The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [204]
Some of the opponents of the US Constitution insisted that it would never work; that a republican form of government spanning a land with ‘such dissimilar climates, economies, morals, politics, and peoples,’ as Governor George Clinton of New York said, was impossible; that such a government and such a Constitution, as Patrick Henry of Virginia declared, ‘contradicts all the experience of the world’. The experiment was tried anyway.
Scientific findings and attitudes were common in those who invented the United States. The supreme authority, outranking any personal opinion, any book, any revelation, was - as the Declaration of Independence puts it - ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s GOD’. Dr Benjamin Franklin was revered in Europe and America as the founder of the new field of electrical physics. At the Constitutional Convention of 1789 John Adams repeatedly appealed to the analogy of mechanical balance in machines; others to William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. Late in life Adams wrote, ‘All mankind are chemists from their cradles to their graves... The Material Universe is a chemical experiment.’ James Madison used chemical and biological metaphors in The Federalist Papers. The American revolutionaries were creatures of the European Enlightenment which provides an essential background for understanding the origins and purpose of the United States.
‘Science and its philosophical corollaries,’ wrote the American historian Clinton Rossiter
were perhaps the most important intellectual force shaping the destiny of eighteenth-century America... Franklin was only one of a number of forward-looking colonists who recognized the kinship of scientific method and democratic procedure. Free inquiry, free exchange of information, optimism, self-criticism, pragmatism, objectivity - all these ingredients of the coming republic were already active in the republic of science that flourished in the eighteenth century.
Thomas Jefferson was a scientist. That’s how he described himself. When you visit his home at Monticello, Virginia, the moment you enter its portals you find ample evidence of his scientific interests - not just in his immense and varied library, but in copying machines, automatic doors, telescopes and other instruments, some at the cutting edge of early nineteenth-century technology. Some he invented, some he copied, some he purchased. He compared the plants and animals in America with Europe’s, uncovered fossils, used the calculus in the design of a new plough. He mastered Newtonian physics. Nature destined him, he said, to be a scientist, but there were no opportunities for scientists in pre-revolutionary Virginia. Other, more urgent, needs took precedence. He threw himself into the historic events that were transpiring around him. Once independence was won, he said, later generations could devote themselves to science and scholarship.
Jefferson was an early hero of mine, not because of his scientific interests (although they very much helped to mould his political philosophy), but because he, almost more than anyone else, was responsible for the spread of democracy throughout the world. The idea - breathtaking, radical and revolutionary at the time (in many places in the world, it still is) is that not kings, not priests, not big city bosses, not dictators, not a military cabal, not a de facto conspiracy