Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science

Ronald L. Numbers, Kostas Kampourakis, Ronald L. Numbers, Kostas Kampourakis

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674915473
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

A Guardian "Favourite Reads—as Chosen by Scientists" Selection "Tackles some of science's most enduring misconceptions."
— Discover A falling apple inspired Isaac Newton's insight into the law of gravity—or did it really?Among the many myths debunked in this refreshingly irreverent book are the idea that alchemy was a superstitious pursuit, that Darwin put off publishing his theory of evolution for fear of public reprisal, and that Gregor Mendel was ahead of his time as a pioneer of genetics. More recent myths about particle physics and Einstein's theory of relativity are discredited too, and a number of dubious generalizations, like the notion that science and religion are antithetical, or that science can neatly be distinguished from pseudoscience, go under the microscope of history. Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science brushes away popular fictions and refutes the widespread belief that science advances when individual geniuses experience "Eureka!" moments and suddenly grasp what those around them could never imagine."Delightful…thought-provoking…Every reader should find something to surprise them."
—Jim Endersby, Science "Better than just countering the myths, the book explains when they arose and why they stuck."
— The Guardian

I

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN SCIENCE

MYTH 1

THAT THERE WAS NO SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY BETWEEN GREEK ANTIQUITY AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

Michael H. Shank

Had Christianity not interrupted the intellectual advance of mankind and put the progress of science on hold for a thousand years, the Scientific Revolution might have occurred a thousand years ago, and our science and technology today would be a thousand years more advanced.

—Richard Carrier, “Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science” (2009)

The widespread myth that there was no scientific activity between Greek antiquity and the Scientific Revolution is becoming increasingly graphic. There even exists a chart that shows an imagined hole in the exponential advancement of science left by the Dark Ages. It assumes that once started, science grows on its own (exponentially here) unless impeded by malevolent forces. Deviations from expectations thus trigger a search for culprits. Jim Walker, who constructed the chart, disarmingly writes: “Unfortunately I do not have the complete database of historical scientific advances but historians could certainly compile the known scientific advances and even come up with estimated numbers and plug them into a graph. I suspect the scientific Dark Ages will become even more apparent and dark.”¹ A chart more permanent and damning than this one recently appeared under the Springer imprimatur, accompanied by Carl Sagan’s assessment of medieval science as “the millennium gap in the middle of the diagram [from Thales (ca. 624–ca. 546 BCE) to 1980, with nothing between Hypatia (ca. 350–415) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), which] represents a poignant lost opportunity for the human species.”² When Sagan published his Cosmos in 1980, his quip was more than two generations out of date; the 2012 republication now makes it three.

The perpetuation of the myth typically trusts an “authority” in one area (here, Sagan in astronomy) to speak authoritatively about another area (for example, the history of science), about which he repeats out-of-date popular prejudices about one thousand years of medieval stagnation.³ Obviously no scholar should waste time researching and writing about a period in which nothing happened. Without looking, we therefore know that nothing new can possibly have been discovered or written on the subject. This conclusion is fully consistent with Sagan’s statements, thus confirming the latter’s “reliable” authority. Ironically, this is just the sort of behavior that is imputed to those stupid medieval folks.

For historians of medieval science, breaking into such vicious circles is a perverse variant on the frustrating game of Whac-A-Mole, in which a player equipped with a mallet scores by hitting on the head moles that randomly pop out of their holes. No sooner has one whacked the dead horse of medieval scientific nothingness back into its grave than it pops out of the ground in new trappings for another wild gallop through popular culture. Few notice the stench.

In the last several years, the myth has enjoyed some glamorous and high-profile vehicles. In 2009, Alejandro Amenábar’s beautiful movie Agora used Sagan’s stunningly anachronistic history of science to make the fifth-century murder of Hypatia in Alexandria the beginning of the Dark Ages. Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve (2011) won the Pulitzer and other prestigious prizes for its fanciful notion that atom-bashing Christianity suppressed Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura until its recovery in the fifteenth century led to modern science.⁴

Understanding the Myth

To start with a concession, the myth rests on a very modest slice of historical reality, which is then decontextualized and generalized beyond all reasonable boundaries. In fact, early medieval Europe was no hotbed of cutting-edge scientific activity. Neither was the Gobi Desert. Much more important, neither was the city of Rome at the height of the empire. This brings us to two of the major problems with the myth. The first involves confronting the state of scientific knowledge under and after Rome, along with the criteria used to evaluate it. The second involves understanding how the myth developed and the reasons why it has persisted—and continues to be repeated by many people who should know better.

The typical form of the myth is restricted to the European Middle Ages (usually Latin, sometimes Greek). Those who repeat it are interested not in historical understanding but in finding a blunt instrument with which to beat “Christianity” or “the Church” or “Roman Catholicism” or “religion.” These entities are invoked to explain the alleged precipitous decline of ancient science, a point that Walker’s chart makes nicely.⁵ It also illustrates graphically an often-implicit assumption in many discussions of decline, namely that ancient science on its own was on its way and rising (exponentially in the graph). Curiously, things suddenly start picking up—exponentially, once again—in early modern Europe, which was so Christian that people killed one another for their particular flavor of it. Calling the Scientific Revolution “Christian” would, however, irreparably damage the decline-by-Christianity thesis. The adjective is therefore simply omitted.⁶

As its use as a bludgeon leads one to suspect, the myth has little to do with evidence but much more to do with storytelling. Structurally, in its most benign form, the myth of the medieval scientific vacuum fits into a story of revolution. As a matter of narrative, a revolutionary story must depreciate the immediately preceding period, whatever its length. Also as a matter of narrative, it is nonsensical, after alleging a radical break with the past, to discuss that past in careful detail. On the contrary, to be consistent, the revolutionary narrative must undercut the historical connection between the purported revolution and its immediate past. The myth of medieval scientific nothingness is one of the most extensive victims of such a narrative. Adults with a critical sense should, on principle, be skeptical of the claim that in any period of human history nothing happened for a millennium. Curiously, however, they believe it. What’s more, the myth-perpetuating disease can infect scholars as well as amateurs. Indeed, this narrative structure is so powerful that even medievalists have been contaminated by it.⁷ The narratives of post-1100 medievalists such as myself have also treated the early Middle Ages as a scientific Dark Age, often covering our own ignorance of these early centuries with deprecatory language that valorizes “our” period, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.

No one is arguing that science in the territory that would become medieval Europe stood at a high level in the seventh century. But here is the problem. The alleged precipitous decline of science in the “Christian” Middle Ages is an artifact of a cheap historical trick. Crudely put, it consists of taking the Alexandrian achievements, beginning with Euclid, and spreading them with a trowel over the entire Roman Empire until the murder of Hypatia in the early fifth century. One then goes to the banks of the Seine, Rhine, or Danube and finds a precipitous scientific decline from the cumulative scientific accomplishments of a city without peer in the Roman Empire.

But what standard is this? What, we might ask, was going on scientifically in the third through fifth centuries along the Rhine? Indeed, what was going on in the city of Rome at the height of the republic or empire? To reform the calendar in the first century BCE, Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE) employed Sosigenes of Alexandria: Rome was evidently understaffed.⁸ The Roman elites certainly enjoyed nature and could access the outlines of the Hellenistic natural philosophies of the day (Stoic, Epicurean, Neoplatonic, and so on), which were summarized in handbooks and encyclopedias.⁹ However, even the educated Romans who read Greek were not interested in the intricacies of Hellenistic mathematical science or natural philosophy or in extending them. If one read only Latin, very few works of Greek science, mathematics, and medicine were accessible.¹⁰ In light of their resources and especially by comparison with the Islamic and Latin civilizations of the Middle Ages, the Romans engaged little with Greek science. Using the mythmakers’ criteria, one could easily argue for a precipitous scientific decline in Augustan Rome. In Walker’s chart, the rising exponential curve from Greek to Roman culture has the wrong slope.

Where does this state of affairs leave the intellectuals in the Western part of the early Latin Middle Ages? With a serious handicap by comparison with Alexandrian science, which was mostly unavailable. But how could it have been available? Since their Roman colonizers left Greek scientific works largely untranslated, the latter were mostly inaccessible when Latin alone defined literacy. It should be obvious that this situation was well entrenched by the time Constantine legalized Christianity in the fourth century. When Latin Christians expressed lukewarm attitudes toward Greek science, they were reflecting ambient culture, not changing it.

What did happen in the early Latin Middle Ages? Contrary to the myth propagators, the late-antique/early-medieval figure Boethius (ca. 480–524 or 525), a high official from an old Roman family, had planned a large-scale translation of Greek natural philosophical and mathematical works into Latin. His program ended with his execution by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, a Christian. If Boethius had not been one, too, we could have another Christian barbarian suppressing learning. Too bad history is so complicated.

To gauge attitudes toward science in the Latin Middle Ages, we can conveniently divide the period into two, hinged around the tenth through the eleventh centuries. Institutionally, one of the major differences between the early Middle Ages and the period that immediately follows lies in the locus of control of intellectual training and educational curriculum. Indeed, a change in control often embodies a change in interests.

From the fifth to the eleventh centuries, scholars familiar with Latin—primarily Christian clerics—did their best to collect learned works available in that language, to study them, and, in some cases, to move beyond them. For the reasons previously discussed, the scientific material accessible to them was largely encyclopedic and introductory.¹¹ There was no translation of Ptolemy’s great second-century works in the mathematical sciences. Clearly, the reason why such works were not read in the early Middle Ages is not that “the Church” opposed them (it did not). Rather, as was its prerogative, the civilization of imperial Rome had other priorities than the translation of the Greek scientific enterprise; thus, it exercised its freedom to neglect them. Why, then, should one expect Rome’s former colonies in the West to immediately transcend the limitations it had inherited? Eventually they would, but not right away.

Translation as a Symptom of Curiosity

Against this background, we can appreciate two crucial events in the Middle Ages that undergirded the development of early modern science: the translation of Greek manuscripts into Arabic, beginning in the late eighth century, and the later translation of many of these texts into Latin. Each of these translation efforts dwarfed that of the Romans. This double transcultural passing of the scientific baton is a vibrant testimony to the high value placed on Greek science in both Arabic and Latin medieval civilizations. Once translated, Euclid’s Elements diffused widely in both of them, as did many other fundamental scientific works. Clearly, the myth of medieval scientific nothingness is built on an absurdity. Why would intellectuals in two civilizations waste their lives translating abstruse and complicated works in which they had no interest whatsoever?

The appropriation of Greek scientific learning by Islamic civilization was an unprecedented development in world history.¹² In the eighth and ninth centuries, scholars supported by the caliphs and their intelligentsia sought out and translated Greek and Syriac manuscripts relating to medicine, natural philosophy, astronomy/astrology, mathematics, and the mathematical sciences.¹³ From the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, developments in Islamic science critically and substantively moved far beyond the Greek patrimony it had appropriated.

What is more, word of this success stimulated an analogous translation movement in Latin Europe. From the tenth to the twelfth centuries, dozens of individuals sought out writings of scientific significance and took up the work of translation. Gerard of Cremona (ca. 1114–1187) learned Arabic to translate Ptolemy’s Almagest into Latin for the first time, plus more than eighty other scientific and medical works from the Arabic, working with Jewish and Muslim associates.¹⁴ This material did not just sit on the shelf unread; it was in demand and fed a hunger for knowledge that access to the Greco-Arabic materi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Medieval and Early Modern Science
• Part II: Nineteenth Century
• Part III: Twentieth Century
• Part IV: Generalizations
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index