History Over Science

A hundred years ago, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, scientists around the world were satisfied that they had arrived at an accurate picture of the physical world. As physicist Alastair I. M. Ray put it in his book "Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality?," 'By the end of the nineteenth century, it seemed that the basic fundamental principles governing the behavior of the physical universe were known.' Indeed, many scientists said that the study of physics was nearly completed: no big discoveries remained to be made, only details and finishing touches. But late in the final decade, a few curiosities came to light. Roentgen discovered rays that passed through flesh. Because he could not explain them, he called them X-rays. Two months later, Henri Becquerel accidentally found that a piece of uranium ore emitted something that fogged photographic plates. And the electron, the carrier of electricity, was discovered in 1897.

Yet on the whole, physicists remained calm, expecting that those oddities would eventually be explained by existing theory. No one would have predicted that within five years the complacent view of the world would be shockingly upended, producing an entirely new conception of the universe and entirely new technologies that would transform daily life in the twentieth century in unimaginable ways.

If you had said to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later, moving images would be transmitted into homes all over the world from satellites in the sky; that bombs of unimaginable power would threaten not merely the human species, but the existence of the world; that antibiotics would abolish infectious disease but disease would fight back; that women would have the vote, and pills to control reproduction; that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without a human touch; airplanes could cross the Atlantic at 2,000 miles an hour; that humankind would travel to the moon and then lose interest in it; that microscopes would be able to see individual atoms; that people would carry telephones weighing a few ounces and speak anywhere in the world without wires; or that most of those miracles would depend on devices the size of a postage stamp, which operated because of a new theory called quantum mechanics -- if you said all this, the physicist would almost certainly have pronounced you mad.

Most of those developments could not have been predicted in 1899, because prevailing scientific theory said they were impossible. And, for the few developments that were not impossible, such as airplanes, the sheer scale of their eventual use would have defied comprehension. One might have pictured an airplane, but 10,000 airplanes in the air at the same time would have been beyond imagining.

So it is fair to say that even the most informed scientist, standing on the threshold of the twentieth , had no idea what was to come.

Now that we stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century, the situation is oddly similar...

-- Michael Crichton


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