Great Feuds in Science , livre ebook

GREAT FEUDS IN SCIENCE
GREAT FEUDS IN SCIENCE

Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever
Hal Hellman

J OHN W ILEY & S ONS , I NC . New York · Chichester · Weinheim · Brisbane · Singapore · Toronto
Copyright © 1998 by Hal Hellman. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heilman, Hal
Great feuds in science : ten of the liveliest disputes ever / by Hal Heilman.            p.    cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-35066-4 (paper)
1.  Science—History.   2.  Scientists—Social aspects—History.
3.  Vendetta—Case studies.   I.  Title.
Q125.H5574   1998
509′.2′2—dc21
97-39824 CIP
10  9  8  7
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
C HAPTER 1
Urban VIII versus Galileo · An Unequal Contest
C HAPTER 2
Wallis versus Hobbes · Squaring the Circle
C HAPTER 3
Newton versus Leibniz · A Clash of Titans
C HAPTER 4
Voltaire versus Needham · The Generation Controversy
C HAPTER 5
Darwin’s Bulldog versus Soapy Sam · Evolution Wars
C HAPTER 6
Lord Kelvin versus Geologists and Biologists · The Age of the Earth
C HAPTER 7
Cope versus Marsh · The Fossil Feud
C HAPTER 8
Wegener versus Everybody · Continental Drift
C HAPTER 9
Johanson versus the Leakeys · The Missing Link
C HAPTER 10
Derek Freeman versus Margaret Mead · Nature versus Nurture
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
To Sheila, Jill, Jennifer, and Scott, extended nuclear family
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Though the final sprint to get this book done occurred in 1996 and 1997, I have been collecting material for it for almost two decades. This included several trips to Europe for some on-site visits, where the hosts and docents were unfailingly pleasant and informative, as at Darwin’s home in Downe and Newton’s quarters at Cambridge. I am especially grateful to Dr. Franco Pacini, Director of the Osservatorio Astrofísico di Arcetri, Italy, who went out of his way to facilitate my visit to II Gioiello, where Galileo spent his last, sad years, and who provided some very useful information as well.
The vast majority of my research, however, has been in libraries. Most helpful have been the wonderful collections of old materials at the Burndy Library (Norwalk, Connecticut); the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, Massachusetts), where I spent several months at a rented desk in the library; the American Academy in Rome, where I spent a month as research scholar; the Bobst Library at New York University, where I taught for eight years; the New York Public Library in New York; and the newer Science, Industry and Business Library, also in New York. And, finally, I made much use of my own local library in Leonia, New Jersey (luckily part of a countywide library system), from which I and the ever-helpful librarians have been able to reach out and pluck a remarkable number of gems from other libraries in our own county and, when needed, across the country.
Because of the book’s wide scope I had to rely, to a large extent, on secondary sources. Among the most useful were books that concentrated entirely or largely on a few of the individual feuds, or that provided information that would have been difficult to track down, such as Rachel H. Westbrook’s John Turberville Needham and His Impact on the French Enlightenment (Ph.D. Thesis, unpublished, Columbia University, 1972); A. Rupert Hall’s Philosophers at War. The Quarrel between Newton and Leibniz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Elizabeth Noble Shor’s The Fossil Feud between E. D. Cope and O. C. Marsh (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1974); and, astonishingly, five separate books on the Mead/Freeman feud.
For concentrated writing time, there is nothing better than the several artists’ colonies where I was able to spend some time. These include the Karolyi Institute in Vence, France (now, unhappily, no longer in operation); Mishkenot Sha’anim, in Jerusalem, Israel; and the Fundación Valparaíso, in Mojácar, Spain, where I was able to bring the book to a long-awaited conclusion.
Over the years I have pestered a great number of colleagues with questions. Some of these scholars I knew, some I did not. In almost all cases, they were helpful. Too many to name, I thank them nonetheless. One whom I would like to single out, however, is Shirley A. Roe. It was her lecture, “Voltaire versus Needham: Spontaneous Generation and the Nature of Miracles,” at the New York Academy of Sciences on December 2, 1981, that got me started in the first place.
Several colleagues were kind enough to read and comment on portions of the manuscript. These include Morton Klass, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University; Samuel I. Mintz, Professor Emeritus of English at the City University of New York; Walter Pitman at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory in Palisades, New York; Phyllis Dain, Professor Emeritus of Library Science at Columbia University; Norman Dain, Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University; John R. Cole, anthropologist and board member of the National Center for Science Education (former president); and Dr. Harold L. Burstyn, an escapee from the history-of-science field, who is now a patent lawyer in Syracuse, New York.
Thanks also to my agent Faith Hamlin for her sound marketing and psychological insights; to my editor Emily Loose for her input; and to John Simko, who saw the book through to the end.
Finally, the support, encouragement, and prodding from my wife, Sheila, who read every word at least a couple of times, was most important of all.
INTRODUCTION
James Galway, the Irish flutist, was scheduled to perform with the London Chamber Orchestra. Because one of the pieces, composed by Carl Stamitz, was not well known, he felt he would be more comfortable conducting that piece himself. It was then decided that Galway would conduct the entire concert.
“I got the tempo of the first piece very clear in my head,” he notes. “Then I gave the downbeat and we began. When I saw the expression of horror on the players’ faces, I knew we had a disaster on our hands. We just stopped dead. What else could we do? I had neglected to look at the program. We were supposed to start with a Vivaldi, not the Stamitz.”
A conductor’s worst nightmare—but here comes a surprise. “We just cracked up,” he adds. “And when the audience realized what had happened, they joined in. I think they like to see something go wrong sometimes.” 1
Unfortunately, when the media report that something has gone wrong in science, it is likely to be a calamity of some sort: the release of a deadly chemical—as in earlier incidents involving methyl mercury, dioxin, and PCBs—or a nuclear accident such as those of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Though these disasters should probably be classified as technological rather than scientific, reporters rarely make this distinction.
News reports of errors in science, rather than technology, seldom appear. As a result, the public rarely sees the various wrong paths down which scientists often tread. Even if an incorrect scientific idea is reported, no one knows it is incorrect. By the time the correct idea is developed, it is brought forth as a new breakthrough, and the old one is simply forgotten. Even in scientific journals, reports of negative results rarely make it into print, in spite of the fact that they can be very helpful to those working in the field.
Part of the problem lies in how science is taught—namely, as a kind of grand march. Almost any science textbook presents the material as a logical series of chapters. Like a juggernaut, the text grinds through the science to be covered, never diverting from its path to show what a struggle it was to bring the ideas to fruition.
After all, the facts, even the theories, are history. It is the process that is the living science; that’s what makes the activity exciting to those who practice it. Nonscientists really don’t understand this. They are equally in the dark when it comes to the practitioners of science, whom they think of in the same way as the work the scientists are carrying out: cold, unfeeling—in short, inhuman.
Often, however, the process of scientific discovery is charged with emotion. When introducing a new idea, a scientist is likely to be stepping on the theories of others. Holders of an earlier idea may not give it up gladly.
How does the loser feel when he or she sees a cherished theory being overturned, perhaps even sees immortality slipping away? When the loser goes down fighting, we have one kind of scientific feud, as illustrated in the quarter-century-long battle between Thomas Hobbes and the British mathematician John Wallis (see Chapter 2 ). One of Hobbes’s problems was that he was so taken with geometry as to be wholly blind to the capabilities