The truth of what we intuit is challenged. My favorite example of this is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In it, people (humankind) live in a cave, in shackles. They can face only the back wall of the cave. Light comes from a fire behind them and from the mouth of the cave, so shadows constantly play on the wall they face. They take the shadows to be reality. One day, one of them breaks free of his shackles. With difficulty, he stumbles toward the cave opening and into the intense light. He gradually deduces that the colorful 3-dimensional objects outside the cave are the causes of the 2-dimensional shadows within. He has discovered a greater reality! He goes back in to relate these marvels to his colleagues, and they scorn him as a madman.
To my knowledge, this story is the first nonreligious account of a reality beyond our senses. Plato believed that even 3-dimensional objects were merely representations of ideal “forms” of the objects. He thought he had reasoned his way toward ultimate truth. Of course, he was wrong, but what is worse, he misled Aristotle, his pupil, about the reliability of reason alone. So it was that a curse fell over Western civilization: the curse of Aristotelian knowledge and holy scripture.
For the next fever of rationalism, let’s jump forward to the Renaissance — mainly because European history is the history I know best. The Renaissance encompasses much of the Age of Exploration, a foreshadowing of the Scientific Revolution, and an efflorescence in the visual arts and literature. That brings us back to Shakespeare, an irresistible reference point.
Within Shakespeare’s lifetime:
- The approximate shapes and sizes of the continents, save for Antarctica, had been mapped.
- Galileo saw four of Jupiter’s moons and the rings of Saturn with a new tool, the telescope. He confirmed Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the “universe.”
In the century of Shakespeare’s death:
- Newton described the laws of motion and a force of attraction he called “gravity.” He explained that the tangential velocity of the planets prevents gravity from plunging them into the Sun. In essence, the planets fall around it, as does the Moon vis-a-vis Earth.
- Leeuwenhoek observed and described microscopic protozoa and bacteria.
The stage was set. We at last had a scientific discipline and the tools to pursue things profoundly large and profoundly small.
The first steps in the pursuit of the profoundly small began with two naturally occurring forces that had been known since ancient times: magnetism and electricity. What were they, really? In the case of magnetism, certain metals were drawn toward lodestone, or magnetite. Electricity behaved similarly. Lightning bolts were drawn from the heavens toward Earth, and sparks could jump from one surface to another when there was friction between them.
In 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted showed that an electric current created a magnetic field around the conductor. A decade later, Michael Faraday showed that moving a magnetic field inside a coil of wire created an electric current. Electricity and magnetism were two faces of the same force, electromagnetism. Once we understood how to use a magnet to induce an electric current, it was just a matter of time before the arrival of power plants and generated electricity.
Questions remained, of course. If electricity is a flow of electrons (negatively charged particles), what sorts of objects held them to begin with? The answer of choice was atoms, the fundamental particles that Democritus had imagined two millennia before. It was the choice of J. J. Thompson, the English physicist who believed that electrons were like raisins in a plum pudding. The “pudding” part of the atom had to be positively charged to hold the electrons. Overall, atoms would have a neutral charge.
But all this seemed a bit fantastic. We could imagine a flow of electrons in a lightning bolt and in a wire, but what of atoms? They offered no visible evidence of themselves.
Enter Einstein, though not in the way you might imagine. He was familiar with the phenomenon called Brownian motion, the behavior of visible particles — say, pollen grains — immersed in a liquid. They moved constantly and randomly; therefore, something invisible must be buffeting them constantly and randomly. By using a microscope, a stopwatch, and some elegant math, Einstein was able to measure the size of the colliding atoms (or molecules) and the force they exerted on the visible particles. Voila! — the existence of invisible atoms and molecules was proven.
So far, we’ve just pierced the 20th century, a good place to take a breather. The discoveries I’ve reviewed have long lost their power to shock. Today, only children are astonished. But in posts to come, we’ll look at the remaining century plus, and unless I miss my guess, many of you will be as stunned as Hamlet was when he encountered his father’s ghost.
The Scratching Post 