RSS Feeds

Email a Friend Printer Friendly

Is astronomy key to scientific progress?

August 07, 2002

EMBARGOED UNTIL WEDNESDAY 7 AUGUST 2002 19:00 BST
UK CONTACT - Claire Bowles, New Scientist Press Office, London:
Tel: +44(0)20 7331 2751 or email claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk

WHAT would have happened to the development of science if Earth had been permanently shrouded in clouds and we`d never seen any stars? There wouldn`t have been any astronomy, but would that have mattered?
That`s the thought that struck mathematician Brian Davies after spending a holiday on the Atlantic island of Madeira under thick cloud.
"Some people have claimed astronomy was an important first step on the road to science," he says. "I simply wondered whether being deprived of a view of the heavens would really have set science back."
Davies, of King`s College London, scrutinised original journals dating back to the birth of modern science at the beginning of the 17th century, noticing what experiments people did and looking at their motivations. He found that people were rarely motivated by a desire to look at the heavens. Instead, developments in technology were more important. "As soon as there was a technological development, people exploited it in every conceivable way," he says.
For instance, the development of good-quality lenses led quickly to microscopes and telescopes, vastly expanding the range of science.
Predictably, Davies says the sciences least affected on a cloudy world would be biology, chemistry and geology. One area most affected would be navigation, since sailors would be unable to use the stars to measure latitude or longitude. But this could still be overcome by technology, using magnetic compasses and gyroscopes. "I`m not saying it would be easy," says Davies. "Sailors would have had to be far braver and America would have been discovered much later."
The biggest impact of perpetual cloud cover would have been on 20th-century science. General relativity, Einstein`s theory of gravity, would not have been confirmed so quickly because that required observing light bending during a total eclipse and anomalies in the orbit of Mercury. And the discovery that the atoms in our bodies were made inside stars would clearly have been impossible before the discovery of the stars. Astrophysics and cosmology would have had to wait for 1950s technology- specifically planes such as the X-15 that could fly at high-altitude, above the clouds.
Davies`s speculations may be of more than mere academic interest now that we know of about 100 planets outside our Solar System, with the number increasing almost every week. "If there are any permanently cloud-enshrouded planets, with gravity similar to Earth, science would develop as quickly as on our planet, as soon as any inhabitants started to combine mathematics with technology," says Davies. "The only thing that would differ is the sequence of discoveries."
But some people insist that astronomy was a strong driving force of science. "There is an intricately interlocking set of circumstances that has driven the fragile origin of modern science," says Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and history of science at Harvard University. "To take away one strong driving force like astronomy could easily upset the entire pattern of development."
Davies agrees that the origins of technology and people`s realisation of the value of mathematics in explaining the world were fragile. "However, once that route had been taken early in the 17th century, the development of science as we know it became inevitable," he maintains. Davies has submitted his paper to the journal Isis.

Author: Marcus Chown

http://www.newscientist.com">New Scientist issue 10th August 2002


PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THIS STORY AND, IF PUBLISHING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO : http://www.newscientist.com"> http://www.newscientist.com

New Scientist