How to insult an entire profession.

I’ve never heard of SALON, which is apparently some sort of pseudo-intellectual event agency. This organisation is presenting one of their events in the Banqueting House in London on 24^th June with the title 1649. Alone the opening sentence of the description made me cringe an a historian:

1649 was a pivotal year. The English public – having tired of a King who had raised taxes for wars and spent it on art – upped and executed him.

I leave it to my educated and knowledge thirsty readers to read up on the real causes of the English Revolution and the resulting regicide, as this is not the purpose of this brief post. My interest concerns rather more the speaker chosen to present the history of science of the period, the good Dr Stuart Clark, who should be well known to the readers of this blog for his displays of history of science ignorance here and here. Salon presents him thus:

Stuart Clark, described by The Independent as a UK star of astrophysics teaching (alongside Stephen Hawking) will be on hand to explain the scientific world of 1649.  Having undertaken extensive research for his acclaimed historical fiction series based in this period, no one is better qualified to explain where science was at in the mid 17th century, and how new ideas were beginning to remodel the minds and hearts of the people of England. [my emphasis]

I personally regard the statement, “no one is better qualified to explain where science was at in the mid 17th century”, as a crass insult to all professional historians of science and not just the legion of very competent experts for the science of the seventeenth century whom it disqualifies.

Giants’ Shoulders #60 Part I: Five Full Years: A Retrospective

With Giants’ Shoulders #60 we close the fifth full year of the existence of the Internets number one history of science blog carnival. To celebrate this milestone I have decided to create a retrospective of the last 59 carnivals in chronological order. Not all of them still exist but where they do I shall choose one of the included post to feature for that carnival. This is not intended to be the best post or anything like that just the one that caught my eye whilst skimming through the list. Giants’ Shoulders #60 Part II, which I hope to have up by tomorrow will as usual feature the best of #histsci, #histtech and #histmed bloggage from the last month. But now back to the future!

Giants’ Shoulders was called into being by Dr SkySkull aka GG physicist, lover of pulp fiction and excellent, although strictly amateur, historian of science. His original announcement posted on June 11 2008 read as follows:

Welcome!  This blog will be maintained as the announcement and information center for “The Giant’s Shoulders”, a new monthly science blogging event.  Information about the event can be read here.  We intend to start things off with a call for hosts of the event and for papers for the first incarnation.

GS #1 July 2008 was hosted by ‘The Blog Father’, Bora Z at his Blog around the Clock website and apparently no longer exists. (But it does!!)

Added 18 June:

Last night Bora Z added the following in the comments so I thought I would bring it up here for those who wisely avoid comment columns:

Hi, the #1 is alive – when Scienceblogs moved from MoveableType to WordPress, they broke all the links, but it’s here:

Many, but not all, of the missing editions were also on Scienceblogs , which of course explains their disappearance .

GS #2 August 2008 was hosted at The Lay Scientist and also no longer exists

GS #3 September 2008 was hosted at Entertaining Research and I have chosen this post by our founder Dr SkySkull

“Interference between different photons never occurs:” Not! (1963)

GS #4 October 2008 was hosted at second order approximation and I have chosen this post from Money Blue Book

 Test Credit Card Numbers With Luhn Credit Card Validation

GS #5 November 2008 was hosted at Pod Black Blog and no longer exists

GS #6 December 2008 was hosted at Rigorous Trivialities and I have chosen this post by Bablab

The Rise and Fall of Phrenology

GS #7 January 2009 was hosted at The Questionable Authority and I have chosen this post microecos

Thus, in these regions the electric fire breaks forth from the lowest depths of the waters.

GS #8 February 2009 was hosted at Greg Laden’s Blog and I have chosen this post by Chinleana

The Aetosaur Paper That Changed Everything

GS #9 March 2009 was hosted at The Evilutionary Biologist and I have chosen this post by Quantum Musings and Problem Sets of Filipinos

The Equation that changed the world

GS #10 April 2009 was hosted by Stochastic Scribbles and I have chosen this post by The Dispersal of Darwin

Book Review: Jim Endersby’s “Imperial Nature”

GS #11 May 2009 was hosted at Curving Normality and I have chosen this post by The Evilutionary Biologist

This Weeks Citation Classic: What is Life?

GS #12 June 2009 was hosted at Thoughts from Gut Bacteria and no longer exists.

GS #13 July 2009 was hosted at Skulls in the Stars and is a wonderful “Day at the Fair” to celebrate one full year of existence. I have chosen this post by Central Science

Wisps of Metal, Whispers of History

GS #14 August 2009 was hosted by The Dispersal of Darwin and I have chosen this post by Dawinaia

Hugh Falconer

GS #15 September 2009 returned to Entertaining Research and I have chosen this post by Providentia

The Halifax Explosion

GS #16 October 2009 was hosted at Quiche Moraine and I have chosen this post by Phil for Humanity

The History and Introduction of Nuclear Chemistry and the Atomic Model

GS #17 November 2009 was hosted at The Primate Diaries and I have chosen this post by Weird Things

charles darwin and otto hahn’s alien fossils

GS #18 December 2009 was hosted at Jost a Mon and I have chosen this post by A DC Birding Blog

A Historic Paper on Cuckoo Behavior

GS #19 January 2010 was hosted by yours truly here at The Renaissance Mathematicus and I have chosen this post by Executed Today

1624: Marco Antonio de Dominis Posthumously

GS #20 February 2010 was hosted by Skull in the Stars and I have chosen this post by Ether Wave Propaganda

Primer: William Thompson

GS #21 March 2010 was hosted by PACHSmögåsbord and I have chosen this post by Time to Eat the Dogs

Prester John

GS #22 April 2010 was hosted by The Lay Scientist and no longer exists.

GS #23 May 2010 was hosted by Deep Sea News and I have chosen this post by Oceanographer’s Choice

Varieties of Oceanographic Experience

GS #24 June 2010 was again hosted by Jost a Mon and I have chosen this post by Heterodoxology

Lawrence Principe and the Rehabilitation of Alchemy – another lecture in Utrecht

GS #25 July 2010 was again hosted by The Dispersal of Darwin and I have chosen this post by Mz Skeptica

The Value of Learning History of Science: One Student’s Perspective

GS #26 August 2010 was hosted by Neurotic Physiology and no longer exists

GS #27 September 2010 was again hosted by Entertaining Research and I have chosen this post by From the Hands of Quacks

Monday Series: The Criminalized Body I

GS #28 October 2010 was hosted by From the Hands of Quacks and I have chosen this post by Saudi Aramco World

Arabic in the Sky

GS #29 November 2010 was hosted by Heterodoxology and I have chosen this post by Ptak Science Books

The Invisible Influence of the Highly Visible? Comets and Meteors in Astrology

GS #30 December 2010 was hosted by Whewell’s Ghost and I have chosen this post by OU History of Science Collections

Holly for the Holidays

GS #31 January 2011 was hosted by Morning Coffee Physics and I have chosen this post by Early Modern Experimental Philosophy

Newton’s “Crucial Experiment”

GS #32 February 2011 returned again to Skulls in the Stars and I have chosen this post by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Centraal

Population, Leeuwenhoek and National Geographic

GS #33 March 2011 was hosted by Sascha here at the Renaissance Mathematicus and he has chosen this post by History of Geology

The Last Virtuoso: Robert Hooke and his contributions in geology

GS #34 April 2011 returned to From the Hands of Quacks and I have chosen this post by Medical Museion

What kind of social studies of science publications would convince scientists themselves?

GS #35 May 2011 was hosted once again by Jost a Mon and I have chosen this post by John Graham Cumming

Geek Weekend: Charles Darwin’s Home

GS #36 June 2011 was hosted by once more by The Dispersal of Darwin and I have chosen this post by Laelaps

 Plesiosaurs the beautiful bottom feeders

GS #37 July 2011 was hosted by Providentia and seems to have disappeared!

GS #38 August 2011 was hosted by The Longitude Blog and I have chosen my own contribution

Upon Reflection: The Hadley Brothers

GS #39 September 2011 was hosted by Mammoth Tales which also seems to have disappeared

GS #40 October 2011 was hosted by Heathen Hub and I have chosen this post by Degrees of Freedom

Archimedes and Euclid like string theory versus freshman calculus 

GS #41 November 2011 was hosted by Early Modern Experimental Philosophy and I have chosen this post by Reciprocal Space

 I get my kicks from thermodynamicks

GS #42 December 2011 was hosted once more by PACHSmögåsbord and I have chosen this post by Booktryst

Tycho Brahe’s Sculpture Garden of Scientific Instruments

GS #43 January 2012 was hosted by our stalwart The Dispersal of Darwin and I have chosen a post by Dinosaur Tracking

 Huxley’s Apocryphal Dinosaur Dinner

GS #44 February 2012 returned here to The Renaissance Mathematicus and I have chosen this post by Deborah Blum

The Science of Mysteries: Instructions for a Deadly Dinner

GS #45 March 2012 was back at Skull in the Stars and I have chosen this post by Rebekah Higgitt at the Longitude Blog

There’s no such thing as the Longitude Prize 

GS #46 April 2012 returned to Providentia (and this time it’s really there) and I have chosen this post by The Georgian Gent

James Hutton, the “Father of Modern Geology” 1726 – 1797

GS #47 May 2012 was hosted by The Medical Heritage Library and I have chosen this post by Gruts

Wittgenstein’s Drachenflugexperiment 

GS #48 June 2012 was hosted by Clerestories and I have chosen this post by Amy Shira Teitel

Venus Transits through history

GS #49 July 2012 was hosted once more here at the Renaissance Mathematicus and I have chosen this post by Contagions

Plague at the Siege of Caffa, 1346

GS #50 August 2012 our half-century was celebrated by From the Hands of Quacks and I have chosen this post by Vanessa Heggie at The H-Word

Sex testing and the Olympics: myths, rumours and confirmation bias

GS #51 September 2012 was hosted History of Geology and I have chosen this post by Providentia

Down on the Heebie-Jeebie Farm

GS #52 October 2012 was hosted by Friends of Darwin and I have chosen this post by Athene Donald

Heroic genius or a distraction from reality?

GS #53 November 2012 was hosted by The Scicurious Brain and I have chosen this post by Skull in the Stars

Invaders from Mars: Reports from the 1938 Invasion

GS #54 December 2012 was hosted by Contagions and I have chosen this post by The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice

Abraham Lincoln: Conversations with the Dead

GS #55 January 2013 was hosted by The Sloane Letters Blog and I have chosen this post by Open Scientist

 Thomas Young the (Last) Man Who Knew Everything

GS #56 February 2013 returned once more to the Dispersal of Darwin and I have chosen this post by The Royal Society: The Repository

Our unusual ‘Chymist’

GS #57 March 2013 was hosted by Stories from the Stores and I have chosen this post by Alexi Baker

Meteorites and mediators of material culture

GS #58 April 2013 was hosted by Asylum Science and I have chosen this post by Trying Biology

Anti-Evolution and Anti-Eugenics: A missing link?

GS #59 May 2013 was hosted by Something by Virtue of Nothing and I have chosen this post by Life and Physics

Feynman: his birthday, his diagrams and his lectures

GS #60 Part II: The Present will appear here at the Renaissance Mathematicus tomorrow (hopefully!)

I have tried in my fairly random choice of post to give at least a flavour of the wide range of the numerous posts that have featured on the Giants’ Shoulders history of science blog carnival over the last five years.

 

Not banned, placed on the Index until corrected.

The Times Higher Education has an article entitled Drugs ban is ‘scientific censorship’, says paper, which is concerned with the fact that the political ban on various recreational drugs hinders scientific research on those substances. The article and the paper it is reviewing make, what I think is, an important point and one that should be addressed but it also contains the following, in my opinion, unfortunate historical statement:

“The outlawing of psychoactive drugs amounts to the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo,” said Professor Nutt.

Why unfortunate? Well you see the Catholic Church never actually banned the works of Copernicus. First off there were no works, plural, but just one, his De revolutionibus. Secondly contrary to the widely held belief it was never banned by the Catholic Church or anybody else for that matter. Following the challenge to their authority by Galileo Galilei and Paolo Antonio Foscarini in interpreting holy scripture in 1615 and the Commission of Qualifiers judgment in 1616 that the proposition that ‘the sun is the centre of the world and completely devoid of local motion is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture’ De revolutionibus was not banned but placed on the Index until corrected.

Now this might seem like a case of splitting hairs, De revolutionibus was placed on the Index of forbidden books, total censorship end of the story. However this is far from being the case. The clue is in the addition ‘until corrected’. This meant that if those passages that stated that the heliocentric hypothesis was a fact were suitably modified back to being a hypothesis then the book would be removed from the Index.

What most people don’t realise is that this is exactly what happened. De revolutionibus was with surprisingly few minor alterations already removed from the Index in 1621 and any Catholic was free to study it in this modified form. In fact Galileo’s own personal copy with the modifications glued into place still exists.

Interesting in this context is that even this very mild censorship seems only to have been effective in Italy. The only surviving copies, which have been modified, are almost all in Italy. Outside of Italy nobody seems to have taken the Vatican’s censorship seriously not even in other Catholic countries.

Why history?

Recently there has been much criticism of the utility, or rather lack of it, of the humanities in general and of history in particular. Reduced to its simplest clichéd form, history doesn’t have any practical application why should it be supported or financed? As today is the fourth birthday of this blog I have decided to wax a little philosophical about my own personal justification for doing history in general and the history of science in particular. This is neither intended to be an academic thesis answering all possible criticisms of the utility of history nor is it intended to be a universal solution justifying the pursuit of history for everyman. It is a loose collection of personal thoughts about why I do what I do, nothing more and nothing less.

I was born loving history I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t captivated and enthralled by one or other aspect of humanities past. Now I’m quite happy to admit that as a little boy growing up in post war Britain my initial enthusiasm was for tales of daring do of warriors and heroes. I loved the Wild West, the Vikings, the Roman legions as well as the recent World War and its not so distant predecessor. However it was not all too long before I began to read historical accounts of the Earp Brothers and what really happened at the OK Corral, to learn about the constitution and structure of those Roman Legions and to trace the routes of those Viking voyages. I yearned to learn the historical facts behind the stories. Whilst still at primary school my deepest historical studies concerned the tanks and planes of the two World Wars spurred on by the construction of those plastic Airfix kits. I didn’t just build tanks I researched them. I knew all about Little Willie and Big Willie the first British tanks developed in WWI and even de Mole’s tank, the vastly superior model suggested by an Australian engineer in 1911, but never built. I took my war history very seriously, supported I have to say by a father who was a professional historian.

The next sentence should be approached with caution by any mathophobics who might have wandered on to the page. I was also born loving mathematics. I had a passion for numbers and all that you can do with them from the very first time I encountered them. I love all things mathematical and always have and always will. As I’ve mentioned more than once when I was about sixteen my historian father gave me a copy of Eric Temple Bell’s Men of Mathematics, a terrible book as I now recognise, but one that opened up the world of the history of mathematics to me. My two great loves had got married. Now possibly the greatest failing in my life was that nobody suggested to me that I could become a historian of mathematics something that never occurred to me as a teenager searching for a direction in life; what happened instead needs a little explain.

First off there was a minor disaster as I took my O-levels at my very elite grammar school. In that year about 80% or more of the pupils who took history O-level on that particular examination board failed the exam dismally. I was one of the few that actually passed although with an abysmal grade. There was of course the expected groaning and gnashing of teeth with headmasters and concerned parents petitioning, cajoling and threatening the examination board who remained impervious to their pleas refusing to even consider changing their grading. Having achieved excellent grades, as expected, in maths, physics and chemistry I now went on to study them at A-level. Now in my first year sixth and my second as a boarder at said elite grammar school I was not a happy bunny. In fact I was deeply unhappy for various reasons and heading straight on into disaster. It came as no surprise when I was summoned to the headmaster’s study. Now being an incredibly ancient and extremely elite grammar school being summoned to the head’s study was the mental equivalent of being forced to walk the plank but in my then mental state I didn’t really care a damn. During the ensuing interview between headmaster and bloody-minded schoolboy the headmaster asked, not unreasonably, “what do you want to study when you leave school?” This was a school that assumed automatically, if you were doing A-levels you would go to university. My spontaneous answer, and it came without any thought whatsoever, was “history”. The, again not unreasonable, response, “so why are you doing science A-levels?” “Because that’s what I’m good at!” Now said headmaster could have told me to stop being silly and thrown me out on my ear but he didn’t. Instead he suggested I could become an archaeologist, as this could be studied with science A-levels leading to a BSc instead of a BA and so it came about that I spent the Easter school holidays on my first excavation in Chelmsford.

This proved to be rather enjoyable and was followed by more digging in the evenings and at weekends on the bank and ditch of Colchester Castle. In the summer I packed my things and went off to dig on the Roman fort at Usk in Monmouthshire, a Cardiff University dig and at that time the second largest excavation in Great Britain. The following summer having finished my A-levels I returned to Usk now an experienced and seasoned digger at the tender age of eighteen. That summer I got to know many of the first year Cardiff archaeology students who were serving part of their compulsory twelve weeks of digging, then part of the Cardiff degree course. One of these was a brash, exuberant, loud mouthed young man by the name of Peter Hill who would go on to become a good friend over many years. One day Pete was pontificating, as was his want, on the subject of archaeology when he pointed out that our principle function as archaeologists was to entertain the public/tax payers who paid the money that made our existence possible. In those days excavations were still financed by the government. Now I have never forgotten Pete’s words and I still consider them to be one of the justifications for doing history, one that some of my fellow historians might reject, we are entertainers.

Now when I use the word entertainer I am not making the modern distinction between art and entertainment, the one highbrow the other low. Here the word entertain encompasses the arts, literature, music and also history. It’s a variation on the old Bible saying, “man shall not live on bread alone”. Just as art or music fulfils some inner, dare I say spiritual, desire in many people so too history. The truth of this can be found all over our society and I think needs no further justification. However I think it is a truth often forgotten, or even suppressed, by academic historians, we are entertainers.

Of course history functions as more than entertainment and I would now like to turn my attention to another aspect based on a play on words. History is his story or her story or our story or their story or maybe just my story. In German the relationship between history and story telling is even more direct as the German word for history is Geschichte and the German word for story is also Geschichte. If I were just to remain by history as story telling I would be repeating my previous point of history as entertainment but I want to take this thought in a different direction provoked by the English play on words, history is his story.

Central to the mental health of all human beings is their sense of identity both as an individual and as part of a whole, a society, a people, or whatever. Implicitly and explicitly we define ourselves and in so doing we create our identity. Our history, that is the story of where we come from and how we got here is a major part of that defining process. We talk of roots and traditions and of belonging to groups that have histories. History plays a major role in identity. Now I realise that this claim comes dangerously close to sounding like the pedagogical idealism of people like Britain’s current Minister of Education Michael Gove, who wishes to impose a narrow nationalist history curriculum on English school children because they should learn what it means to be British. However what Gove is proposing is actually a perversion and a misuse of what I am trying to express. By manipulating and editing history he is trying to create a false identity. Using falsified history, even if only falsified through selective presentation, is a propaganda weapon used by many politicians over the centuries and one which historians must, if necessary, be prepared to confront and expose for what it is by presenting the real uncensored history.

Turing to my own small area of history’s vast canvas, the history of science, it was traditional to restrict history as identity to political history, often called scornfully the history of kings, in the twentieth century this was often expanded to include first social history and then cultural history but history of science is usually left out and ignored. I think that at no other time has an awareness and knowledge of the history of science been so important exactly because of the role that history plays in defining identity. We live in a society that is totally defined and dominated by science and technology in a way that has never before been the case. Above all technology has for several millennia played a significant role in defining the various and myriad human societies but a society that has been so completely dominated by its science and technology, as ours is has never before existed. I believe passionately that an understanding of the historical process that brought us to this situation is necessary if we are not to become alienated from this all-dominant aspect of our society and thereby lose an important facet of our own identity. Science and technology play an important role in defining us we need, in my opinion, to understand how this came about in order to maintain control of our own identities.

Before I close this already overlong series of meandering thoughts there is one last aspect of the history of science that I wish to briefly elucidate. As all ready stated we live in a society dominated by science and technology and as a result there exists a major desire to understand how science develops or as I prefer to say, evolves. The reasons for this are largely political, how can we control that evolution, direct it to solve the problems we need to solve? How can we invest our money in science to get the best returns for our investments? How should we best educate the next generations to obtain the scientists of the future that we will need? The answers to these and other similar questions are searched for in a discipline now called science studies the core of which is a mixture of philosophy and sociology of science. I belong to that group who believe that any such studies that ignore the history of science and the examination of how science actually evolved throughout history is doomed to fail. History is the laboratory that allows us to examine and dissect the evolution of the scientific disciplines. As Lakatos said without history of science philosophy of science is empty, a dictum that continues to inform my own endeavours.

As I stated at the beginning the thoughts expressed above are my personal answer to the question, “why history”. Anybody who has a different answer or wishes to criticise, refute or ridicule my answer is, as always, welcome to do so in the comments. That’s what they’re there for.

A mind bogglingly stupid statement!

In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald the British “poster boy of pop science”^TM made the following series of statements:

“When you’ve got difficult economic times, you see governments saying, ‘Well, maybe we should cut back on this kind of blue-sky stuff.’ It’s just drivel. Imagine if that had happened in 1799 when the Royal Institute [sic] was being set up. Then, in the worst-case scenario, you don’t get electricity.” [my emphasis]

Let us take a brief look at a list of some of the prominent names associated with the evolution of the science of electricity between 1600 and 1900. This list is of course by no means exhaustive:

William Gilbert, Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray, Francis Hauksbee, John Desaguliers, C. F. du Fay, Abbé Nollet, Pieter van Musschenbroek, Benjamin Franklin, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday, Georg Simon Ohm, James Clerk Maxwell, Galileo Ferraris, Oliver Heaviside, Charles Parsons, Joseph Swan, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Ernst Werner von Siemens and William Thomson.

Your quiz question for today, which of the men in this list were not involved with the Royal Institution?

Now some of you might accuse me of just being nasty to the “poster boy of pop science”^TM, as he was obviously referring to Michael Faraday who did work for the Royal Institution from 1813 (unlike any of the others) and who is normally credited with having invented the electric generator or more accurately discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction on which the generator is based. So is the “poster boy of pop science”^TM right after all?

Well, the question is, as always, given the general developments in electrical research at the beginning of the 1830s, might it not be possible that someone else would have discovered this principle and thus we would have had electricity with or without Faraday? Are we going to replace one dubious hypothetical with another one? Well, actually no! We just have to take a somewhat closer look at the history of electricity to discover that is exactly what happened.

Both the Italian Francesco Zantedeschi and the American Joseph Henry discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction before Faraday. Zantedeschi published his discovery, which however went unnoticed, while Henry first published when he realised that he had been beaten to the punch by Faraday. If this wasn’t enough to show that we would have had electricity if Faraday and the Royal Institution had never existed the Hungarian inventor Ányos István Jedlik actually invented a generator, superior to Faraday’s, several years before Faraday made his legendary discovery.

As I’ve said on several occasions in the past statements in the history of science and technology along the lines of if it hadn’t been for X we wouldn’t have Y are almost inevitably wrong and are on close inspection likely to leave their utterer looking pretty stupid.

Nicolaus was not a priest.

Erik Kwakkei (@erik_kwakkei) drew my attention to a rather nice short video from Prager University by Anthony Esolen of Providence College explaining that the Middle Ages were anything but Dark and should actually be called the bright ages. This is a very well done little piece managing to correct a whole series of myths in a very short time span. However I can’t resist taking a pot shot at his completely inaccurate description of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Esolen says:

Nicolaus Copernicus was, “a priest astronomer at a Polish university”.

The only part of this brief statement that is correct is that Copernicus was an astronomer.  However, it is important to point out that he was only ever an amateur astronomer; astronomy was his hobby so to speak. He never taught it at a university.

Copernicus started his undergraduate studies at the University of Kraków in Poland but left without taking a degree. He continued his studies a various universities in Northern Italy, where he studied law and medicine, not astronomy, completing his studies in 1503 with a doctorate in canon law from the University of Ferrara.

Already as a teenager Copernicus had been appointed a cannon canon of the Chapter of Frauenburg Cathedral in Warmia, where his Uncle Lucas Watzenrode was Prince Bishop. The cannons canons of the cathedral were the administration or government of Warmia.

After graduation Copernicus became private physician and secretary to his Uncle. Later he served the chapter in numerous administrative positions until his death in 1543, this being his profession and not astronomy.

Although attached to the cathedral all of his life Copernicus never took holy orders and was thus never a priest. The false claim that he was appears to have been put into the world by Galileo.

As always I find it disappointing that in an otherwise good video disposing of myths about the Middle Ages the one sentence about Copernicus should consist of false facts. A little bit of research, about five minute, could have avoided this piece of stupidity.

5 Brilliant Mathematicians – 4 Crappy Commentaries

I still tend to call myself a historian of mathematics although my historical interests have long since expanded to include a much wider field of science and technology, in fact I have recently been considering just calling myself a historian to avoid being pushed into a ghetto by those who don’t take the history of science seriously. Whatever, I have never lost my initial love for the history of mathematics and will automatically follow any link offering some of the same. So it was that I arrived on the Mother Nature Network and a blog post titled 5 brilliant mathematicians and their impact on the modern world. The author, Shea Gunther, had actually chosen 5 brilliant mathematicians with Isaac Newton, Carl Gauss, John von Neumann, Alan Turing and Benoit Mandelbrot and had even managed to avoid the temptation of calling them ‘the greatest’ or something similar. However a closer examination of his commentaries on his chosen subjects reveals some pretty dodgy not to say down right crappy claims, which I shall now correct in my usual restrained style.

He starts of fairly well on Newton with the following:

There aren’t many subjects that Newton didn’t have a huge impact in — he was one of the inventors of calculus, built the first reflecting telescope and helped establish the field of classical mechanics with his seminal work, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.” He was the first to decompose white light into its constituent colors and gave us, the three laws of motion, now known as Newton’s laws.

But then blows it completely with his closing paragraph:

We would live in a very different world had Sir Isaac Newton not been born. Other scientists would probably have worked out most of his ideas eventually, but there is no telling how long it would have taken and how far behind we might have fallen from our current technological trajectory.

This is the type of hagiographical claim that fans of great scientists tend to make who have no real idea of the context in which their hero worked. Let’s examine step by step each of the achievements of Newton listed here and see if the claim made in this final paragraph actually holds up.

Ignoring the problems inherent in the claim that Newton invented calculus, which I’ve discussed here, the author acknowledges that Newton was only co-inventor together with Leibniz and although Newton almost certainly developed his system first it was Leibniz who published first and it was his system that spread throughout Europe and eventually the world so no changes here if Isaac had not been born.

Newton did indeed construct the first functioning reflecting telescope but as I explained here it was by no means the first. It would also be fifty years before John Hadley succeeded in repeating Newton’s feat and finally making the commercial production of reflecting telescopes viable. However Hadley also succeeded in making working models of James Gregory’s reflecting telescope, which actually predated Newton’s and it was the Gregorian that, principally in the hands of James Short, became the dominant model in the eighteenth century. Although to be fair one should mention that William Herschel made his discoveries with Newtonians. Once again our author’s claim fails to hold water.

Sticking with optics for the moment it is a little know and even less acknowledge fact that the Bohemian physicus and mathematician Jan Marek Marci (1595 – 1667) actually decomposed white light into its constituent colours before Newton. Remaining for a time with optics, James Gregory, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Christian Huygens and Robert Hooke were all on a level with Newton although none of them wrote such an influential book as Newton’s Optics on the subject. Now this was not all positive. Due to the influence won through the Principia, The Optics became all dominant preventing the introduction of the wave theory of light developed by Huygens and Hooke and even slowing down its acceptance in the nineteenth century when proposed by Fresnel and Young. If Newton hadn’t been born optics might even have developed and advance more quickly than it did.

This just leaves the field of classical mechanics Newton real scientific monument. Now, as I’ve pointed out several times before the three laws of motion were all borrowed by Newton from others and the inverse square law of gravity was general public property in the second half of the seventeenth century. Newton’s true genius lay in his mathematical combination of the various elements to create a whole. Now the question is how quickly might this synthesis come about had Newton never lived. Both Huygens and Leibniz had made substantial contribution to mechanics contemporaneously with Newton and the succeeding generation of French and Swiss-German mathematicians created a synthesis of Newton’s, Leibniz’s and Huygens’ work and it is this that is what we know as the field of classical mechanics. Without Newton’s undoubtedly massive contribution this synthesis might have taken a little longer to come into being but I don’t think the delay would have radically changed the world in which we live.

Like almost all great scientists Newton’s discoveries were of their time and he was only a fraction ahead of and sometimes even behind his rivals. His non-existence would probably not have had that much impact on the development of history.

Moving on to Gauss we will have other problems. Our author again makes a good start:

Isaac Newton is a hard act to follow, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Carl Gauss. If Newton is considered the greatest scientist of all time, Gauss could easily be called the greatest mathematician ever.

Very hyperbolic and hagiographic but if anybody could be called the greatest mathematician ever then Gauss would be a serious candidate. However in the next paragraph we go off the rails. The paragraph starts OK:

Carl Friedrich Gauss was born to a poor family in Germany in 1777 and quickly showed himself to be a brilliant mathematician. He published “Arithmetical Investigations,” a foundational textbook that laid out the tenets of number theory (the study of whole numbers).

So far so good but then our author demonstrates his lack of knowledge of the subject on a grand scale:

Without number theory, you could kiss computers goodbye. Computers operate, on a the most basic level, using just two digits — 1 and 0…

Here we have gone over to the binary number system, with which Gauss book on number theory has nothing to do, what so ever. In modern European mathematics the binary number system was first investigated in depth by Gottfried Leibniz in 1679 more than one hundred years before Gauss wrote his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, which as already stated has nothing on the subject. The use of the binary number system in computing is an application of the two valued symbolic logic of George Boole the 1 and 0 standing for true and false in programing and on and off in circuit design. All of which has nothing to do with Gauss. Gauss made so many epochal contributions to mathematics, physics, cartography, surveying and god knows what else so why credit him with something he didn’t do?

Moving on to John von Neumann we again have a case of credit being given where credit is not due but to be fair to our author, this time he is probably not to blame for this misattribution.  Our author ends his von Neumann description as follows:

Before his death in 1957, von Neumann made important discoveries in set theory, geometry, quantum mechanics, game theory, statistics, computer science and was a vital member of the Manhattan Project.

This paragraph is fine and if Shea Gunther had chosen to feature von Neumann’s invention of game theory or three valued quantum logic I would have said fine, praised the writer for his knowledge and moved on without comment. However instead our author dishes up one of the biggest myths in the history of the computer.

…he went on to design the architecture underlying nearly every single computer built on the planet today. Right now, whatever device or computer that you are reading this on, be it phone or computer, is cycling through a series of basic steps billions of times over each second; steps that allow it to do things like render Internet articles and play videos and music, steps that were first thought up by John von Neumann.

Now any standard computer is called a von Neumann machine in terms of its architecture because of a paper that von Neumann published in 1945, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. This paper described the architecture of the EDVAC one of the earliest stored memory computers but von Neumann was not responsible for the design, the team led by Eckert and Mauchly were. Von Neumann had merely described and analysed the architecture. His publication caused massive problems for the design team because the information now being in the public realm it meant that they were no longer able to patent their innovations. Also von Neumann’s name as author on the report meant that people, including our author, falsely believed that he had designed the EDVAC. Of historical interest is the fact that Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the nineteenth century already possessed von Neumann architecture!

Unsurprisingly we walk straight into another couple of history of the computer myths when we turn to Alan Turing.  We start with the Enigma story:

During World War II, Turing bent his brain to the problem of breaking Nazi crypto-code and was the one to finally unravel messages protected by the infamous Enigma machine.

There were various versions of the Enigma machine and various codes used by different branches of the German armed forces. The Polish Cipher Bureau were the first to break an Enigma code in 1932. Various other forms of the Enigma codes were broken by various teams at Bletchley Park without Turing. Turing was responsible for cracking the German Naval Enigma. The statement above denies credit to the Polish Cipher Bureau and the other 9000 workers in Bletchley Park for their contributions to encoding Enigma.

Besides helping to stop Nazi Germany from achieving world domination, Alan Turing was instrumental in the development of the modern day computer. His design for a so-called “Turing machine” remains central to how computers operate today.

I’ve lost count of how many times that I’ve seen variations on the claim in the above paragraph in the last eighteen months or so, all equally incorrect. What such comments demonstrate is that their authors actually have no idea what a Turing machine is or how it relates to computer design.

In 1936 Alan Turing, a mathematician, published a paper entitled On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. This was in fact one of four contemporaneous solutions offered to a problem in meta-mathematics first broached by David Hilbert, the Entscheidungsproblem. The other solutions, which needn’t concern us here, apart from the fact that Post’s solution is strongly similar to Turing’s, were from Kurt Gödel, Alonso Church and Emil Post. Entscheidung is the German for decision and the Entscheidungsproblem asks if for a given axiomatic system whether it is also possible with the help of an algorithm to decide if a given statement in that axiom system is true or false. The straightforward answer that all four men arrived at by different strategies is that it isn’t. There will always be undecidable statements within any sufficiently complex axiomatic system.

Turing’s solution to the Entscheidungsproblem is simple, elegant and ingenious. He hypothesised a very simple machine that was capable of reading a potentially infinite tape and following instruction encoded on that tape. Instruction that moved the tape either right or left or simply stopped the whole process. Through this analogy Turing was able to show that within an axiomatic system some problems would never be Entscheidbar or in English decidable. What Turing’s work does is, on a very abstract level, to delineate the maximum computability of any automated calculating system. Only much later, in the 1950s, after the invention of electronic computers a process in which Turing also played a role did it occur to people to describe the computational abilities of real computers with the expression ‘Turing machine’.  A Turing machine is not a design for a computer it is term used to described the capabilities of a computer.

To be quite open and honest I don’t know enough about Benoit Mandelbrot and fractals to be able to say whether our author at least got that one right, so I’m going to cut him some slack and assume that he did. If he didn’t I hope somebody who knows more about the subject that I will provide the necessary corrections in the comments.

All of the errors listed above are errors that could have been easily avoided if the author of the article had cared in anyway about historical accuracy and truth. However as is all to often the case in the history of science or in this case mathematics people are prepared to dish up a collection of half baked myths, misconceptions and not to put too fine a point on it crap and think they are performing some sort of public service in doing so. Sometimes I despair.