Book One: OUT OF THE DARK AGES
Emerging from the dark – The elegance of Copernicus – The Earth moves! – The orbits of the planets – Leonard Digges and the telescope – Thomas Digges and the infinite Universe – Bruno: a martyr for science? – Copernican model banned by Catholic Church – Vesalius: surgeon, dissector and grave-robber – Fallopio and Fabricius – William Harvey and the circulation of the blood
The movement of the planets – Tycho Brahe – Measuring star positions – Tycho’s supernova – Tycho observes comet – His model of the Universe – Johannes Kepler: Tycho’s assistant and inheritor – Kepler’s geometrical model of the Universe – New thoughts on the motion of planets: Kepler’s first and second laws – Kepler’s third law – Publication of the Rudolphine star tables – Kepler’s death
William Gilbert and magnetism – Galileo on the pendulum, gravity and acceleration – His invention of the ‘compass’ – His supernova studies – Lippershey’s reinvention of the telescope – Galileo’s developments thereon – Copernican ideas of Galileo judged heretical – Galileo publishes Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems – Threatened with torture, he recants – Galileo publishes Two New Sciences – His death
Book Two: THE FOUNDING FATHERS
René Descartes and Cartesian co-ordinates – His greatest works – Pierre Gassendi: atoms and molecules – Descartes’s rejection of the concept of a vacuum – Christiaan Huygens: his work on optics and the wave theory of light – Robert Boyle: his study of gas pressure – Boyle’s scientific approach to alchemy – Marcello Malpighi and the circulation of the blood – Giovanni Borelli and Edward Tyson: the increasing perception of animal (and man) as machine.
Robert Hooke: the study of microscopy and the publication of Micrographia – Hooke’s study of the wave theory of light – Hooke’s law of elasticity – John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley: cataloguing stars by telescope – Newton’s early life – The development of calculus – The wrangling of Hooke and Newton – Newton’s Principia Mathematica: the inverse square law and the three laws of motion – Newton’s later life – Hooke’s death and the publication of Newton’s Opticks
Edmond Halley – Transits of Venus – The effort to calculate the size of an atom – Halley travels to sea to study terrestrial magnetism – Predicts return of comet – Proves that stars move independently – Death of Halley – John Ray and Francis Willughby: the first-hand study of flora and fauna – Carl Linnaeus and the naming of species – The Comte de Buffon: Histoire Naturelle and thoughts on the age of the Earth – Further thoughts on the age of the Earth: Jean Fourier and Fourier analysis – Georges Couvier: Lectures in Comparative Anatomy; speculations on extinction – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: thoughts on evolution
7. Enlightened Science I: Chemistry catches up
The Enlightenment – Joseph Black and the discovery of carbon dioxide – Black on temperature – The steam engine: Thomas Newcomen, James Watt and the Industrial Revolution – Experiments in electricity: Joseph Priestley – Priestley’s experiments with gases – The discovery of oxygen – The chemical studies of Henry Cavendish: publication in the Philosophical Transactions – Water is not an element – The Cavendish experiment: weighing the Earth – Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier: study of air; study of the system of respiration – The first table of elements; Lavoisier renames elements; he publishes Elements of Chemistry – Lavoisier’s execution
8. Enlightened Science II: Progress on all fronts
The study of electricity: Stephen Gray, Charles Du Fay, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Coulomb – Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta and the invention of the electric battery – Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis: the principle of least action – Leonhard Euler: mathematical description of the refraction of light – Thomas Wright: speculations on the Milky Way – The discoveries of William and Caroline Herschel – John Michell – Pierre Simon Laplace, ‘The French Newton’: his Exposition – Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford): his life – Thompson’s thoughts on convection – His thoughts on heat and motion – James Hutton: the uniformitarian theory of geology
Charles Lyell: His life – His travels in Europe and study of geology – He publishes the Principles of Geology – Lyell’s thoughts on species – Theories of evolution: Erasmus Darwin and Zoonomia – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: the Lamarckian theory of evolution – Charles Darwin: his life – The voyage of the Beagle – Darwin develops his theory of evolution by natural selection – Alfred Russel Wallace – The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species
Humphry Davy’s work on gases; electrochemical research – John Dalton’s atomic model; first talk of atomic weights – Jöns Berzelius and the study of elements – Avogadro’s number – William Prout’s hypothesis on atomic weights – Friedrich Wöhler: studies in organic and inorganic substances – Valency – Stanislao Cannizzaro: the distinction between atoms and molecules – The development of the periodic table, by Mendeleyev and others – The science of thermodynamics – James Joule on thermodynamics – William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and the laws of thermodynamics – James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann: kinetic theory and the mean free path of molecules – Albert Einstein: Avogadro’s number, Brownian motion and why the sky is blue
The wave model of light revived – Thomas Young: his double-slit experiment – Fraunhofer lines – The study of spectroscopy and the spectra of stars – Michael Faraday: his studies in electromagnetism – The invention of the electric motor and the dynamo – Faraday on the lines of force – Measuring the speed of light – James Clerk Maxwell’s complete theory of electromagnetism – Light is a form of electromagnetic disturbance – Albert Michelson and Edward Morley: the Michelson–Morley experiment on light – Albert Einstein: special theory of relativity – Minkowski: the geometrical union of space and time in accordance with this theory
12. The Last Hurrah! of Classical Science
Contractionism: our wrinkling planet? – Early hypotheses on continental drift – Alfred Wegener: the father of the theory of continental drift – The evidence for Pangea – The radioactive technique for measuring the age of rocks – Holmes’s account of continental drift – Geomagnetic reversals and the molten core of the Earth – The model of ‘sea-floor spreading’ – Further developments on continental drift – The ‘Bullard fit’ of the continents – Plate tectonics – The story of Ice Ages: Jean de Charpentier – Louis Agassiz and the glacial model – The astronomical theory of Ice Ages – The elliptical orbit model – James Croll – The Milankovitch model – Modern ideas about Ice Ages – The impact on evolution
Invention of the vacuum tube – ‘Cathode rays’ and ‘canal rays’ – William Crookes: the Crookes tube and the corpuscular interpretation of cathode rays – Cathode rays are shown to move far slower than light – The discovery of the electron – Wilhelm Röntgen & the discovery of X-rays – Radioactivity; Becquerel and the Curies – Discovery of alpha, beta and gamma radiation – Rutherford’s model of the atom – Radioactive decay – The existence of isotopes – Discovery of the neutron – Max Planck and Planck’s constant, black-body radiation and the existence of energy quanta – Albert Einstein and light quanta – Niels Bohr – The first quantum model of the atom – Louis de Broglie – Erwin Schrödinger’s wave equation for electrons – The particle-based approach to the quantum world of electrons – Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: wave–particle duality – Dirac’s equation of the electron – The existence of antimatter – The strong nuclear force – The weak nuclear force; neutrinos – Quantum electrodynamics – The future? Quarks and string
The most complex things in the Universe – Charles Darwin and nineteenth-century theories of evolution – The role of cells in life – The division of cells – The discovery of chromosomes and their role in heredity – Intracellular pangenesis – Gregor Mendel: father of genetics – The Mendelian laws of inheritance – The study of chromosomes – Nucleic acid – Working towards DNA and RNA – The tetranucleotide hypothesis – The Chargaff rules – The chemistry of life – Covalent bond model and carbon chemistry – The ionic bond – Bragg’s law – Chemistry as a branch of physics – Linus Pauling – The nature of the hydrogen bond – Studies of fibrous proteins – The alpha-helix structure – Francis Crick and James Watson: the model of the DNA double helix – The genetic code – The genetic age of humankind – Humankind is nothing special
Measuring the distances of stars – Stellar parallax determinations – Spectroscopy and the stuff of stars – The Hertzsprung–Russell diagram – The colour–magnitude relationship and the distances to stars – The Cepheid distance scale – Cepheid stars and the distances to other galaxies – General theory of relativity outlined – The expanding Universe – The steady state model of the Universe – The nature of the Big Bang – Predicting background radiation – Measuring background radiation – Modern measurements: the COBE satellite – How the stars shine: the nuclear fusion process – The concept of ‘resonances’ – CHON and humankind’s place in the Universe – Into the unknown