Edmund and the History of Fishes, A Tale of Science

Once upon a time, long, long ago there lived a man with Ideas. This man was brilliant, but reclusive and bad with people. Let’s call him Isaac.

Our Friend Edmund, 1687

One day, a young astronomer, much better with people, let’s call him Edmund, went to Isaac and asked him a question which would prove to be one of the most important questions every asked of anyone. Edmund asked,

what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the planets supposing the force of attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it.

Isaac replied that it would, of course, duh, be an ellipse. Now, this may be common knowledge today but Edmund found this answer very exciting and he asked to see the work Isaac had done to come up with this answer. Isaac had done a lot of thinking about this kind of question, but, turned out, he couldn’t quite track down the bit of paper on which he had come up with this response.

So he went away and wrote. And he wrote. And he wrote. And eventually he came up with a whole book packed full of his ideas not only about the shape of the orbit of planets but about how things were in the universe in general.

Meanwhile at the Royal Society, where Edmund was a clerk, the Society published what they thought was going to be an absolute blockbuster book. It was going to have stunning illustrations like never before seen in 1686. It was by eminent naturalists John Ray and Francis Willughby and was called De Historia Piscium (The History of Fishes).

It, like a fish out of water, was a flop. The Society had grossly overestimated the interest of the general and specific public in even the mostly beautiful woodcut engravings of fish and now it had an expensive loss on its hands, stacks of books about fish and certainly couldn’t go on making other commitments to other books, even ones which were going to revolutionise the understanding of the universe.

Willughby's Fishy Illustrations

Edmund, on the other hand, had been working his socks off trying to get grumpy, reclusive Isaac to finish and publish his book. But now—worse—there was no money to publish because it had all being soaked up by the History of Fishes. The Society was so skint that they were actually paying Edmund in copies instead of his £50 salary.

Thankfully, Edmund believed fiercely in Isaac’s work and managed to scrape together the cash from his own meagre funds and publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known among its best friends as the Principia.

Isaac (Newton), of course, went on to eternal fame and glory as the definer of gravity and classical mechanics as a whole and Edmund (Halley) went on to generally be a great all-around guy and use the Principia to calculate the trajectory of a famous comet that bears his name.

The Royal Society is still shuffling its feet in a somewhat embarrassed way and has this to say about The History of Fishes:

“While it may seem surprising to some people that the early Fellows of the Royal Society nearly passed up the opportunity to publish Newton’s Principia, we mustn’t forget that Halley, Newton, Ray and Willughby were all working in the very earliest days of the scientific revolution.  Although the Principia may have gone on to achieve lasting fame and glory, we hope that visitors to our new online picture resource will be able to appreciate why early Fellows of the Royal Society were so impressed by Willughby’s stunning illustrations of piscine natural history.”

Which I think reads amusingly like a sheepish grin and an unnecessary excuse over 300 years later.

One part of this story remains to be addressed: Did Isaac ever fully answer Edmund’s question? The answer appears to be ‘no’, at least not right away. I can’t follow the maths on this page, but it does explain saying that the argument Newton did give only the 'converse proposition' to the original question and that

the answer to Halley’s question “followed from” the converse proposition, which of course is not a generally valid argument. Newton later claimed that he hadn’t included the proof for the original question – the one that prompted the entire work – because he regarded it as “very obvious”.

…You can see what Halley was working with. The argument was sort of included in later editions, but only through the efforts of various other mathematicians and natural philosophers.

But Halley was nevertheless, along with everyone else who understood Newton’s work, justifiably impressed by what he had done and even wrote him a charming ode that concludes with the glowing lines:

Then ye who now on heavenly nectar fare,
Come celebrate with me in song the name
Of Newton, to the Muses dear; for he
Unlocked the hidden treasuries of Truth:
So richly through his mind had Phoebus cast
The radiance of his own divinity.
Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.

But in the light of Newton's achievement, let us spare a thought, for Halley who befriended and worked with this unusual man Newton, invested time and money in him, and put up with being paid in books about fish, out of sheer belief that his Ideas were worth something and ought to be out here not in there.

James Watson's Retroactive Diary

The James Watson of the Past

So, this isn't really a review of James Watson's famous book The Double Helix, but a response to his prologue.

James Watson is commonly known as one of the co-discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins. The Double Helix book retells the discovery, in a way deliberately not free of James Watson's personality. To explain his approach, he writes:

As I hope this book will show, science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

There are lots of ways to tell a history. Many of them are primarily factual: "this happened on this day". Lots take into account the events or the society (including cultural traditions) surrounding the key characters-- think of Einstein and Eddington's pacifism in World War One bringing them together. Some go into personal relationships and backgrounds-- the writer Dava Sobel has a tendency to try this (sometimes fictionally). But it's only since books like The Double Helix, in 1968, that we've really got much of a sense of the role of personality, particularly from the person involved.

Watson wants this book to be true and accurate. In fact, he had always wanted the book to be accurate:

The thought that I should write this book has been with me almost from the moment the double helix was found. Thus my memory of many of the significant events is much more complete than that of most other episodes in my life.  

He not only intends to be accurate concerning the events of 1951-1953 but also accurate to his own interpretation and responses to events and people. This is not "the discovery of the structure of DNA" this is Watson's version. In fact, the original title of the book was to be Honest Jim.

Importantly, he (attempts) to give himself a get-out-of-jail-free card for anything he might say that is controversial or rude, stating that he is writing as if without the benefit of hindsight, an as-it-happens account:

Thus many of the comments may seem one-sided and unfair, but this is often the case in the incomplete and hurried way in which human beings frequently decide to like or dislike a new idea or acquaintance.

This wasn't all that successful because the book, initally intended to be published through Harvard University Press but was blocked by both Watson's co-authors of the original article Wilkins and Crick (and I might speculatively add the university itself as universities are definitely in the business of deciding what is beneficial for them to be directly associated with).

There was an entire 1980 critical edition published by Norton that included some of the criticism and responses to criticism that surrounded the publication of the book.

But how accurate is such an "honest" retelling? Certainly every scientist knows that what we believe to be the case and what is the case are not the same thing. Watson partially acknowledged this in the epilogue of The Double Helix, particularly in the case of his description of the scientist Rosalind Franklin whose work was instrumental in the discovery.*

James Watson Nowadays

Is it perhaps better to regard Watson's book more of a diary after-the-fact than a historical recount? A diary is honest to the minute but usually considerably inaccurate with the benefit of hindsight. He states he was planning to write a book from the point the discovery was made. It's not such a huge leap to speculate that he was in fact writing an imaginary diary before he began working on DNA, keeping phrases in his mind or in notebooks and his letters to his parents (which he says he used for date references) that then made it into the book. I think there is a kind of prodigal, ambitious person who does this and I think Watson falls easily into both prodigal (attending university at 15) and ambitious categories.

The Double Helix is absolutely an interesting and valuable text to have in the world but I'm not sure that accurate is the right word. The book may be relatively or entirely accurate to the personal truth and that certainly has a powerful voice, but as soon as he starts writing sentences which ascribe beliefs and actions to people that aren't him we surely have to assume that (considering Crick or Wilkins' conspicuous lack of blessing for this book), Watson may as well be making stuff up. In short, it's a personal retroactive diary with all that entails when using it as a historical text.

 *I should note that Watson's misogynism, at the very least towards Franklin (and towards his sister) I don't think are undone by his epilogue explanation (although let's make some allowances for the Pleasantville attitudes that probably abounded). I found a blogger who wrote something about this that I vehemently disagree with but again, that's another blog post.

Review: Shock of the Old (Part II)

This post constitutes part two of a review of David Edgerton's book Shock of the Old. I shall attempt to make this post stand alone by itself but read Part I if you want the review of the actual book rather than my mad musings.

In Part I, I ended by facetiously summarising my objection to the ideas in the book by saying: Yes. And?

I agree with David Edgerton's ideas. I don't see much problem with them: of course we should take a complete look at the history of technology, rather than one that--as this 2006 Guardian interview with Edgerton says--describes 1940s technology history as one of supersonic flight and atomic power.

Supersonic 1940s: The Bell X-1

When I read this interview (before having read the book) my response was dramatic. Who thinks that the 1940s was a decade of supersonic flight? Is this a popular conception that I've somehow missed out on or an absurd academic one? In the Guardian interview and in the book, Edgerton insists on using the term "we" to describe the position he is attempting to counter. "We think that..." "We believe..." Who is this we and why do they have a rather bizarre view of the 1940s? I absolute agreed, before reading the book, that the 1940s were more of a time of "tanks, aeroplanes, cars, coal and wheat and pig farming."

You could ascribe my objection to pure high and mightyness: I don't think that because I am superior and magically have more knowledge (or the right kind of knowledge) than most. 

Let me defend myself by trying to explain why I think I didn't come into this book with the expectation that technology history, either popularly or academically, never seemed to be quite as extreme as Edgerton makes out (perhaps we should allow that he may have been hyperbolising to make a point).

Finally I will actually disagree with Edgerton. Hold on to your hats, things will get crazy.

Still reading? Something of what Edgerton is worried about, this focus on the absurd magic of the cutting edge, seems to come from the futurist ideas of the 50s-70s, when people were landing on the Moon and everyone fully expected we would have at least a Moon colony and flying cars by now. The science fiction of this period--think Thunderbirds, 2001 and even Back to the Future--are I think symptoms of the possibly more sensible expectation of the everyday person. The future was going to be awesome and it was barely fifty years away, if that.

Alternate future: the Firefly crew on their crowded, jury-rigged bridge.

But I was born in the mid 1980s and my teenage TV science fiction was quite a different story. Dark Angel (2000) was set in a post-apocalyptic future populated almost exclusively by the kind of technologies Edgerton wants to draw attention to: bicycles instead of cars, jury-rigged ways of keeping up with the vanguard of technology. Firefly (2002), the beloved space western, was similar-- the heroes didn't have the cutting edge technology. Unable to access the most cutting edge technology, they too made us of elderly technology (although it looked futuristic to us). Even Stargate which gives us an alternate 'now', has humans in general scrambling to keep up with other technologies and doing many of the things Edgerton wants to highlight: borrowing, reverse-engineering, imitating, jury-rigging. The Dial Home Device for the Earth Stargate was missing and Earth scientists have managed to hack one together out of what, compared to the original technology, amounts to some bits of string and duct tape.

 A generation after Edgerton, I think, the myth of the future has changed from one of the gleaming inventiveness of humanity to one of borrowing and jury-rigging. It's changed enough for me to be genuinely surprised that anyone would look at the 1940s and think "supersonic flight" above "Spitfire" or would feel it necessary to be quite so bombastic about making this point about old technology being important as if it was completely groundbreaking. 

 That's the "Yes" of my fascetious argument. The 'And' therefore expects more from this line of argument. If we have in fact established that there is more to technology that what was invented yesterday, how can we begin to investigate this or make sense of it? This is what I would have liked to read in the book-- some clear suggestion not only that we should look at old, borrowed, regressive and maintained technology as equally important but how we should approach it. The book contains plenty of examples, but I don't think I ever got the sense that Edgerton really knows what the next step is. Perhaps he's got there now, as the book is now a good six years old!

*

And now I must disagree with Edgerton. Or rather, I must query how he appears to conceive of technology (or perhaps how he appears to conceive of how "we" conceive of technology). There is a sense that technologies invented are intended to eclipse their predecessors. For example, I see no reason why the machete as a killing tool should necessarily be outmoded by the gun, bomb, rocket or atomic warhead-- which the book appears to suggest is what is intended by the rocket's invention. If I live in London and want to get people in Paris, I don't have to be in Paris to kill them if I have a rocket. I can simply line up my rocket and fire it. It may not be the cheapest, most efficient or effective method, but it plays quite a different role.

In fact, technology rarely eclipses a previous technology complete because-- like Darwin's semi-apocryphal finches--it occupies quite a different evolutionary niche. A "better" bird doesn't necessarily entirely displace the previous bird because the ways in which it is different may outweigh the ways in which it fills the same task as the earlier bird.

In the killing technology example, the bomb will never replace the machete entirely because the bomb will always play a different role: it is more difficult to acquire, especially in quantity (even with the internet), more indiscriminate and less personal. It destroys people in quite a different way, which must have sociological and psychological implications.

1869 Ladies' Pedal Bicycle

We walk for different reasons and on different journeys than we bike, take a train, drive  or fly. While these are successive transport technologies I just don't see that anyone really dismisses biking because planes exist. This is the level on which Edgerton makes his stand: Bicycles fly in the face of the innovation myth. But do they really?

Consider the bicycle made today. Not the bicycle grandfathered--that's a different story--but the bicycle constructed today. It has a certain shape--penny farthings and choppers being unusual--an airfilled rubber tire, air brakes, a unisex (usually) diamond frame.

There has been innovation. Something has happened to the bicycle to refine it: each component has been initially invented and used and nowadays there is a general consensus on how to make an affordable general-use bicycle that is modern at least to the last 30 years. Even where poverty abounds and jury-rigging is rife, people tend to take what is best and use it. This bicycle is not old at all! The concept of 'a bicycle' may be over a hundred and fifty years old, but since then it has undergone near-continous innovation taking in advances/changes in design, materials, construction methods, methods of maintenance, social norms and changes in use-- all the things Edgerton wants to talk about.

A different kettle of fish: The modern diamond-frame bike.

For me, that is the history of technology and it is absolutely one of innovation. The main invention of technology is important but not nearly so important as the inventions that will improve it-- and they are inventions and I can't really get behind the idea that they aren't new.

I saw a thing once about a lighting technology used in some towns in the Philippines which consisted of a plastic bottle full of water wedged in a hole in the roof. You can try this at home! The water acts as a lens to 'capture' and redirect the light more effectively than a simply using a piece of plastic as a window.

Edgerton would love this as a piece of Old Technology. But is it old? It makes use of simple materials and a basic understanding of light (or even an observation of it), it's cheap and near-universally available. But it wasn't being done ten years ago and now it's being done. It's not advanced, certainly, but that's not necessarily what we're talking about.

The Shock of the Old has something to say, but it doesn't seem to have enough to say. We need to know: what is a distinct technology? When is a technology newly invented and when merely updated? If an old thing like a bicycle is made out of radically innovated parts and materials, is it still an old technology (I'm looking at you, Bugatti Veyron)? Is the Concorde a new thing entirely or just an updated plane? Shouldn't we be looking at technologies more closely (e.g. the tires of a bicycle rather than the bicycle as a whole) to make more sense out of the progress of technology? Are innovations in maintenance of old things innovations? What role does the niche of technology play in how it is eclipsed, or not? Without these questions being at least addressed-- at least asked-- the whole book boils down to the rather unshocking observation of: "not everyone uses the newest stuff".

Yes. And?