Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers: Eight Scientific Rivalries That Changed the World

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From the laws of gravity to cyberspace, a brilliant examination of some of the most momentous scientific advancements and the human minds and competition behind them.

As George Bernard Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Like other creative geniuses, scientists have achieved breakthroughs as a result of nonrational motives -- ...

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Overview

From the laws of gravity to cyberspace, a brilliant examination of some of the most momentous scientific advancements and the human minds and competition behind them.

As George Bernard Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Like other creative geniuses, scientists have achieved breakthroughs as a result of nonrational motives -- notably the desire to best a rival. In this fascinating, unique book, Michael White paints an intimate portrait of several of the world's greatest minds over the past four centuries and explores eight all-too-human rivalries, revealing how each fired scientific endeavor and resulted in extraordinary discoveries.

White demonstrates how rivalries have evolved from scientist against scientist to modern competition between nations and corporations. Enlightening and entertaining, here is a rich history of intectual achievement that elevates White to the ranks of the best popular science writers, including Dava Sobel, Timothy Ferris, and Richard Rhodes.

FAMOUS RIVALRIES

The Calculus -- Isaac Newton versus Gottfried Leibniz

Oxygen -- Antoine Lavoisier versus Joseph Priestly

Evolution -- Charles Darwin versus Richard Owen

Electric Current -- Nikola Tesla versus Thomas Edison

The Atom Bomb -- The Allies versus the Axis Powers

DNA -- Francis Crick and James Watson versus Linus Pauling versus Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins

The Race to the Moon -- The United States versus the Soviet Union

Cyberspace -- Bill Gates versus Larry Ellison

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael White is the author of more than a dozen books and is a consultant for the Discovery Channel series The Science of the Impossible.

"...The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man..."

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Editorial Reviews

Wired
Michael White...enriches each story with analysis, solid scientific explanation, and detailed biographies of each combatant...accessible...engaging.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
"Scientific discovery is based upon the excitement of argument... the overwhelming effect [of which] has been to propel science forward." In several of the eight rivalries White (Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, etc.) compares in this captivating work, the competition is more than personal: the fate of nations (e.g., the Allies versus the Axis powers in the battle to develop the atom bomb) and of industry (Thomas Edison versus Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse in the fight to harness electricity; Bill Gates and Microsoft versus Larry Ellison and Oracle in the struggle to dominate cyberspace) hang in the balance. While each story could stand on its own, White's skill at interweaving important themes across time and among rivalries brings the whole work together. For example, less than a century after Galileo encouraged scientific experiment and exchange, Isaac Newton stymied progress by keeping his discovery of calculus to himself. When he learned that a young German mathematician named Gottfried Leibniz had reached the same conclusions, Newton was furious. Charles Darwin, on the other hand, realized that science could only benefit from cooperation among its practitioners and from public awareness. Just before releasing his 1859 masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, to the world, Darwin befriended a young scientist named Alfred Wallace, who was also working on a theory of evolution. Together, they published the first scientific paper on the subject. Mixing intrigue, espionage and human drama, White has created an arresting narrative that should engage readers beyond fans of popular science. 15-city NPR campaign. (Mar. 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A solid account of some memorable squabbles reminds readers that scientists are as prone to turf wars and ego trips as any other mortals. British author White, whose credits include biographies of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, begins with a quick overview of early scientific controversies, in particular the conflict between astronomers and the Catholic Church. He then examines eight particular rivalries. Newton, who quarreled with anyone who questioned his preeminence, saved his greatest venom for Leibnitz, who seems to have discovered calculus at almost the same time as his English rival. In the long run, Leibnitz's clearer notation became the standard. The chemists Lavoisier and Priestly backed rival theories of combustion. Priestly actually discovered oxygen, but insisted on interpreting it in terms of the outmoded phlogiston theory. It was the Frenchman's broader (and ultimately, correct) theories that led to the development of chemistry as an exact science. Similarly, Darwin's opponents, most of whom opposed evolution on religious rather than scientific grounds, lost the argument mainly because their theoretical position was in effect a dead end for the biological sciences. Sometimes being right isn't enough; Tesla won his argument (as hotly contested as any) with Edison over the choice between alternating and direct current for distribution of electricity, but his complete lack of worldly acumen made him a marginal figure. In modern times, White also looks at the races to build the nuclear bomb and to find the structure of DNA, as well as the ongoing commercial competition between Bill Gates and his rivals. In each case, he looks on the bright side, making the argumentthatcompetition spurs progress and forces the scientists involved to work at their best. Sometimes clumsily written, but an interesting look at the human element in science.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780380806133
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 11/28/2002
  • Series: Harper Perennial
  • Edition description: 1ST
  • Pages: 448
  • Product dimensions: 5.30 (w) x 8.10 (h) x 1.14 (d)

Meet the Author

Michael White is the author of more than a dozen books and is a consultant for the Discovery Channel series The Science of the Impossible.
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Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Second Inventors Count for Nothing

Great men are like women, who never give up their lovers except with the utmost chagrin and mortal anger. And that, gentlemen, is where your opinions have got you.
— Caroline of Ansbach to Gottfried Leibniz
London, October 1711
The astronomer royal, john flamsteed, would have liked to run up the stairs of the Royal Society to punch Newton's nose, but gout prevented him. Instead, assisted by his servant, he slowly ascended the grand staircase and entered the meeting room where Newton was waiting for him.

In 1711, Sir Isaac Newton was the most famous scientist in the world. Knighted six years earlier, he was both scientific megalith and public servant, president of the Royal Society and master of the Royal Mint. The society he presided over was growing in power and influence, and only two months earlier it had moved into its first independent home, a beautiful town house in Crane Court, in the heart of the City of London.

With a public credo that served as one of the earliest models for cooperation between natural philosophers,* it was nevertheless a society of wealthy gentlemen who liked to argue. The Royal Society dedicated itself to: "the advancement of the knowledge of natural things and useful arts by experiments, to the glory of God the creator and for application to the good of mankind." In this it served science well, but many of the individuals who contributed to the life of the Royal Society despised one another, and some could barely bring themselves to sit in the same room as their scientific colleagues.

Newton andFlamsteed were just such individuals. They rarely spoke, and by 1711 each went out of his way to hinder the work of the other and to embarrass and humiliate the other whenever possible. Newton had summoned Flamsteed to Crane Court on this October afternoon as though the astronomer royal was an errant schoolboy, and Flamsteed had taken his time to appear there, deliberately antagonizing the president. Newton was charging Flamsteed with withholding data from his government-funded observatory and claimed that the astronomer should willingly share his findings with the scientific community. But this was merely the tail end of a dispute that had dragged on for almost two decades. Flamsteed knew that Newton merely wanted the data to include in his new edition of the Principia mathematica. Furthermore, the astronomer royal felt used, and believed he had been paid a pittance for a lifetime of dedicated effort, thanks in part to the powerful influence Newton exerted over decisions made throughout the scientific establishment.

In the grand first-floor Council Chamber, with its tall windows offering a view of the narrow courtyard beyond, Flamsteed settled himself carefully into a chair to face the president. He eyed him defiantly.

Newton immediately asked him if he had at last brought with him the required data. Flamsteed merely smiled and said he had not. Then, raising his voice, he added bitterly: "I was robbed of the fruits of my labours."

"We are then robbers of your labours?" Newton shouted back.1 Flamsteed, seething from years of what he believed to be ill treatment, could not restrain himself, and there followed one of the most furious rows the Royal Society had ever seen. As lesser figures huddled outside the doors to eavesdrop and the late October sun set in the west, Newton called Flamsteed "a puppy" and the astronomer royal shouted back that the sixty-nine-year-old Sir Isaac was an "abominable thief." They argued for hours. Flamsteed claimed Newton was trying to acquire data from his observatory by illicit means, and Newton retaliated that he had royal permission to obtain such information. After the two had exhausted themselves, Flamsteed stormed out to his personal kingdom at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, defiant and unbowed, and Newton turned to searching for new schemes to bend the astronomer's will to his own.

Although this was one of the more dramatic episodes in Newton's long succession of clashes with other scientists of his day, it was neither the most heartfelt nor the most protracted. This dubious honor goes to the three-decade-long dispute between Britain's greatest scientist and his European counterpart, the "Continental Newton," Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, over who could claim priority for the invention of a mathematical technique called the calculus. But to understand how this conflict arose, as well as its significance for the evolution of science, we must first look at the characters of the two men at the heart of the battle and the social climate that led to their clash.Isaac newton was an only child born on Christmas Day 1642 in the tiny village of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire. His father had died before Isaac's birth, and his mother was left to run the family's small farm. They were not a wealthy family but lived well for the time, approximately a middle-income, home-owning family today. In fact, young Isaac's life could have been idyllic except that when he was three years old his mother, Hannah, decided to remarry, and the boy was left in the care of his elderly grandparents in the Woolsthorpe manor house that had been the family home for four generations.

This traumatized Newton. Years later he would write of his hatred for his stepfather, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, who at sixty-three was more than thirty years older than Newton's mother. Psychologists and historians have long pondered Newton's writings in his private notebooks and pointed to evidence that, as a young man at Cambridge University, he still cherished dreams of killing Smith and his mother for what they had done to him. He spewed bile onto the page, bile infected with contempt and hatred for his half siblings, the three children Hannah bore Smith before his death eight years after their marriage.

In a confessional account now known as the Fitzwilliam Notebook and started soon after Newton began his degree, Newton listed his sins, which included "threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them" and "wishing death and hoping it to some."

Newton's distress is understandable. Smith showed little interest in his stepson and insisted his wife devote her energies to her new family. From Isaac's perspective, his mother had simply been taken from him. The boy must have assumed he had done something terribly wrong to precipitate her unexpected departure, Isaac grew confused further by her short-lived and infrequent visits and unannounced disappearances. But what is both striking and pertinent to his later behavior toward his contemporaries is that time seems to have exacerbated his pain. These notebooks prove that, rather than gain emotional distance from the events of his childhood, over the years he merely calcified his bitterness.

Of Newton's later epoch-making genius little could be seen from his earliest years. Among his contemporaries at the king's school in the largest town of the area, Grantham, he was renowned for making models of windmills and lanterns, for kites and sundials, but for the most part he was viewed as a morose character who did not excel academically until he was about thirteen or fourteen years old. The story goes that one day on the way to school, the class bully punched Isaac in the stomach. Enraged, Newton challenged him to a fight after school. Although the other boy was much larger, Newton won the fight, apparently dragging the boy along the ground before scraping his rival's face roughly across a stone wall. Significantly, the one who had started the trouble was a place higher than Newton in the school academic ratings. As the boy lay nursing his bloodied nose, Newton leaned into his face and declared that he would not rest until he had not only overtaken him but become the best pupil in the school. And he stuck to his word. Within a year Newton was the star pupil and the apple of Headmaster Henry Stokes's eye.

How much of this is elaborated and how much is truth is not so important as the fact that this event seems to have marked a turning point in Newton's life. From this time on he relished study and could not be drawn away from his books. This greatly angered his mother, who had returned to manage the farm after Smith's death, when Newton was eleven. She saw nothing of value in academic matters and wanted her eldest son to learn the ways of the farmer so he could someday take over the estate.

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Table of Contents


Acknowledgments
The Long Road to Reason
1: Second Inventors Count for Nothing
2: The Fanatic and the Tax Collector
3: Of Monkeys and Men
4: The Battle of the Currents
5: Of Atom Bombs and Human Beings
6: The Race for the Prize
7: Reaching for the Moon
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