The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [134]
Marx was impressed by Darwin’s thesis that the struggle for existence was at the root of improvement. For Marx, the social equivalent lay in the class struggle towards revolution. Darwin removed the supernatural, teleoLogical meaning of existence, just as Marx did. Man was able to modify history once he had understood that history obeyed laws just as nature did. Progress was only possible through belief in these views. Change was at the root of human development.
Thanks to Darwin, the modern view of the human condition today is essentially the same, on both sides of the ideological border. The disagreements are not about whether society can progress, but about the methods to be used. Both sides are equally materialist. On both sides man is alone with the problem of his future. Life is, in the literal sense, what we make it.
The microchip, which will bring perhaps the greatest social revolution in history, uses the behaviour of electrons to act as an immensely complex set of switches. It owes its existence to early experiments in magnetism.
Making Waves
For two hundred years after the publication of the Principia in 1687, Newton’s cosmology provided people with a universe that was comfortable and reliable within which to work and think. In his description of planets moving according to the same immutable laws which applied on earth, Newton showed that the natural state of society was a reasonable, stable, unrevolutionary one, in which, while each member knew his place in the functional scheme of things, individual enterprise would bring reward so long as it remained within the laws which governed men just as surely as they governed the stars. Newton had, after all, shown that change was produced by the application of lawful force which moved planets in orbit. The same might be achieved by ambitious humans who applied the laws of change to their own condition.
Newton’s universe was an eminently common-sense place. Space was homogeneous and absolute, existing independently of whatever might be within it. Its structure was rigid and timeless. Of it, Newton said: ‘Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.’
Space was the unchangeable container of matter. Matter moved within it. Without space, which permitted difference in the position of an object, there could be no displacement, which was a principle of motion. Objects could only be identified as being in different positions because of their juxtaposition as they lay outside each other’s physical boundaries.
Space was also infinite. According to Euclid, if a line were drawn between any two points it could extend infinitely, since it was always capable of extension. If there were a barrier to this extension, it would have to be a barrier existing in something. The ‘beyond the barrier’would, therefore, consist of more space.
Space was infinitely divisible, because no matter how close two things were, if they were not the same object there had to be space between them. Space was inert. What happened in space concerned only matter, which of course it preexisted as a medium in which matter could exist.
Time was a similarly straightforward concept. Like space, it too was empty. It was the same everywhere. It was also infinite, since there had always to be a ‘before’and an ‘after’. Like space, it did not interact with what it contained. Change happened in time. Time, like space, did not imply change or motion. The movement of time was independent of the movement of matter. Events, which were the physical content of time, were as unrelated to it as objects were to space.
Time, too, was infinitely divisible. No interval was so small that it could not be observed. Subjective views of time were irrelevant, since at whatever rate the passage