The Missing Link

February 11, 2006

A Matter of Perspective

I've just begun H.G. Wells two volume Outline of History. He begins by noting that for many centuries man believed himself to live on a flat earth under a domed sky. "The Babylonian and Chinese astronomers, after many centuries of star observation, still believed that the earth was flat."

The Greeks first perceived a spherical world, but still imagined a very small universe, where the sun, the moon and the stars rotated around a fixed earth at the center of everything.

Only in the 15th Century did Copernicus guess that the sun is our anchor and not vice versa.

Here H.G. Wells dazzles:

It was only with the development of the telescope by Galileo in the opening of the seventeenth century that the views of Copernicus became widely accepted.

The development of the telescope marks, indeed, a new phase in human thought, a new vision of life. It is an extraordinary thing that the Greeks, with their lively and penetrating minds, never realized the possibilities of either microscope or telescope. They made no use of the lens. Yet they lived in a world in which glass had been known and had been made beautiful for hundreds of years; they had about them glass flasks and bottles, through which they must have caught glimpses of things distorted and enlarged. But science in Greece was pursued by philosophers in an aristocratic spirit, men who, with a few such exceptions as the ingenious Archimedes and Hiero, were too proud to learn from such mere artisans as jewellers and metal- and glass-workers.

Ignorance is the first penalty of pride. The philosopher had no mechanical skill and the artisan had no philisophical education, and it was left for another age, more than a thousand years later, to bring together glass and the astronomer.

In our times interdisciplinary studies are quite common. Yet this historical anecdote is nevertheless a useful warning as some of our academic disciplines become so increasingly specialized that we risk not being able to see the universe for the stars.

Posted by Conor at February 11, 2006 03:16 PM