Time for another thread, and perhaps a break from our exhausting round of ragegasms.
I don’t have anything particularly useful to offer, so I’m afraid that what you get is some random musing on some science-y stuff.
Yesterday afternoon I was reading a fascinating essay by Abraham Pais* on Einstein and quantum theory (as one does). I was rolling along when this passage brought me to a screeching halt:
In the last four months of 1859 there occurred a number of events which were to change the course of science.
On the twelfth of September, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier (1811-1877)submitted to the French Academy the text of a letter to Hervé Faye (1814 1902) in which he recorded that the perihelion of Mercury advances by thirty-eight seconds per century due to “some as yet unknown action on which no light has been thrown,” (Le Verrier, 1859). The effect was to remain unexplained until the days of general relativity.** On the twenty-fourth of November a book was published in London, entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, by Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882). Meanwhile on the twentieth of October Gustav Kirchhoff (1859) from Heidelberg submitted his observation that the dark D– lines in the solar spectrum are darkened still further by the interposition of a sodium flame. As a result, a few weeks later he proved a theorem and posed a challenge. The response to Kirchhoff’s challenge led to the discovery of the quantum theory.
I know, I know. While Darwin’s book was pretty much instantly understood to open enormous new vistas in the study of the living world, no contemporary observers could have had more than a twitch of recognition of the significance of either Mercury’s motion or what would come from a deep dive into the electromagnetic spectrum. But in hindsight we can (as Pais did) see those three months as a watershed, a before and after moment in the making of modern science, and hence of so much of our allegedly modern lives.
The economic historian Brad DeLong has made the case that 1870 or so was a critical turning point, the moment when humankind at last broke out of Malthusian trap that had capped growth and the chance for an ever increasing fraction of humankind to enjoy lives that exceed subsistence. He makes a strong argument, IMHO, but what strikes me is the way the last half of the nineteenth century was genuinely a break with the past across so much of human experience, for ill (see, e.g. this) and very much for good.
My book in progress (out next spring) looks at one of those shifts, born of the long struggle to understand the mechanisms of infectious disease that came to a climax in the 1870s and 1880s. Pais here points to parallel leaps in other scientific domains. There’s no doubt that a raft of technologies born of various sciences made everyday life in the last third of the century meaningfully different across growing swathes of the globe than what one’s parents or grandparents had experienced in recent decades.
All of which to say is that I’m finding it both fun and provoking to look into that time. History does not repeat itself, but, as they say, it knows the chords. I’m hearing a lot of resonances between our own time and what was going on about one hundred and fifty years ago.
That’s enough late-night dorm room meandering from me. What do y’all think? Leaving the miseries of minute-by-minute politics aside for a moment, how radical a shift in our understanding of and engagement of the world have we gone through over the last while? What are the odds we’ll find a way to turn any such new ideas into human flourishing.
Or, if you’d rather, MLB’s Opening Day is ten days away.*** That’s fair game too.
Which is to say, this thread is as open as are at this blessed moment of possibility each team’s chances of winning the World Series.
*Pais was a physicist, a friend of Einstein and Bohr, the biographer of both men, and someone I had the good fortune to know, albeit slightly. One afternoon we got to walk around the Prague Jewish cemetery together; it was a truly moving hour or so.
**I tell the story of Le Verrier’s Mercury discovery and the at once serious and comic scientific quest that followed in The Hunt for Vulcan. It’s a fun read, if I do say so as shouldn’t.
***I, for one, do not take this coming Wednesday’s two game set in South Korea as baseball’s opening day. YMMV.
Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery… c. 1766.
Three Months That Changed The World (Respite)Post + Comments (57)