The Discoverers (Knowledge Series Book 2)

by Daniel J. Boorstin

The word “moon” in English and its cognate in other languages are rooted in the base me meaning measure (as in Greek metron, and in the English meter and measure), reminding us of the moon’s primitive service as the first universal measurer of time.

The discomfiting fact that the cycles of the moon and the cycles of the sun are incommensurate would stimulate thinking. Had it been possible to calculate the year, the round of seasons, simply by multiplying the cycles of the moon, mankind would have been saved a lot of trouble. But we might also have lacked the incentive to study the heavens and to become mathematicians.

Their “intercalation,” or insertion of extra months, avoided the inconvenience of a “wandering” year in which the seasons wandered gradually through the lunar months, so that there was no easy way of knowing which month would bring the new season. This Metonic calendar with its nineteen-year clusters was too complicated for everyday use.

Many of the early Christians, following their own literal interpretation of the Bible, fixed the death of Jesus on a Friday, and the Easter resurrection on the following Sunday. But if the anniversary of the festival was to follow the Jewish lunar calendar, there was no assurance that Easter would occur on a Sunday. The bitter quarrel over the calendar led to one of the earliest schisms between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Church of Rome. The Eastern Christians, holding to the lunar calendar, continued to observe Easter on the fourteenth day of the lunar month, regardless of the day of the week. At the very first ecumenical (worldwide) council of the Christian Church, held at Nicaea in Asia Minor in 325, one of the world-unifying questions to be decided was the date of Easter. A uniform date was fixed in such a way as both to stay with the traditional lunar calendar and to assure that Easter would always be observed on Sunday. But this did not quite settle the matter. For community planning someone still had to predict the phases of the moon and locate them on a solar calendar. The Council of Nicaea had left this task to the bishop of Alexandria. In that ancient center of astronomy he was to forecast the phases of the moon for all future years. Disagreement over how to predict those specified cycles led to a division in the Church, with the result that different parts of the world continued to observe Easter on different Sundays.

The week—or something very like it—was probably the earliest of these artificial time clusters. Our English word “week” seems to come from an Old High German word meaning to change, or turn about (like the English “vicar” and the German Wechsel). But the week is no Western invention, nor has it everywhere been a cluster of seven days. Around the world, people have found at least fifteen different ways, in bunches of 5 to 10 days each, of clustering their days together. What is planet-wide is not any particular bouquet of days but the need and the desire to make some kind of bouquet. Mankind has revealed a potent, pressing desire to play with time, to make more of it than nature has made.

Every conceivable human activity or experience—from the knotting of strings to the interpretation of dreams—has become an oracle, witnessing man’s desperate eagerness for clues to his future. By contrast with these other kinds of prophecy, astrology was progressive. Astrology differed in asserting the continuous, regular force of a power at a distance. The influences of heavenly bodies on the events on earth it described as periodic, repetitious, invisible forces like those that would rule the scientific mind.

The growth of science would depend on man’s willingness to believe the improbable, to cross the dictates of common sense. With astrology man made his first great scientific leap into a scheme for describing how unseen forces from the greatest distance, from the very depth of the heavens, shaped everyday trivia.

The geocentric, or Ptolemaic, theory of the universe would become a modern byword for astronomical error. Similarly, the land-dominant view, the view that dry land comprised most of the earth’s surface, became a byword for geographic error. These two popular misconceptions were destined to obscure Ptolemy’s colossal achievements. But never since Ptolemy has anyone provided so comprehensive a survey of the whole scientific knowledge of an age.

Ptolemy dominated the popular and literary view of the universe throughout the Middle Ages. The world as depicted in Dante’s Divine Comedy came right out of Ptolemy’s Almagest In many ways Ptolemy spoke as a prophet. For he enlarged the uses of mathematics in the service of science. While he drew on the best observations made before him, he emphasized the need for repeated, increasingly precise observation. In fact, Ptolemy was a harbinger of the scientific spirit, an unsung pioneer of the experimental method.

In view of the scanty factual reports available to him, Ptolemy’s maps of his “known world,” the Roman Empire, were a remarkable accomplishment. He showed the crucial scientific talents—shaping theories to fit available facts and testing old theories by new facts.

Astrology remained the bête noire of the Christian Church Fathers. Faith in a star-written destiny had dissuaded Romans, such as Emperor Tiberius, from paying homage even to their pagan gods. Tertullian (c. 160–c. 230) warned against astrology because “men, presuming that we are disposed of by the immutable arbitrament of the stars, think on that account that God is not to be sought after.” Shrewd Christian theologians of the Middle Ages managed to find holy uses for the widespread belief in astral powers. Both Albertus Magnus and Saint Thomas Aquinas admitted the strong governing influence of the stars, but they insisted that man’s freedom was his very power to resist that influence. Even if astrologers often did make true predictions, Aquinas explains, these usually concerned, events in which large numbers of men were involved. In such cases the passions of the many would prevail against the rational wisdom of the few; but the individual Christian’s free will had not been exercised.

The very word “clock” bears the mark of its monastic origins. The Middle English clok came from the Middle Dutch word for bell and is a cognate of the German Glocke, which means bell. Strictly speaking, in the beginning a timepiece was not considered to be a clock unless it rang a bell. It was only later that it came to mean any device that measured passing time.

The force that moved the arm that struck the bell was provided by falling weights. What made the machine truly novel was the device that prevented the free fall of the weights and interrupted their drop into regular intervals. The sundial had shown the uninterrupted movement of the sun’s shadow, and the sandglass operated by the free-falling of water or sand. What gave this new machine a longer duration and measured off the units was a simple enough device, which has remained almost uncelebrated in history. It was called an escapement, since it was a way of regulating the “escape” of the motive power into the clock, and it held revolutionary import for human experience. With the simplicity of the greatest inventions, the “escapement” was nothing more than an arrangement that would regularly interrupt the force of a falling weight. The interruptor was so designed that it would alternately check and then release the force of the weight on the moving machinery of the clock. This was the basic invention that made all modern clocks possible. Now a weight falling only a short distance could keep a clock going for hours as the regular downward pull of the falling weights was translated into the interrupted, staccato movement of the clock’s machinery.

The back-and-forth movement of the bar (moved by the large falling weights) would alternately engage and disengage the cogs on the clock’s machinery. These interrupted movements eventually measured off the minutes and, later, the seconds. When, in due course, clocks became common, people would think of time no longer as a flowing stream but as the accumulation of discrete measured moments. The sovereign time that governed daily lives would no longer be the sunlight’s smooth-flowing elastic cycles. Mechanized time would no longer flow. The tick-tock of the clock’s escapement would become the voice of time.

The canonical hours, which had measured out the daylight into the appropriate elastic units between divine services, were registered on clocks until about the fourteenth century. It was around 1330 that the hour became our modern hour, one of twenty-four equal parts of a day. This new “day” included the night. It was measured by the time between one noon and the next, or, more precisely, what modern astronomers call “mean solar time.” For the first time in history, an “hour” took on a precise, year-round, everywhere meaning.

There are few greater revolutions in human experience than this movement from the seasonal or “temporary” hour to the equal hour. Here was man’s declaration of independence from the sun, new proof of his mastery over himself and his surroundings. Only later would it be revealed that he had accomplished this mastery by putting himself under the dominion of a machine with imperious demands all its own.

The first clocks did not have dials or hands at all. They did not need them, since their use was simply to sound the hour. An illiterate populace that might have trouble reading a dial would not mistake the sound of bells. With the coming of the “equal” hour, replacing the “temporary” or “canonical” hour, the sounding of hours was idea...

By 1500 the clock at Wells Cathedral in England was striking the quarter-hours, but had no way to mark the minutes. To measure minutes you still had to use a sandglass. A separate concentric minute hand, in addition to the hour hand, did not come into use until the pendulum was successfully applied to clocks. The pendulum also made it possible to indicate seconds. By 1670 it was not unusual for clocks to have a second hand whose movements were controlled by a 39-inch pendulum with a period of just one second.

Ptolemy used this sixty-unit system for subdividing the circle, and he also used it to divide the day. Not until much later, perhaps in the thirteenth century with the arrival of the mechanical clock, did the minute become a division of the hour. The language, again, is a clue to the needs and capacities of timekeeping machinery. The “second” was at first an abbreviation for “second minute,” and originally described the unit resulting from the second operation of sexagesimal subdivision. Long used for subdivisions of a circle, seconds were not applied to timekeeping until clockmaking was refined in the late sixteenth century.

still begins at midnight by the clock. The archaeology of our everyday life leads us all over the world. The 365 days of our year acknowledge our debt to ancient Egyptian priests, while the names of months—January, February, March—and of the days of our seven-day week—Saturday, Sunday, Monday—remain our tie to the early Hebrews and to Greek and Roman astrologers. When we mark each hour of our 24-hour day, and designate the minutes after the hour, we are living, as a historian of ancient science reminds us, by “the results of a Hellenistic modification of an Egyptian practice combined with Babylonian numerical procedures.”

Astronomy and physics at the University of Pisa, where Galileo was enrolled, had consisted of lectures on the texts of Aristotle. But Galileo’s own way of learning, from observing and measuring what he saw, expressed the science of the future.

His discovery, although never fully exploited by Galileo himself, opened a new era in timekeeping. Within three decades after Galileo’s death the average error of the best timepieces was reduced from fifteen minutes to only ten seconds per day. A clock that kept perfect step with countless other clocks elsewhere made time a measure transcending space. Citizens of Pisa could know what time it was in Florence or in Rome at that very moment. Once such clocks were synchronized they would stay synchronized. No longer a mere local convenience for measuring the craftsman’s hours or fixing the time for worship or the town council’s meeting, henceforth the clock was a universal yardstick. Just as the equal hour standardized the units of day and night, summer and winter, in any particular town, so now the precision clock standardized the units of time all over the planet.

When the Royal Society was founded in 1662, they wisely chose Hooke, still only twenty-seven, for the novel post of Curator of Experiments, assigned to try the experiments suggested by members. “The truth is”—Hooke in his Micrographia (1665) sounded the keynote of the new age—“the science of Nature has been already too long made only a work of the brain and the fancy: It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of observations on material and obvious things.”

In 1658, when he was only twenty-three, Hooke had already conjectured that the regulator for a marine clock might be made by the “use of Springs instead of Gravity for the making of a Body vibrate in any Posture.” A spring attached to a balance wheel could make the wheel oscillate back and forth around its own center of gravity, thus providing the periodic movement needed to stop and start the clockworks, and so mark the units of time. This crucial insight would make possible the marine clock.

Philosophers were always looking for new handles on the universe—new similes, new metaphors, new analogies. Despite their scorn for those who cast the Creator of the Universe in man’s image, the theologians never ceased to scrutinize man’s own handiwork as their clues to God. Now man was a proud clockmaker, a maker of self-moving machines. Once set in motion, the mechanical clock seemed to tick with a life of its own. Might not the universe itself be a vast clock made and set in motion by the Creator Himself? This interesting possibility, not conceivable until the mechanical clock was on the scene, would be a main way station toward modern physics.

Even after the clock ceased to be the master metaphor of the universe, it became more than ever master of daily life on this planet. The clock made it possible for Europeans to be “on time.” By the late seventeenth century, when clocks were not uncommon among the literate and wealthy, the word “punctual”—which formerly had described a person who insisted upon points (from the Latin punctus, “points”) or details of conduct—came to describe a person who was exactly observant of an appointed time. By the late eighteenth century the word “punctuality” appeared in our language to describe the habit of being in good time.

To discover the planet, mankind would have to be liberated from ancient hopes and fears, and open the gateways of experience.

THE great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments and contradictory witnesses. Villagers who themselves feared to ascend the mountaintops located their departed ones on the impenetrable heavenly heights.

According to popular astronomy, the lowest of the seven planetary spheres was the moon, whose ether was nearest the earth’s impure atmosphere. Pythagoreans and Stoics imagined souls returning to earth just after they had crossed the circle of the moon. Therefore “sublunary” (beneath the moon) came to describe everything terrestrial, mundane, or ephemeral.

MORE appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowing.

Latitude and longitude were to the measurement of space what the mechanical clock was to the measurement of time. They signaled man’s dominance over nature, discovering and marking the dimensions of experience. They substituted precise units suiting human convenience for the accidental shapes of the Creation.

CHRISTIAN Europe did not carry on the work of Ptolemy. Instead the leaders of orthodox Christendom built a grand barrier against the progress of knowledge about the earth. Christian geographers in the Middle Ages spent their energies embroidering a neat, theologically appealing picture of what was already known, or was supposed to be known.

After the death of Ptolemy, Christianity conquered the Roman Empire and most of Europe. Then we observe a Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia, which afflicted the continent from A.D. 300 to at least 1300. During those centuries Christian faith and dogma suppressed the useful image of the world that had been so slowly, so painfully, and so scrupulously drawn by ancient geographers. We no longer find Ptolemy’s careful outlines of shores, rivers, and mountains, handily overlaid by a grid constructed on the best-known astronomical data. Instead, simple diagrams authoritatively declare the true shape of the world, though they are only pious caricatures.

All people have wanted to believe themselves at the center. But after the accumulated advances of classical geography, it required amnesiac effort to ignore the growing mass of knowledge and retreat into a world of faith and caricature.

UNLIKE Columbus, who would aim straight for the Indies, Prince Henry the Navigator had a larger, a vaguer, and more modern destination—true to his horoscope. “The noble spirit of this Prince,” the admiring reporter Gomes Eanes de Zurara explained, “was ever urging him both to begin and to carry out very great deeds.… he had also a wish to know the land that lay beyond the isles of Canary and that Cape called Bojador, for that up to his time, neither by writings, nor by the memory of man, was known with any certainty the nature of the land beyond that Cape.… it seemed to him that if he or some other lord did not endeavour to gain that knowledge, no mariners or merchants would ever dare to attempt it, for it is clear that none of them ever trouble themselves to sail to a place where there is not a sure and certain hope of profit.”

Astronomers were adept at explaining away what seemed only minor problems by a variety of complicated epicycles, deferents, equants, and eccentrics, which gave them a heavy vested interest in the whole scheme. The more copious this peripheral literature became, the more difficult it became to retreat to fundamentals. If the central scheme was not correct, surely so many learned men would not have bothered to offer their many subtle corrections.

Copernicus believed that his system actually accorded better than the older geocentric system with the way the universe ought to be. He believed he was describing the actual truths of an essentially mathematical universe. Heavenly motions must be perfect circles. In Copernicus’ time, all this reminds us, astronomy was still a branch of mathematics—in E. A. Burtt’s phrase “the geometry of the heavens.” Following Pythagorean and Neoplatonic doctrine, this carried implications too for mathematics itself, which, instead of being the deductive study of abstract constructs, purported to describe the actual world. It would be some time before this notion changed. Meanwhile, this proved to be a fruitful confusion, luring astronomers and others through the gateway to modern science.

The Copernican doctrine had lain semidormant for a half-century after Copernicus. Without the telescope the heliocentric theory might long have remained an interesting but unpersuasive hypothesis. Now the telescope made all the difference. What he saw persuaded Galileo of the truth of what he had read. And he was not alone. Until the telescope, the defenders of Christian orthodoxy felt no need to ban Copernican ideas. But this new device, which spoke directly to the senses, short-circuited the priests’ appellate jurisdiction over the heavens. Astronomy was transformed from a preserve of arcane theories in learned language into a public experience.

In the absence of a science of optics, sensible people were especially wary of “optical illusions” (deceptiones visus). This medieval distrust of all optical devices was the great obstacle to a science of optics. As we have seen, it was believed that any device standing between the senses and the object to be sensed could only mislead the God-given faculties. And to a certain extent the crude microscopes in those days confirmed their suspicions. Chromatic and spherical aberration still produced fuzzy images.

Although the Copernican ideas reached Japan late, when they did arrive they met less obstinate resistance than they had in Europe, for in the early nineteenth century the prestige of Western science gave the doctrine special appeal.

Paracelsus’ faith led him to believe that there were no incurable diseases, only ignorant physicians. “For God it is, who commanded: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself and thou shalt love God above all things. If, now, thou wilt love God, thou must also love His works. If thou wilt love thy neighbour, thou must not say: For thee there is no help. But thou must say: I cannot do it and I understand it not. This truth shields thee from the curse that descends on the false. So take heed what is told thee; the rest shall be sought after until the art is found from which good works proceed.” The physician must always search for new remedies, never limiting his prescriptions to those allowed by Galen.

had before. Europe’s ancient institutions of learning, colleges and universities, had been founded not to discover the new but to transmit a heritage. By contrast, the Royal Society and other parliaments of scientists, with their academies in London, Paris, Florence, Rome, Berlin, and elsewhere, aimed to increase knowledge. They were a witness not so much to the wealth of the past as to what Bishop Sprat called “the present Inquiring Temper of this Age.”

In organizing the Royal Society, the shrewd Henry Oldenburg had seen the new significance of priority. He sensed that members might be reluctant to send their discoveries to the society for fear that others might steal their claims to be the first. So he proposed “that a proper person might be found out to discover plagiarys, and to assert inventions to their proper authors.” To protect the rights of priority to investigations still in progress, Oldenburg moved that “when any Fellow have any philosophical notion or invention not yet made out, and desired the same, sealed in a box, to be deposited with one of the secretaries till perfected, this might be allowed, for better securing inventions to their authors.” The progress of science would be haunted by the specter of priority. Even the most eminent scientists would seem more concerned to claim the credit than to prove the truth of their discoveries.

The sober verdict of an eighteenth-century French admirer of Newton recognized that Hooke’s claims were not entirely without merit but showed “what a distance there is between a truth that is glimpsed and a truth that is demonstrated.”

In retrospect the binomial nomenclature (e.g., Homo sapiens, for genus and species) seems so simple and obvious that it hardly needed to be invented. But before Linnaeus devised his binomial scheme, there was no generally agreed-upon scientific name for any particular plant.

It was left to Buffon to open the vistas of modern biology by bringing the whole earth and all its plants and animals onto the stage of history. After Buffon it was harder to believe that anything on earth was changeless. He had glimpsed the “mystery” of species. Now there was time and time to spare for varieties of animals to emerge or become extinct, making the whole world a museum of surprising fossils. By stretching the calendar, Buffon widened the stage for the naturalists’ imagination. The creation could be observed not merely as a Linnaean panorama in space, but as a continuous drama in time. “Nature’s great workman is Time. He marches ever with an even pace, and does nothing by leaps and bounds, but by degrees, gradations and successions he does all things; and the changes which he works—at first imperceptible—become little by little perceptible, and show themselves eventually in results about which there can be no mistake.”

ONE grand master metaphor dominated, perverted, and obstructed European efforts to discover man’s place in nature. This was the simple notion of a Great Chain of Being. The whole universe, European scientists and philosophers explained, consists of an ordered series of beings, from the lowest, simplest, and tiniest at the bottom to the highest and most complex at the top.

Tyson’s anatomy of the orang-outang placed man in a whole new constellation. Just as Copernicus displaced the earth from the center of the universe, so Tyson removed man from his unique role above and apart from all the rest of Creation, for whose nutriment, clothing, and delight plants were created, and for whose service there was a world of animals. Never before had there been so circumstantial or so public a demonstration of man’s physical kinship with the animals. Just as Vesalius had detailed and drawn the structure of the human body, so Tyson now detailed the anatomy of what he showed to be man’s closest relative among the animals. The implication was plain that here was the “missing link” between man and the whole “lower” animal creation.

After the twelfth century some manuscript books carried tables, running heads, and even rudimentary indexes, which showed that Memory was already beginning to lose some of its ancient role. But retrieval became still easier when printed books had title pages and their pages were numbered. When they were equipped with indexes, as they sometimes were by the sixteenth century, then the only essential feat of Memory was to remember the order of the alphabet. Before the end of the eighteenth century the alphabetic index at the back of a book had become standard. The technology of Memory retrieval, though of course never entirely dispensable, played a much smaller role in the higher realms of religion, thought, and knowledge. Spectacular feats of Memory became mere stunts.

THE ancient Roman Empire left a living legacy across Europe. The relics of Roman law defined property, contracts, and crimes for that continent and much of the rest of the world. Memories of political unity encouraged European federalists for centuries. The language of Rome survived, provided the literature of the written book, and created a European community of learning. But this legacy that united the culture of Europe also divided the communities of Europe. For all over the continent there were two-language communities.