I’ve always liked these big idea books, suggested by RJ of the flourishing actually, because they do what they suggest. While I gave away Star Trek book, as I didn’t really get anything out of it, the movie book and Sherlock Holmes books were enjoyable though. I didn’t care for some of the film selections.
The most interesting thing about these books is the quotations, because they are perhaps the most valuable aspect of these tomes. Unpacking the thinking of these utterances really intrigues me. I’d only gotten through a couple chapters so I’m going to revisit the quotes
Really, all ideas can be tied back to some branch of scientific study. But so often, it seems that the inherent love for discovery we all have as children is beaten out of us in one way or another.
Many modern people believe we have already put all the ideas out there and we are just remixing and combining them in new ways. The idea I keep hearing is there are only so many stories that can really be told, only so many chords to use, words are limited by the common vocabulary, and so on. Indeed I find many of my own ideas aren’t all that novel as time ticks on, but it just means that we as a general society are still attached to certain comfort zones.
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“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” This is a very famous Einstein quote.
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Here’s a quote from physician Al-Razi. “The doctor’s aim is to do good, even to our enemies.” Talk about being relevant in our modern times… I think this goes beyond doctors, really, but especially in medicine!
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The idea of the fourfold roots of everything, which Empedocles believed, is actually at the heart of my own literature: fire, air, earth, and water feature prominently in my ideas about magic. He was more right than he thought, although the truth is literally more elemental than that. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and various levels of heat are in fact the basis for a lot of what makes up our universe.
“For Empedocles,” the book reads, “love and strife are the two forces that shape the universe. In this world, strife tends to predominate, which is why life is so difficult.”
Thank goodness for modern chemistry, but this idea has never really left fantasy literature.
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Darwin didn’t discover natural selection. That was Al-Tusi back in the 13th century. What I especially like about Al-Tusi’s findings is the suggestion that human beings are only a “middle step of the evolutionary stairway”. Of course this is still considered fundamentally true in science.
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While Zhang Heng’s ideas may sound silly now — “the sun is like fire, the moon is like water” for example — it’s not really that silly if you really think about the obvious evidence. His key work was called “the spiritual constitution of the universe” and it’s something I should investigate further. He also authored “the map of the Ling xian” which imagined a universe far smaller, absurdly so, than reality but also a step in the right direction.
Before him, Jing Fang said “the Moon and the planets are Yin, they have shape but no light.”
This is correct. So Zhang Heng built on this idea that the planets and moon reflect light like water, meaning they are subject to eclipses. Also correct. So people often mistake this to mean the moon is made of water, which is not a ridiculous belief in context. Imagine if the moon really was just a huge sea, that would be kind of neat.
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Jan Swammerdam “showed that egg, larva, pupa, and adult are all stages in the development of an insect and not separate animals created by God.” I didn’t realize it took until the 17th century to recognize this. It seems baffling to me that these stages were seen as transfigurations.
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About Kepler… I love the “ancient ideas that heavenly bodies were mounted on crystal spheres.” It’s a beautiful concept, however unrealistic and silly as it might sound today. I suppose that ellipses are just as beautiful though, and even more awe inspiring.
What’s crazy to me is just how perfectly mathematical our universe is. That is not a random chance. I don’t know what it is, but it’s created, not an accident. It turns out Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, while a bit generalized, proved to work out.
I love this Galileo quote: “Count what is countable, measure what is measurable, and what is not measurable, make it measurable.”
And indeed, a falling body accelerates uniformly, as proven by astronauts on the moon!
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I vaguely recall the name William Gilbert from my science classes, you know the guy who essentially said the globe of the earth is a magnet.
I like this quote by him too, “Stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators.”
I find it funny that they used compasses well before they realized the earth itself is actually magnetic. Kepler and Galileo owe him for his theories, which ultimately proved correct.
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I love how Francis Bacon saw science as a “spring of a progeny of inventions, which shall overcome, to some extent, and subdue our needs and miseries.” He got that right! He would be the “first to explain the methods of inductive reasoning and set out the scientific method” which we of course still use today. Of course we should be thinking scientifically about everything, not just “the sciences.”
And this quote should be a poster on every classroom wall ever: “whether or not anything can be known, can be settled not by arguing, but by trying.” Politicians especially need to learn this one weird trick…
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I actually never learned about this in school, Evangelista Torricelli invented the Mercury barometer, and said “We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element air, that by unquestioned experiments is known to have weight.”
Pascal, who the programming language would later be named after, figured out the pressure aspect, the units of which are also named after him.
Anyway, our story isn’t done here. Prussian scientist Otto von Guericke invented a pump to lower the air pressure in a container. Robert Boyle would learn of these experiments and created new and improved versions of the air pump. He also insisted that his results came from actual experiments not “thought experiments” as many scientists, even Galileo, had cited to that point.
Boyle was lucky in that he inherited a significant fortune from his father the Earl of Cork, for real. He was part of what would be called the “invisible college” which sounds bad ass. this would one day become the Royal Society in 1663. He had some other pretty weird ideas too, but don’t we all?
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It’s funny how Christian Huygens ended up being right that light is in fact made up of waves, even if the “ether” is an imaginary concept. Of course I still use it in my universe to connect magical forces, but that’s a story. Not real life. I’m a fan of Huygens for his discovery of the moon Titan and being the first to accurately describe the rings of my favorite planet Saturn!