Book summary “The human side of science”: summary

Introduction

You likely view science as a cold accumulation of pure facts, sterile logic, and objective data. Yet this sanitized textbook version hides the messy reality of ambition, ego, error, and intense rivalry that actually drives discovery. You miss the true nature of progress when you ignore the flawed, passionate humans behind the equations.

Scientific progress is driven by human interactions, rivalries, and passions across centuries rather than cold algorithmic logic.

Arthur W. Wiggins reveals this human side of science by examining the personalities and social forces that shaped major breakthroughs. You will trace this historical journey from ancient astronomy to modern genomics, uncovering the personal struggles behind cosmic models, thermodynamics, and DNA.

• How did personal rivalries accelerate calculus and thermodynamic discoveries?
• What drove brilliant minds to clash over electricity and continental drift?
• How did collaboration and patent office routines yield relativity?
• What human ambitions fueled the races for the atom and the genetic code?

1. Earths Place in the Cosmos

Astronomical understanding evolved from ancient geocentric models to precise heliocentric orbits through persistent observation and confrontation with dogma.

Ancient Models

Democritus and Leucippus postulated that matter is discontinuous and consists of uncuttable units called atoms alongside empty space. Seeking mechanistic explanations while discounting subjective sensory perception, the ancient materialist philosophers answered the fundamental question of divisibility by declaring that matter cannot be infinitely cut.

Democritus traveled extensively through Asia, Ethiopia, India, and Egypt, earning the title of the Laughing Philosopher in Abdera. His lifetime spanned from 460 BCE to 370 BCE.

Aristotle championed a continuous view of matter composed of elements and established a geocentric model of the universe. He rejected the idea of indivisible units, instead proposing that matter is made of fire, air, earth, water, and heavenly æther. His model placed a stationary spherical earth at the center of roughly fifty rotating crystalline spheres.

Aristotle lived from 384 to 322 BCE and established the Lyceum in Athens. His students were known as Peripatetic Philosophers because they walked while talking.

Aristarchus used trigonometric observations to propose an early heliocentric model where the earth orbits a much larger sun. By calculating that the sun was substantially larger than the earth, Aristarchus deduced that it made more sense for the smaller body to orbit the larger one, placing the sun at the center of the universe. Aristarchus lived from 310 BCE to 230 BCE.

Claudius Ptolemy formalized a complex geocentric system utilizing eccentric centers and epicycles to account for planetary retrograde motion. Ptolemy published the Almagest in 150 CE, which cataloged constellations and provided computational tables for heavenly bodies using circular orbits centered on larger orbital circles to explain counterintuitive west-to-east planet movements. Ptolemy lived from 90 CE to 168 CE in Alexandria, Egypt, as a Roman citizen and wrote his monumental work in Greek. His star catalog listed forty-eight constellations.

The Copernican Revolution

Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler progressively transformed astronomy from geocentric doctrine to precise elliptical heliocentric orbits. Nicolaus Copernicus lived from 1473 to 1543 and revived the sun-centered model. Tycho Brahe lived from 1546 to 1601 and gathered unprecedented naked-eye observational data using massive instruments. Johannes Kepler lived from 1571 to 1630 and ultimately abandoned circular orbits for ellipses after finding an eight minutes of arc discrepancy in Mars's orbit.

Tycho Brahe lost the bridge of his nose in a dark duel over a mathematical formula and wore a brass prosthetic nose for the rest of his life, while funding his Uraniborg observatory with five percent of Denmark's budget.

Galileo used the telescope to gather empirical evidence against Aristotelian cosmology, leading to a clash with the Roman Catholic Church. Galileo Galilei lived from 1564 to 1642. By observing moon craters, sunspots, and Jupiter's moons, Galileo demonstrated that celestial bodies are not perfect or exclusively orbiting Earth. His support for heliocentrism and provocative writing style brought him before the Inquisition. Galileo sold an initial spyglass to the Venetian Senate for lifetime faculty tenure at the University of Padua, and later used a twenty-power telescope to discover new celestial phenomena.

2. Scientific Rivalries and Heat Dynamics

Personal disputes and intense isolation drove monumental breakthroughs in physics, calculus, and the nature of heat.

When Cambridge was shut down to minimize the spread of the Great Plague, Isaac Newton returned to Woolsthorpe. He spent almost two years advancing mathematics and physics without formal academic distractions.

During the university shutdown, Newton invented fluxions equivalent to calculus, formulated three general laws of motion, conceived universal gravitation, and systematized the procedure by which science operates. The Great Plague killed 25 percent of London's population.

Newtonian Conflicts

Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke engaged in a thirty-year semipublic feud over scientific priority and optics. Hooke criticized Newton's published theories on light and color, claiming portions were stolen from him.

When Newton published his theories, Hooke attacked them. After Hooke died and Newton became president of the Royal Society, Newton was accused of destroying a portrait of Hooke.

The independent development of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz triggered an acrimonious priority dispute. Newton developed calculus using fluxions in 1666, while Leibniz developed it using differential notation in 1674.

Nicolas Fatio de Duillier referred to Leibniz as the second inventor of calculus, infuriating Leibniz. This led to altered dates on prior papers and a fierce debate until Leibniz died in 1714.

The Bernoulli family produced profound mathematical and scientific discoveries amidst intense internal family conflict. Nicolaus had ten children born to him starting in 1623. Johann Bernoulli posed the brachistochrone problem with a six-month deadline as a challenge to test mathematicians and secretly test Isaac Newton.

Daniel Bernoulli formulated the energy conservation principle for flowing fluids in Hydrodynamica. The principle states that pressure changes with velocity.

In a curveball, a spinning baseball drags air on one side to increase its velocity, creating lower pressure on that side and causing the ball's path to curve.

You can test fluid dynamics with simple items:

• Hold two sheets of paper vertically in front of your face.
• Blow between the sheets and watch to see if they move toward or away from each other.

The Chemistry of Heat

Antoine Lavoisier dismantled the phlogiston theory of combustion through rigorous quantitative measurements. He published Reflexions sur le phlogistique in 1777, but was guillotined in 1794 during the French Revolution.

Lavoisier and his wife reportedly burned Georg Ernst Stahl's books in celebration after his quantitative experiments disproved phlogiston.

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, disproved the caloric theory by demonstrating that mechanical friction produces a limitless supply of heat. He published an experimental inquiry concerning the source of the heat which is excited by friction in 1798.

3. Elements, Current Wars, and Drifting Continents

Systematic classification of matter, battles over electrical distribution, and the mapping of ocean floors revolutionized chemistry and earth sciences.

The Periodic Table

John Dalton put atomic theory on a solid footing by proposing that atoms differ in size and mass and combine in fixed proportions. Dalton suggested that elements are collections of identical atoms and that atoms combine in fixed proportions of small, whole numbers, forming the law of multiple proportions.

Dalton identified hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus along with their relative masses based largely on gas measurements. John Dalton was born in 1766, and he presented his paper on relative weights to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1803.

Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table of elements based on atomic weights and successfully predicted undiscovered elements by leaving gaps. Mendeleev arranged elements on cards by atomic weights and typical properties, demonstrating a periodic dependence of properties. When an element did not fit a group based on its chemical properties, he boldly skipped a space, predicting missing elements like scandium, germanium, and gallium.

Mendeleev spent about six weeks experimenting with arrangements of elements in 1869. Scandium was discovered in 1879, matching Mendeleev's prediction.

Mendeleev skipped the space after calcium because titanium matched carbon-silicon group properties rather than boron-aluminum, successfully predicting scandium.

Henry Moseley discovered that the atomic number—the number of protons in the nucleus—is a more fundamental guide to elemental properties than atomic mass. By shooting high-energy electrons at different metals and measuring the unique frequency of emitted X-rays, Moseley proved that the positive charge in the atomic nucleus increases by regular steps from one element to the next.

Moseley studied X-ray frequencies in 1913. He placed argon before potassium in the periodic table because its atomic number is 18 while potassium's is 19, resolving discrepancies caused by atomic mass.

The Current War

Thomas Edison pioneered practical direct current electrical generation and incandescent lighting but faced severe transmission limitations. Edison developed an incandescent lamp using a carbonized thread filament in an evacuated bulb and built a direct current generation and distribution system. However, transmission losses meant customers had to be located within a mile of the generator.

Edison set up his lighting system for public viewing at Menlo Park in 1879. He opened the Pearl Street Station in Manhattan in September 1882, powering 2,400 bulbs in the financial district.

Nikola Tesla invented the alternating current induction motor and a multi-phase system that solved the distance and transmission efficiency problems of direct current. Tesla realized that an electric motor could operate using alternating current without a commutator if it utilized a rotating magnetic field, allowing electricity to be stepped up to high voltages for long-distance transmission and stepped down safely for use.

Tesla worked briefly for Edison before resigning and eventually partnering with George Westinghouse, whose AC system successfully lit the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

To discredit Westinghouse's AC system as a dangerous killing current, Edison's allies like Harold P. Brown staged public animal electrocutions and lobbied for the use of alternating current in capital punishment. In August 1890, convicted felon William Kemmler was executed using alternating current in the first electrocution at Auburn Prison in New York. The generator voltage used in the execution of William Kemmler reached 1,000 to 1,400 volts, with an initial duration of current applied during Kemmler's execution lasting 17 seconds.

Plate Tectonics

Alfred Wegener proposed the continental drift hypothesis, suggesting that modern continents were once joined in a supercontinent called Pangea before drifting apart. Wegener noted matching fossilized plants and animals, geological formations, and ancient tropical climates across separate oceans, arguing that continents drifted across the earth's face. His theory was initially rejected by geologists due to a lack of a viable mechanism.

Wegener first mentioned his hypothesis in lectures in 1912, and he published his book The Origin of Continents and Oceans in 1915, proposing that lands were joined in Pangea 300 million years ago.

The theory of continental drift was revived and transformed into plate tectonics after post-WWII ocean-floor magnetic mapping revealed alternating striped patterns. Using fluxgate magnetometers to map ocean-floor magnetic fields, researchers found symmetric magnetic stripes indicating that the ocean floor was spreading and recording reversals of the earth's magnetic field, confirming that tectonic plates ride on mantle currents.

Victor Vacquier directed a Scripps Research Institute program using surplus naval magnetometers during the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958. The average interval between reversals of the earth's magnetic field is 200,000 years.

4. Einstein and the Miracle Year

Albert Einstein lived from 1879 to 1955. His family background combined practical commerce from his father Hermann and artistic intellectualism from his mother Pauline Koch. Hermann Einstein lived from 1847 to 1902. Pauline Koch Einstein lived from 1858 to 1920.

The Einstein Brothers company successfully supplied lighting for the 1885 Munich Oktoberfest before facing business pressure from Siemens's alternating-current systems.

Albert Einstein developed revolutionary physical theories from a modest patent office routine supported by critical academic alliances.

Medical student Max Talmud introduced young Einstein to advanced science and philosophy, triggering a major crisis in his religious views. Max Talmud lived from 1869 to 1941. Reading Popular Books on Natural Science caused Einstein to reject biblical stories and embrace freethinking.

Early Influences

Einstein's time boarding with the Winteler family in Aarau fostered his independent thinking and inspired foundational thought experiments about relativity. He utilized mental simulations called Gedankenexperiments to visualize physical phenomena.

Einstein tried to visualize what it would be like to move at the speed of light and observe a neighboring light wave, questioning if it would appear as a frozen light beam.

Classmate Marcel Grossmann played a critical role in supporting Einstein's education through meticulous note-taking and securing him a patent office job. Marcel Grossmann lived from 1878 to 1936. Einstein achieved an intermediate exam score of 5.7 out of 6 at the ETH. Marcel Grossmann achieved 5.6 on the same exam.

Marcel Grossmann's father connected Einstein with Friedrich Haller, the head of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, leading to Einstein's employment.

To pursue deep scientific and philosophical discussions, Einstein and his peers formed an informal intellectual group called the Olympia Academy. Together with Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, Einstein met regularly in Bern to read and discuss works by major philosophers and scientists.

Annus Mirabilis

Working as a patent examiner provided Einstein with a stable income while leaving him mental space to develop revolutionary physics theories. Employed as a technical expert third class starting in 1902, Einstein quickly mastered the evaluation of patent applications. He used his spare moments at his desk drawer—jokingly called his Department of Theoretical Physics—to work on fundamental physics.

Patent Office director Friedrich Haller helped train Einstein in blueprint reading after hiring him in June 1902.

During his miraculous year of 1905, designated as the Annus Mirabilis, Einstein published four groundbreaking papers in Annalen der Physik that fundamentally reshaped modern physics. These works explained the photoelectric effect through light quanta, analyzed molecular dimensions via liquid viscosity and Brownian motion, formulated special relativity by abolishing the absolute æther, and established mass-energy equivalence.

Einstein's paper on special relativity, titled On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, removed the need for an absolute reference frame for space and time while keeping the speed of light constant. His doctoral thesis was 17 pages long. The mass-energy equivalence formula is $E = mc^2$.

5. Relativity, Quantum Debates, and Activism

General relativity triumphed through mathematical collaboration and solar eclipse validation, while Einstein engaged in deep quantum debates and social activism.

General Relativity

To generalize his theory of relativity beyond special cases, you see that Einstein required advanced non-Euclidean geometry and enlisted the help of his mathematician friend Marcel Grossmann. When Einstein was stuck in Zurich and Prague without a clue for generalized geometry, he pleaded with Grossmann for help, leading to their partnership where Grossmann handled the complex mathematics. Encouraged by David Hilbert to work on generalizing field equations, Emmy Noether proved her first theorem, which elegantly demonstrated that Einstein's general relativity automatically included the conservation of energy and momentum without requiring laborious calculations.

General relativity predicted that starlight passing close to the sun would be deflected by 1.74 seconds of arc due to space-time curvature, twice the prediction under Newtonian gravity. Newton predicted a 0.86 second of arc shift. Arthur Eddington and E. Cottingham went to Principe while Andrew Crommelin and Charles Davidson went to Sobral, Brazil, capturing data that made Einstein a worldwide celebrity overnight. Their analyzed data yielded a shift of 1.79 seconds, successfully supporting the theory using four-inch-diameter models for telescopes along the path of totality.

Later Debates and Activism

Einstein strongly rejected the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics championed by Niels Bohr and others, insisting that fundamental reality must be governed by strict cause and effect. During their debates, Einstein would invent thought experiments to challenge quantum mechanics, and Bohr would meticulously dismantle them, occasionally arguing so intensely while riding a streetcar that they missed their stops repeatedly. After years of political hurdles, delays, and opposition from figures like Philip Lenard due to prejudices against his Jewish heritage and pacifism, the Nobel committee awarded Einstein the 1921 prize in 1922. The entire financial award was directed to Mileva as part of their divorce settlement, amounting to ten times an average professor's annual salary and allowing her to purchase three apartment houses in Zurich.

Driven by rising anti-Semitism, the aftermath of World War I, and Kurt Blumenfeld's influence, Einstein became a vocal supporter of Zionism while remaining opposed to general nationalism. Kurt Blumenfeld visited Einstein in early 1919, prompting Einstein to articulate his view that being a Jew made him a supporter of Zionist efforts even as an opponent of nationalism under the Balfour Declaration. Einstein actively opposed racial segregation and white supremacy in the United States, viewing racism as a disease of white society rather than a flaw of colored minorities. When Marian Anderson was turned away from the Nassau Inn in Princeton due to her color, Einstein invited her to stay at his home at 115 Mercer Street, a practice she repeated during every subsequent visit, and traveled 60 miles from Princeton to Lincoln University in 1946 to denounce racial segregation publicly.

6. Cosmic Distances and the Expanding Universe

Astronomical measurements of Cepheid variables and galactic recession velocities proved that the universe consists of countless external galaxies and is expanding.

Edwin Powell Hubble was born in Missouri in 1889-1953 as the third of eight children. He excelled in high school sports at Wheaton Central High School, where Superintendent Russell announced class honors by telling Hubble he had never seen him study for ten minutes and awarding him a scholarship to the University of Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago, became an amateur heavyweight boxer, and was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship from Illinois in 1910 to study jurisprudence at Queen's College, Oxford, where he read 300 books on a wide range of subjects. After teaching high school and coaching basketball, he returned to astronomy at the Yerkes Observatory.

Mapping the Cosmos

Henrietta Swan Leavitt lived in 1868-1921 and worked as a computer at the Harvard College Observatory analyzing photographic plates of the Magellanic Clouds, part of what critics called Pickering's Harem. Henrietta Swan Leavitt analyzed the Magellanic Clouds and discovered 1,777 new variable stars. She found that the pulsation period of Cepheid variables is directly related to intrinsic luminosity, leading to the period-luminosity relation. In 1913, Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung used the period-luminosity relationship to measure vast distances.

At a 1920 meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis squared off in a debate titled "The Scale of the Universe." Shapley argued for a massive Milky Way with globular clusters and the sun far from the center, while Curtis defended smaller dimensions and Island Universes. In October 1923, Hubble used the one-hundred-inch telescope at Mount Wilson to find a variable star in M31, the Andromeda Nebula. Hubble calculated its distance at 1 million light-years, proving that spiral nebulae exist outside the Milky Way. Upon receiving Hubble's letter announcing the discovery, Harlow Shapley remarked to Cecilia Payne, "Here is the letter that destroyed my universe."

Galactic Expansion

V. M. Slipher lived in 1875-1969 and applied the Doppler effect at the Lowell Observatory using a spectrograph to measure radial velocities of faint nebulae. At the 1914 American Astronomical Society meeting, V. M. Slipher presented his spectrographic observations of nebulae to a standing ovation among the 48 number of papers read at the astronomical meeting. A blue shift indicates an approaching source, while a red shift indicates a receding source.

In 1929, Hubble published "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae," establishing Hubble's law. He combined distance measurements with radial velocities measured by Milt Humason using improved spectrographs. Albert Einstein visited Mount Wilson in 1931, announced the removal of his cosmological constant from his equations, and praised Hubble's work.

7. Nuclear Physics and the Race for DNA

The discovery of the neutron and nuclear fission led directly to the atomic age, while X-ray crystallography unlocked the structure of DNA.

James Chadwick demonstrated the existence of the neutron in 1932. This neutral and massive particle possessed no electrical charge and could penetrate atomic nuclei without repulsion. Chadwick won the Nobel Prize in 1935.

During World War I, Chadwick worked in an internment camp in Ruhleben using commercially available toothpaste containing radioactive material and gum wrappers with aluminum foil to run experiments.

The Atomic Bomb

Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch explained nuclear fission in 1939 using Bohr's liquid drop model and Einstein's mass-energy equivalence. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had found barium among the products of uranium neutron bombardment.

Meitner and Frisch discussed the unexpected presence of barium while walking and skiing in the snow during the Christmas holiday in 1932, drawing diagrams on small pieces of paper.

Leo Szilard enlisted Albert Einstein to write a warning letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. Fearing that Nazi Germany could develop a powerful bomb through a uranium chain reaction, this letter created the Advisory Committee on Uranium and the Manhattan Project.

Szilard and Eugene Wigner got lost while driving to Long Island and had to ask a seven-year-old boy for directions to Einstein's vacation house.

Enrico Fermi and his team constructed Chicago Pile-1 in 1942 inside a squash court at the University of Chicago. The reactor used 6 tons of uranium pellets, 34 tons of uranium oxide, and 400 tons of graphite blocks.

On December 2, 1942, after the last control rod was withdrawn, the pile went critical and sustained a chain reaction for twenty-eight minutes, prompting the coded message that the Italian navigator had landed in the New World.

Szilard organized petitions and met with government officials to advocate against the unannounced military use of atomic bombs on Japan. President Truman directed that the atomic bomb should target military objectives and soldiers rather than women and children, culminating in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The Hiroshima bomb carried the destructive power of 16000 tons of TNT and killed 70000 to 80000 people instantly.

The Double Helix

John Turton Randall established a biophysics research unit at King's College London in 1950. Randall assembled a research group that included Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin to investigate DNA.

Raymond Gosling used part of a condom to seal a hydrogen-filled X-ray camera to produce sharper diffraction pictures of DNA.

Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling captured Photo 51. Franklin separated DNA into A and B forms and methodically analyzed their properties.

Maurice Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson without Franklin's permission, which instantly revealed the helical structure to Watson and catalyzed the final model-building phase in 1953.

James Watson and Francis Crick successfully built the physical double-helix model of DNA using structural insights and base-pairing rules. Linus Pauling had erroneously announced a three-chain protein-like structure for DNA, prompting Watson and Crick to race against him and complete the correct model in early March 1953.

Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. James Watson's auctioned Nobel medal fetched 4.8 million dollars in 2014.

8. Genomics and High-Speed Sequencing

A genome is the complete set of DNA of an organism, containing all its chromosomes and genes necessary to build and run that organism. Hans Winkler coined the term genome in 1920 by combining gene and chromosome.

Advanced shotgun sequencing and automated capillary machines enabled the rapid mapping of complete genomes and sparked intense commercial and intellectual property races.

J. Craig Venter used automated sequencers to sequence complementary DNA. In June 1991, Venter reported in Science that he had identified about 330 genes active in the human brain. Wallace Steinberg funded Venter with seventy million dollars to establish The Institute for Genomic Research and Human Genome Sciences.

Sequencing Innovations

Hamilton Smith proposed shotgun sequencing to bypass traditional mapping.

• Shear the DNA into thousands of random-sized pieces using sound waves;
• Sequence the pieces individually using automated machines;
• Store all sequence data in a computer;
• Use specially written software to find overlaps and stitch the pieces together on the mathematical basis of pattern recognition.

TIGR successfully sequenced the entire genome of Haemophilus influenzae and Mycoplasma genitalium using this method.

The Human Genome Race

Mike Hunkapiller developed the ABI PRISM 3700 machine using thin, liquid-filled capillary tubes, which was about eight times faster than existing machines. Venter formed Celera to utilize these machines and algorithm scientists. Celera sequenced the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, consisting of 165 million base pairs and 13,600 genes, in less than four months.

On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton and UK prime minister Tony Blair jointly announced the completion of the genome sequence.

10 Key Ideas

1. Scientific progress is driven by human interactions, rivalries, and passions across centuries rather than cold algorithmic logic.
2. Astronomical understanding evolved from ancient geocentric models to precise heliocentric orbits through persistent observation and confrontation with dogma.
3. Personal disputes and intense isolation drove monumental breakthroughs in physics, calculus, and the nature of heat.
4. Systematic classification of matter, battles over electrical distribution, and the mapping of ocean floors revolutionized chemistry and earth sciences.
5. Albert Einstein developed revolutionary physical theories from a modest patent office routine supported by critical academic alliances.
6. General relativity triumphed through mathematical collaboration and solar eclipse validation, while Einstein engaged in deep quantum debates and social activism.
7. Astronomical measurements of Cepheid variables and galactic recession velocities proved that the universe consists of countless external galaxies and is expanding.
8. The discovery of the neutron and nuclear fission led directly to the atomic age, while X-ray crystallography unlocked the structure of DNA.
9. Advanced shotgun sequencing and automated capillary machines enabled the rapid mapping of complete genomes and sparked intense commercial and intellectual property races.