FROM CERTAINTY TO UNCERTAINTY. The Story of Science and Ideas F. DAVID PEAT

DESCARGAR

Que sais-je? (What do I know?)

Montaigne

he first year of a new century

always appears auspicious. The year 1900 was no exception. Americans

welcomed it in with the three Ps: Peace, Prosperity, and Progress. It was

the culmination of many outstanding achievements and looked forward,

with great confidence, to a century of continued progress. The

twentieth century would be an age of knowledge and certainty. Ironically

it ended in uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt. This book is the

story of that change and of a major transformation in human thinking.

It also argues that, while our new millennium may no longer offer

certainty, it does hold a new potential for growth, change, discovery,

and creativity in all walks of life.

On April 27, 1900, Lord Kelvin, the eminent physicist and president

of Britain

’

s Royal Society, addressed the Royal Institution, pointing

out

“the beauty and clearness of the dynamical theory.”

Finally

Newton

’

s physics had been extended to embrace all of physics, including

both heat and light. In essence, everything that could be known

was, in principle at least, already known. The president could look

ahead to a new century with total conviction. Newton

’

s theory of

Que sais-je? (What do I know?)

Montaigne

Preface

motion had been confirmed by generations of scientists, and it explained

everything from the orbits of the planets to the times of the

tides, the fall of an apple, and the path of a projectile. What

’

s more,

during the preceding decades James Clerk Maxwell had established a

definitive theory of light. Taken together, Newton

’s and Maxwell’

s two

theories appeared to be capable of explaining every phenomenon in

the entire physical universe.

Yet the cusp of the twentieth century presents us with an irony.

1900 was a year of great stability and confidence. It saw the consolidation

and summing up of many triumphs in science, technology, engineering,

economics, and diplomacy. As Senator Chauncey Depew of

New York put it,

“

There is not a man here who does not feel 400 percent

bigger in 1900 than he did in 1896, bigger intellectually, bigger

hopefully, bigger patriotically,

”

while the Reverend Newell Dwight

Hillis claimed,

“

Laws are becoming more just, rules more humane;

music is becoming sweeter and books wiser.

”

Yet, at that very moment

other thinkers, inventors, scientists, artists, and dreamers, including

Max Planck, Henri Poincar

, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi,

Nikola Tesla, the Wright brothers, Bertrand Russell, Paul C

zanne,

Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Henry Ford, and

Herman Hollerith were conceiving of ideas and inventions that were

to transform the entire globe.

1900 was the year in which flash photography was invented and

speech was first transmitted by radio. Arthur Evans discovered evidence

of a Minoan culture and the United States backed its paper currency

with gold. Once the Gold Standard had been adopted, was there

anything that could stand in the way of a greater degree of confidence

in the future of their world?

1900 also represents the culmination of a period of rapid discovery.

In the two previous years the Curies had discovered radium and

J. J. Thomson the electron. Von Linde had liquefied air and Aspirin had

been invented. Edison

’

s Vitascope together with the magnetic recording

of sound heralded the age of the movies.

Thanks to Nikola Tesla

’

s inventions in alternating current, the city

of Buffalo was receiving electrical power generated by Niagara Falls.

Count von Zeppelin constructed an airship, the Paris Metro opened,

Preface

xi
and London saw its first motorbus. By 1902, the transmission of data

by telephone and telegraph was already well established, and the first

faxed photographs were being transmitted.

1900 also saw a link between Britain

’
s Trades Union Congress and
the Independent Labour Party, a move that would eventually lead to

the establishment of the welfare state. With such a dream of social improvement

people seemed justified in believing that the future would

provide better housing, education, and health services. Homelessness

would be a thing of the past and, while those thrown out of work would

need to tighten their belts a little, they would be supported by the welfare

state and would no longer face suffering and hardship.

Europe also experienced a great sense of stability in 1900. Queen

Victoria, who had ruled since 1837, was still on the throne. She had

become known as

“the Grandmother of Europe,”
since her grandchildren
were now part of the European monarchy. Indeed all of the European

kings and queens, as well as the Russian royal family, were a part

of a single international family presided over by Victoria. It was for this

reason, diplomats believed, there would never be a war within Europe.

On May 18, 1899, at the prompting of Czar Nicholas II

’
s minister
of foreign affairs, 26 nations met at The Hague for the world

’
s first
peace conference. There they established an International Court to arbitrate

in disputes between nations. The conference outlawed poison

gases, dumdum bullets, and the discharge of bombs from balloons.

Wars and international conflicts would be things of the past. The world

itself was moving toward a new golden age in which science and technology

would be put to the service of humanity and world peace

Yet when people look to a golden future they should not forget the

role of hubris. Often our predictions return to haunt us. It is particularly

ironic that in this same year, 1900, ideas and approaches began to

surface that were to transform our world, our society, and ourselves in

radical and unpredictable ways.

What were those tiny seeds that were destined to blossom in such

unexpected directions? In 1900 Max Planck published his first paper

on the quantum, and young Albert Einstein graduated from the Zurich

Polytechnic Academy. A year later Werner Heisenberg was born. These

three physicists would create the great revolutions of modern science.

xii

Preface
In 1900 Henri Poincar

é
was working on an abstruse technical difficulty
involving Newtonian mechanics. Over half a century later this

would explode into chaos theory. Astronomers were looking forward

to the opening of the great telescopes at Mount Wilson in 1904 and, in

the decades that followed, Edwin Hubble would use these instruments

to discover that the universe was far vaster than ever believed and,

moreover, that it was continually expanding.

In 1900 biologists rediscovered the work of an obscure mid nineteenth

century monk, Gregor Mendel. Ignored by the scientific community

in his own day, Mendel had examined the way physical characteristics

are inherited when different varieties of garden peas are

crossed. Who would have guessed that exactly a century after this rediscovery

of the basis of genetic inheritance, the completion of the

Human Genome Project would be announced?

This same year, 1900, saw the publication of Sigmund Freud

’s
Interpretation
of Dreams.

Much more rational than a Victorian dream
book, which typically flirted with divination and the occult, it demonstrated

that dreams are

“the royal road to the unconscious”
and, in
turn, that our waking lives are ruled by the irrationality of the unconscious.

That unconscious had a potential for violence and human irrationality

that was to be powerfully demonstrated again and again during

the twentieth century.

At the end of the nineteenth century Percival Lowell used his fortune

to establish his own observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, with the

aim of discovering life on Mars. In 1900 H. G. Wells, inspired by these

ideas, published

War of the Worlds,
with its image of the mass destruction
of the human race. Ironically the real possibility of global destruction

in the twentieth century did not arise from little green men from

Mars but from human-made weapons of mass destruction.

1900 was the year when the young philosopher Bertrand Russell

heard Giuseppe Peano speak at a conference in Paris. The lecture so

inspired Russell that he devoted his life

’
s work to the discovery of certainty
in mathematics and philosophy. How this mathematical Holy

Grail itself was eventually subverted forms the core of Chapter 2.

In 1900, inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, Marcel Proust

visited Venice. He abandoned the novel on which he had been working

Preface

xiii
and, determined to seek some new way of expressing

“man’s”
confrontation
with eternity, he embarked on a master plan that was to terminate

in one of the major literary works of the twentieth century. It was

also the year that the 18-year-old James Joyce, after having his first

article published, decided to become a full-time writer. In this same

year Picasso had his first exhibition and made a trip to Paris, an event

that was to have a profound effect on art in the twentieth century. 1900

was also the year in which Paul C

é
zanne was working on his famous
studies of Montagne Sainte-Victoire. The works he produced there had

a revolutionary effect on painting and produced yet another form of

doubt as he questioned the certainty of what he was seeing.

In the previous year Henry Ford had formed the Detroit Motor

Company, which would produce the famous Model T, a car that transformed

American society. Add to this Ford

’
s discovery of mass production
through the assembly line and one understands in part why, when

young Henry left his father

’
s farm, only a quarter of Americans lived in
a city, yet, when he died, well over half of them were city dwellers. In

1900 there were 8,000 automobiles in the United States and 150 miles

of paved road. Today the number of cars in the United States is close to

100 million.

A few years earlier, in 1896, Herman Hollerith had created the

Tabulating Machine Company to speed up the processing of data using

a system of punched cards. In 1911 the company

’
s name changed
to International Business Machines. The radio vacuum tube had been

invented (in 1904), and so both the physical components and the business

infrastructure were already in place for the creation of the computer

revolution.

In the same year as the creation of Hollerith

’
s Tabulating Machine
Company, Henri Becquerel discovered the radioactivity of uranium. A

few decades later, while studying Becquerel

’
s phenomenon, the German
scientist Otto Hahn realized that the atom could be split. When

knowledge of this process reached the United States, colleagues persuaded

Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt recommending

the building of an atomic bomb, out of the fear that Nazi scientists

would do so first. And so was born the atomic age, and with it the

possibility of the annihilation of all life on earth.

xiv

Preface
While the twentieth century began with confident certainty it

ended in unsettling uncertainty. Never again will we have the same

degree of pride in our knowledge. In our infatuation with science and

technology we overestimated our ability to manipulate and control the

world around us. We forgot the power of the mind

’
s irrational impulses.
We were too proud in our intellectual achievements, too confident

in our abilities, too convinced that humans would stride across

the world like gods.

Today we are wiser and more cautious. We are suspicious of great

plans and global promises. We view with caution the sweeping proposals

of experts and politicians. We savor unbounded optimism with a

generous pinch of salt.

Above all we want a better world for ourselves, our children, and

our children

’
s children. We have learned that ordinary people can have

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