The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [155]
The first analytical chemistry laboratory, in 1840, founded by Liebig in Giessen, Germany.
He found that each plant required a specific amount of alkaline material to neutralise its own acids, and that it would grow most where those alkalis were plentiful and least where they were scarce. Supplementing these minerals should therefore save soil from exhaustion and increase yields without damaging the natural cycle. Artificial fertiliser was the outcome of Liebig’s adaptation of economic theories to nature.
In the general structure of nature, whether the cosmos is seen to be static or the subject of linear or cyclic change, boundaries are indicated within which investigation of nature may be conducted. Research beyond those boundaries will be defined as useless, unnecessary, or counter-productive.
In the 1860s the new non-Euclidean geometry of Bernard Reimann and Hermann von Helmholtz appeared in Britain, where it met strong opposition because of the implications it held for the accepted view at the time of how reality could be described. The new geometry questioned the validity of Euclidean geometry as a true and accurate means of describing the universe. Non-Euclidean geometry described what the universe would look like, for instance, to two-dimensional beings living on the surface of a sphere. In their curved space the internal angles of a triangle would add up to more than 180 degrees. Indeed, the sum of the degrees would vary according to the curvature of the sphere.
This concept struck at the classical Newtonian view of a three-dimensional cosmos in which one of the absolutes was that it conformed to Euclidean geometry. To question this view, as non-Euclidean geometry did, was to question the received model of God’s creation. Disbelief in this would undermine Christian society, and, worse, limit the ability of science to represent the real world, as Euclidean geometry was supposed, uniquely, to do.
A similar limitation on research occurred as a result of James Maxwell’s demonstration in 1873 that light waves were not the only form of electromagnetic radiation and that there should be others. Heinrich Hertz discovered the existence of radio waves in 1887, and further investigation continued, culminating in the work of David Edward Hughes and Marconi at the end of the century, when the first radio transmissions crossed the Atlantic. Throughout this time scientists continued to try to identify radio emissions from the sun, without success.
However, in 1902 Max Planck’s theory of radiation appeared to show that all extra-terrestrial radio emissions would, in principle, be so weak as to be undetectable. This view was held so strongly that no further investigations were conducted for thirty years. Then, in 1930, the Bell Telephone Company commissioned one of their employees, Karl Jansky, to find out why the new car radios suffered from static. Jansky set up radio antennae, and heard a steady hiss coming from the direction of the Milky Way. Radio astronomy was born thirty years later, due to the power of the Planck structure of radiation behaviour.
The galaxy as viewed by a radio telescope, showing the strength of radiation increasing from blue through yellow to red along the plane of the galactic centre.
Limitations were also imposed by the political structure that reigned after the French Revolution. Mathematics and physics were deemed to be too closely allied to the elitist ideologies of the pre-revolutionary Enlightenment, and were banned. Chemistry, on the other hand, dealing as it did with such things as bleaching agents, gunpowder and general technical processes, was felt to be closer to the life of the common man, and as such received encouragement and financial