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Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World Part I Professor Steven L. Goldman THE TEACHING COMPANY ® PUBLISHED BY: THE TEACHING COMPANY 4151 Lafayette Center Drive, Suite 100 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-1232 1-800-TEACH-12 Fax—703-378-3819 www.teach12.com Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2007 Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company. ISBN 978-1-59803-305-2 Steven L. Goldman, Ph.D. Departments of Philosophy and History, Lehigh University Steven Goldman has degrees in physics (B.Sc., Polytechnic University of New York) and philosophy (M.A., Ph.D., Boston University) and, since 1977, has been the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Lehigh University. He has a joint appointment in the departments of philosophy and history because his teaching and research focus on the history, philosophy, and social relations of modern science and technology. Professor Goldman came to Lehigh from the philosophy department at the State College campus of Pennsylvania State University, where he was a co-founder of one of the first U.S. academic programs in science, technology, and society (STS) studies. For 11 years (1977–1988), he served as director of Lehigh’s STS program and was a co-founder of the National Association of Science, Technology and Society Studies. Professor Goldman has received the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award from Lehigh University and a Book-of-the-Year Award for a book he co- authored (another book was a finalist and translated into 10 languages). He has been a national lecturer for Sigma Xi—the scientific research society—and a national program consultant for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has served as a board member or as editor/advisory editor for a number of professional organizations and journals and was a co-founder of Lehigh University Press and, for many years, co-editor of its Research in Technology Studies series. Since the early 1960s, Professor Goldman has studied the historical development of the conceptual framework of modern science in relation to its Western cultural context, tracing its emergence from medieval and Renaissance approaches to the study of nature through its transformation in the 20th century. He has published numerous scholarly articles on his social-historical approach to medieval and Renaissance nature philosophy and to modern science from the 17th to the 20th centuries and has lectured on these subjects at conferences and universities across the United States, in Europe, and in Asia. In the late 1970s, the professor began a similar social-historical study of technology and technological innovation since the Industrial Revolution. In the 1980s, he published a series of articles on innovation as a socially driven process and on the role played in that process by the knowledge created by scientists and engineers. These articles led to participation in science and technology policy initiatives of the federal government, which in turn led to extensive research and numerous article and book publications through the 1990s on emerging synergies that were transforming relationships among knowledge, innovation, and global commerce. Professor Goldman is the author of two previous courses for The Teaching Company, Science in the Twentieth Century: A Social Intellectual Survey (2004) and Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It (2006). ©2007 The Teaching Company i Table of Contents Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World Part I Professor Biography.................................................................................... i Course Scope................................................................................................1 Lecture One Knowledge, Know-How, and Social Change.....4 Lecture Two Writing Makes Science Possible ......................13 Lecture Three Inventing Reason and Knowledge....................22 Lecture Four The Birth of Natural Science ............................31 Lecture Five Mathematics as the Order of Nature.................40 Lecture Six The Birth of Techno-Science............................50 Lecture Seven Universities Relaunch the Idea of Knowledge......................................59 Lecture Eight The Medieval Revolution in Know-How .........69 Lecture Nine Progress Enters into History .............................78 Lecture Ten The Printed Book—Gutenberg to Galileo ........87 Lecture Eleven Renaissance Painting and Techno-Science.......96 Lecture Twelve Copernicus Moves the Earth...........................105 Timeline....................................................................................................114 Glossary....................................................................................................119 Biographical Notes...................................................................................125 Bibliography.............................................................................................137 ii ©2007 The Teaching Company Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World Scope: It is easy to fall into one of two traps in dealing with ideas: either to dismiss them as abstractions and, thus, of less consequence than concrete things, such as swords, plowshares, and factories, or to glorify them as abstractions, as creative inventions of the mind, and thus, praiseworthy independent of any practical consequences whatsoever. Ideas are, nevertheless, as concrete as swords and plowshares because they are always tied to a concrete context of values, actions, beliefs, artifacts, and institutions out of which they arise and on which they may act. The concreteness of ideas derives from their being produced not only within a particular cultural context but out of that context, and it is because ideas are produced out of a particular context that ideas are able to influence and even to reshape that context. Treating ideas out of context, then, treating them as if their existence were, in principle, independent of any particular context, deeply distorts the reality of ideas and obscures their power to affect the world. Ideas and their contexts interact in complex, mutually influential ways such that the resultant effect on society of introducing a new idea is unpredictable. The evolution of the Internet from a modest computer networking project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense to a global technology transforming commerce, industry, politics, warfare, communication, education, entertainment, and research illustrates the unpredictability of the idea-social context interaction. The still-unfolding consequences of a small number of innovative ideas introduced to solve technical problems posed by enabling different kinds of computers in different locations to share information in real time continue to surprise, confound, and disturb us! Unpredictable though it may be, however, for 200 years now, the interaction of science and technology with society has been the primary driver of social and cultural change, first in the West, then globally and at an accelerating rate. During this period, social and personal values and relationships; social, political, and economic institutions; and cultural values and activities have changed and continue to change almost beyond recognition by our great-grandparents. What is it that has enabled such deep transformations of ways of life that have been entrenched for centuries and even millennia? Certainly, we can identify artifacts—the telephone, the automobile, airplanes, television, the computer— that appear to be causes of social change. But identifying artifacts does not reach down to the causes of innovation itself, nor does it expose those features of the sociocultural infrastructure that enable innovations to be causes of social change. Artifacts, in spite of their high visibility, are symptoms of causes at work; they are not themselves causes. It is not television or automobiles or the Internet that have changed society. Instead, forces at work within the network of relationships that we call society are causing television and automobiles and the Internet to take the changing forms that they take. One of these forces is ideas, explicitly in the case of new scientific ideas and implicitly in the case of ideas in the past that have been internalized selectively by society, thereby shaping both the sociocultural infrastructure and the lines along which it is vulnerable to change. The objective of this course is to explore scientific ideas that have played a formative role in determining the infrastructure of modern life through a process of sociocultural selection. But we shall interpret the term scientific idea broadly. There is, after all, no sharp distinction between ideas that are classified as scientific and those that are classified as philosophical or mathematical or even between scientific ideas and political, religious, or aesthetic ideas. Alfred North Whitehead, for example, famously linked the emergence of modern science in the Christian West to Judaeo-Christian monotheism: to the belief in a single, law-observing creator of the Universe. The idea that there are laws of nature at least seems to reflect a political idea, while there can
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