The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [0]
Copyright © 1985 by London Writers Ltd.
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First eBook Edition: November 2009
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ISBN: 978-0-316-09191-6
Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 The Way We Are
2 In the Light of the Above
3 Point of View
4 Matter of Fact
5 Infinitely Reasonable
6 Credit Where It’s Due
7 What the Doctor Ordered
8 Fit to Rule
9 Making Waves
10 Worlds Without End
Bibliography
Picture Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
So many members of academic faculties have given invaluable assistance in the writing of this book that it is regrettably impossible for me to express my gratitude to them all individually. I hope they will forgive me if I make mention in particular of Dr Alistair Crombie, of Trinity College, Oxford, who was especially generous with both his time and his unequalled knowledge.
I should like to thank Penny Fairfax, Bettina Lerner and Jay Ferguson for their meticulous assistance with research, as well as the television production team who worked so hard to make possible the series of programmes associated with this book: Richard Reisz, John Lynch, Martin Hughes-Games, Katharine Everett, Maralyn Lister, Dorothy Prior, Brian Hall, Ian Stone, John Else, Sarah Carr and last but far from least, my hardworking and talented assistant, Veronica Thorne.
Juliet Brightmore, Angela Dyer and Robert Updegraff put the book together, in trying circumstances, with the flair and quality for which they are justly known.
My wife, incredibly, tolerated it all for over three years.
JAMES BURKE
London 1984
Preface
You are what you know. Fifteenth-century Europeans ‘knew’ that the sky was made of closed concentric crystal spheres, rotating around a central earth and carrying the stars and planets. That ‘knowledge’ structured everything they did and thought, because it told them the truth. Then Galileo’s telescope changed the truth.
As a result, a hundred years later everybody ‘knew’ that the universe was open and infinite, working like a giant clock. Architecture, music, literature, science, economics, art, politics - everything - changed, mirroring the new view created by the change in the knowledge.
Today we live according to the latest version of how the universe functions. This view affects our behaviour and thought, just as previous versions affected those who lived with them. Like the people of the past, we disregard phenomena which do not fit our view because they are ‘wrong’ or outdated. Like our ancestors, we know the real truth.
At any time in the past, people have held a view of the way the universe works which was for them similarly definitive, whether it was based on myths or research. And at any time, that view they held was sooner or later altered by changes in the body of knowledge.
This book examines some of those moments of change, in order to show how the changes of view also generated major institutions or ways of thought which have since survived to become basic elements of modern life.
Each chapter begins at the point where the view is about to shift: in the eleventh century before the extraordinary discoveries by the Spanish Crusaders; in the Florentine economic boom of the fourteenth century before a new way of painting took Columbus to America; in the strange memory-world that existed before printing changed the meaning of ‘fact/’; with sixteenth-century gunnery developments that triggered the birth of modern science; in the early eighteenth century when hot English summers brought the Industrial Revolution; at the battlefield surgery stations of the French revolutionary armies where people first became statistics; with the nineteenth-century discovery of dinosaur fossils that led to the theory