The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [154]
In our own day, the opposing ‘big bang’and ‘steady state’theories of cosmic origin influence scientific effort because they have generated sub-disciplines within physics and chemistry which are dedicated to finding supportive evidence for each view.
All cosmologies by their very form dictate the nature, purpose and, if any, the direction of movement of the universe. The epic work of Linnaeus in the middle of the eighteenth century to create a taxonomic structure in which all plants and animals would fit was spurred by a Newtonian desire to discover the Grand Design he believed was in the mind of God when He had started a clockwork universe at the time of Creation. By identifying and naming all forms of plants and animals in this unchanging and harmonious universe, thus laying bare the totality of God’s work, Linnaeus considered that he had completed the work of science.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the view had changed. According to the cosmic theory implicit in Darwin’s Origin of Species, the universe was dynamic and evolutionary, and contained organisms capable of change from one form to another. Some Darwinists, such as the German Ernst Haeckel, were of the opinion that organic forms of life had evolved from inorganic material early in the earth’s history.
In the third quarter of the century the eminent biologist Thomas Huxley found what he took to be a fossil in a mud sample taken from the sea-bed ten years earlier by the crew of the Challenger during the first round the world oceanographic survey. Obedient to Haeckel’s theory that at some time in the past there had been a life form which was half-organic, half-inorganic, Huxley identified the fossil as the missing organism and named it Bathybius haeckelii. Some years later, Bathybius was revealed to be an artifact created by the effect of the preservative fluid on the mud in the sample. In the interim, however, it had served to confirm a key element in a wide-ranging cosmic theory.
A major scientific step was taken in the field of agricultural chemistry in the nineteenth century, due also to the view that natural processes were dynamic and directional. In 1840 Baron John Justus von Liebig published the results of his work on plant and soil chemistry, which he based on a balance-sheet theory of nature. Ideas about agriculture had supposed the ultimate source of plant nutrition to be humus, of which the soil was presumed to be an inexhaustible source. Technical methods were developed to exploit this for maximum profit, on a field-by-field basis.
Liebig believed the contemporary economic theories of Adam Smith and others that the market was a natural regulator and that supply and demand were the balancing influences that kept an economy healthy. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, the balance of society was in danger on account of the exploding population generated by the Industrial Revolution. The increase in population threatened to overwhelm traditional methods of food production. Malthus had drawn attention to the disparity between the rates of increase of crop yield and the rate of expansion of the population:
Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in geometrical ratio… whereas the means of subsistence, under the circumstances the most favourable to industry, could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetic ratio.
The balance-sheet model in which Liebig believed led him to approach the problem of agricultural yield expecting to find a general mechanism of cyclic balance in the supply and demand of plants which was being disturbed by high-yield, intensive farming methods. He looked for an overall mechanism. He burned straw, hay and fruit, and discovered by analysing the ash that any area of land supporting any kind of vegetation produced the same quantity of