The Human Side of Science: Edison and Tesla, Watson and Crick, and Other Personal Stories behind Science's Big Ideas

by Arthur W. Wiggins, Charles M. Wynn Sr., Sidney Harris (Illustrator)

Overview

This lively and humorous book focuses attention on the fact that science is a human enterprise. The reader learns about the foibles and quirks as well as the admirable ingenuity and impressive accomplishments of famous scientists who made some of the greatest discoveries of the past and present. Examples abound: James Watson and Francis Crick formed a legendary partnership that led to the discovery of DNA, but they essentially ignored the contribution of female colleague Rosalind Franklin. Later, in the race to sequence the human genome, Watson criticized J. Craig Venter's technique as a process that "could be run by monkeys." Nikola Tesla once worked for Thomas Edison, but then quit after a dispute about a bonus. Robert Hooke accused Isaac Newton of stealing his ideas about optics. Plato declared that the works of Democritus should be burned. With tongue-in-cheek illustrations by renowned science cartoonist Sidney Harris, this book takes the reader behind the scenes of scientific research to shine new light on the all-too-human people who "do" science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781633881563
Publisher:	Prometheus Books
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Pages:	364
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Arthur W. Wiggins is the author of the Joy of Physics (with cartoons by Sidney Harris) and the coauthor, with Charles M. Wynn Sr., of the The Five Biggest Ideas in Science, Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction, The Five Biggest Unsolved Problems in Science, and the textbook Natural Science: Bridging the Gaps. Wynn and Wiggins have also edited And God said, “Let There Be Evolution!”: Reconciling the Book of Genesis, the Qur’an and the Theory of Evolution. Wiggins is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Physics, Oakland Community College in Michigan.

Charles M. Wynn Sr. is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Eastern Connecticut State University. Besides the above-named titles coauthored with Arthur W. Wiggins, Wynn is also the author of Quantitative and Qualitative Experiments for General Chemistry.
 
Sidney Harris was called “America’s premier science cartoonist” by Isaac Asimov. He has contributed to American Scientist for many years and provided illustrations for The Five Biggest Ideas in Science, Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction, and The Five Biggest Unsolved Problems in Science.

Read an Excerpt

The Human Side of Science

Edison and Tesla, Watson and Crick, and Other Personal Stories behind Science's Big Ideas

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By Arthur W. Wiggins, Charles M. Wynn Sr.

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2016 Arthur W. Wiggins and Charles M. Wynn Sr
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63388-156-3

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CHAPTER 1

DEMOCRITUS AND ARISTOTLE PONDER THE EXISTENCE OF ATOMS

It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.

— William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 3, scene 2 (1599)

The idea that matter consists of atoms is pervasive in modern culture, even though no one has ever seen them directly. One of the best and most interesting pictures we've got was produced in 1989. It was obtained by a scanning tunneling microscope at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. A beam of xenon atoms was shot at a chilled nickel crystal, and the atoms that stuck to the crystal were manipulated by the microscope's probe into the pattern shown below:

SLICING AND DICING MATTER

The reality of atoms answers a fundamental question that is simple enough to frame: If any material object is cut into smaller and smaller pieces, would there be some limit, after which no further cuts could be made, or would the material be infinitely cuttable?

To get to the heart of this question, we need to go back, back, way back. How far? As many wags have suggested, "The ancient Greeks thought of everything first." Atoms are a case in point.

DEMOCRITUS: MATTER IS DISCONTINUOUS

Democritus (460 BCE — 370 BCE) was born in the far north of Greece, in Abdera. He was taught by Leucippus, and many of his and Leucippus's ideas are so interwoven they are difficult to separate. As a young man, Democritus traveled extensively, spending a great deal of his inheritance from a wealthy father. He visited Asia, Ethiopia, India, and spent a long time in Egypt. Democritus's writings have not survived intact, so only secondary sources exist to help convey his ideas.

I am the most travelled of all my contemporaries; I have extended my field of enquiry wider than anyone else; I have seen more countries and climes and have heard more speeches of learned men.

Although he was virtually unknown in Athens (he went there once to visit Anaxagoras and was ignored), his students and neighbors in Abdera regarded him highly because he was invariably cheerful and ready to see the humorous side of life. He was referred to as the "Laughing Philosopher." He and Leucippus were materialists in that they looked for mechanistic explanations of phenomena, rather than deeper causes. They thought perception through the senses was so subjective that it was unreliable, so they discounted observations as relevant evidence.

Democritus (and, by extension, Leucippus) answered the fundamental question about divisibility of matter by postulating the existence of an uncuttable unit called an atom (Greek a = "not," tomos = "to cut") as the fundamental unit of matter.

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.

ARISTOTLE: MATTER IS CONTINUOUS

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was born in the small city of Stagira in north-eastern Greece, and he studied at Plato's Academy in Athens, where he started at about age seventeen. Plato (427-347 BCE), in turn, was a student of Socrates (469-399 BCE). After Plato's death, Aristotle left Athens for about twelve years. During that time, he tutored young people who went on to become kings, including Alexander (the Great). Upon his return to Athens in about 335 BCE, Aristotle established a school called the Lyceum.

Athens was the cultural hub of Greece and featured a tradition of discussion of all issues great and small. Aristotle and his students walked as they talked, earning them the title the "Peripatetic Philosophers." Although Aristotle agreed with Plato about many things, he and Plato also had significant differences of opinion. For example, Plato's reasoning was deductive in that it proceeded from general principles to specific instances. For example, all chairs have four legs, therefore this chair has four legs. On the other hand, Aristotle's reasoning was inductive in that it broadened from the specific to the general. For example, I have seen five tables, all of which have four legs. Therefore, all tables have four legs. Aristotle's emphasis on specifics led him to make systematic observations about living things, especially marine life, which set biology on a sound footing that lasted for centuries.

Aristotle invented and systematized logic as a tool for scientific inquiry. The overall scientific process used by Aristotle was one of careful observation, followed by logical reasoning about causes. Despite his extraordinarily wide-ranging scholarship that laid the groundwork for many intellectual pursuits during his own time and long thereafter, even a man as perceptive as Aristotle surprisingly made a few errors. His analyses of motion in general and planetary motion in particular were both flawed, leading to later difficulties, as we'll see in subsequent chapters. One particular error seems quite blatant, namely:

Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine.

With his emphasis on careful observation, many have wondered why Aristotle didn't simply count the teeth of both sexes and make a proper comparison.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Human Side of Science by Arthur W. Wiggins, Charles M. Wynn Sr.. Copyright © 2016 Arthur W. Wiggins and Charles M. Wynn Sr. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface, 7,
Introduction: Science's Evaluation System, 9,
Chapter 1: Democritus and Aristotle Ponder the Existence of Atoms, 21,
Chapter 2: Aristotle, Aristarchus, Copernicus, and Galileo Seek to Determine Earth's Place in the Cosmos, 31,
Chapter 3: Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and Gottfried Leibniz Argue about Motion and Calculus, 49,
Chapter 4: The Battling Bernoullis and Bernoulli's Principle, 61,
Chapter 5: Antoine Lavoisier and Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) Have Rival Theories of Heat, 73,
Chapter 6: Mendeleev, Meyer, Moseley and the Birth of the Periodic Table, 83,
Chapter 7: Westinghouse and Tesla versus Edison — AC/DC Titans Clash, 103,
Chapter 8: Alfred Wegener Stands His Ground about Continental Drift, 119,
Chapter 9: Part 1: Albert Einstein, Marcel Grossmann, Mileva Maric, and Michele Besso Struggle with Relativity, 131,
Chapter 10: Part 2: Albert Einstein's Struggles Continue, 153,
Chapter 11: Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley Clash/Cooperate over the Universe's Size, 183,
Chapter 12: Disastrous Consequences of Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn's Discovery of Nuclear Fission, 211,
Chapter 13: Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, and Francis Crick Determine the Structure of DNA, 235,
Chapter 14: J. Craig Venter, James Watson, and Michael Hunkapiller Race for the Human Genome, 255,
Chapter 15: Ten Honorable Mention Mini-Chapters, 271,
Afterword, 311,
Notes, 313,
To Dig Deeper, 327,
Index, 345,

Editorial Reviews

"PRAISE FOR THE JOY OF PHYSICS:   “… makes genuine fun out of rigorous science… Wiggins’s friendly, stress-free approach will teach readers how to measure, observe and calculate, and he enriches his study with short history lessons and biographies of physics pioneers... Clever cartoons by Sydney Harris and quotes from such worthies as Jeff Foxworthy provide laugh-out-loud moments, while the very human travails of pioneers like Tesla and Bernoulli remind us that life (and science) is seldom easy, even for geniuses. A welcome volume, Wiggins’s gentle but thorough text could do much to quell perennial student bellyaching over introductory physics courses.” —Publishers Weekly “…an entertaining, informative romp through electromagnetism and light, dynamics, quantum mechanics and the big bang.” —New Scientist     “Filled with examples and simple demonstrations and experiments you can do yourself, it’s a hands-on approach to the fun of discovery.  Here is a route not only to understanding physics—which, after all, deals with the biggest cosmic questions such as workings of the universe—but doing physics.” —Skeptical Inquirer   “…conveys the delight of understanding in a way that requires the reader to be comfortable with math no more complex than first-year algebra. Even more appealing is the manner in which the author uses math to explain a series of generally accessible experiments, with instructions that accompany many of the essays. Relevant cartoons by Sidney Harris amuse and enlighten the reader along the way… a fine resource for teachers who need to reinforce their own understanding of fundamental physics. It is a pleasure to read and will help teachers provide answers to students’ questions on the underlying principles of physical science… This book will reinforce the idea that physics is not only an important school subject but that it explains a great deal about the world we encounter every day.” —NSTA Recommends, National Science Teachers Association   “…rather than relying just on clear explanations, amazing results and interesting anecdotes to engage readers, The Joy of Physics also takes readers through a series of easy and fun practical experiments – such as demonstrating simple harmonic motion with a yo-yo – that illustrate physical concepts. The book is also peppered with illustrations by the famous science cartoonist Sidney Harris and each chapter begins with a humorous quotation.” —Physics World

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