A Guide to the Scientific Wilderness
BY Michael Hanlon
ISBN-13: 978–0–230–51758–5
Introduction
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement
Lord Kelvin, 1900
Lord Kelvin, 1900
How we laugh now at those daft Victorians. They thought they knew everything. To them, the Universe was a small and well-ordered sort of place, consisting of a few million stars. The planets were held aloft by Newton’s well-ordered apron strings, and the whole cosmos ticked away like a Swiss clock.
Down here on Earth they knew that life began in a warm little pond, and that its subsequent evolution was governed by Mr Darwin’s grand thesis. Stuff was made of atoms, of about a hundred different flavours, which behaved like mini versions of the planets: tiny, well-behaved billiard balls. Science was nearing its end – all that was left was to cross the ‘t’s and dot the ‘i‘s. We were nearly at the Summit of Total Understanding.
The summit turned out to be a false one. A whole series of brilliant and bothersome insights in the early 20th century threw so many spanners into the scientific works that we were forced to more or less rip everything up that we thought we knew and to start again.
Down here on Earth they knew that life began in a warm little pond, and that its subsequent evolution was governed by Mr Darwin’s grand thesis. Stuff was made of atoms, of about a hundred different flavours, which behaved like mini versions of the planets: tiny, well-behaved billiard balls. Science was nearing its end – all that was left was to cross the ‘t’s and dot the ‘i‘s. We were nearly at the Summit of Total Understanding.
The summit turned out to be a false one. A whole series of brilliant and bothersome insights in the early 20th century threw so many spanners into the scientific works that we were forced to more or less rip everything up that we thought we knew and to start again.
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