...and Taking It Seriously
Suppose you were faced with the following examination question: Which of the following statements do you think is more applicable to science? (1) "History is more or less bunk" [Henry Ford]; (2) "If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!" [S.T. Coleridge]. How would most scientists answer? Some—such as those involved in taxonomy—might opt for the second alternative, but I suspect a majority would prefer the first. Yet it is difficult to avoid all history in sci
Which of the following statements do you think is more applicable to science? (1) "History is more or less bunk" [Henry Ford]; (2) "If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!" [S.T. Coleridge].
How would most scientists answer? Some—such as those involved in taxonomy—might opt for the second alternative, but I suspect a majority would prefer the first. Yet it is difficult to avoid all history in science.
For example, astronomers often use a graph known as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. This is not a plot of Hertzsprung against Russell—as one of my students once asserted—but of the brightness of a star against its surface temperature. The historical query here is not who Hertzsprung and Russell were, but why they plotted the graph in such a way. The values of brightness on the vertical axis increase in the...
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