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Volume 30:

Scientific Papers (full text)

Scientific writing is destined to hold an awkward place in a project like the Harvard Classics. The Classics depend on the humanist belief in returning to original sources, on the faith that the great thinkers of antiquity still have much to tell us about the world. But science progresses in a way that the liberal arts don't. This progress usually envolves falsification -- and with it explicit repudiation -- of previously long-held theories. And falsified scientific theories, however historically interesting or aesthetically pleasing, are no longer scientifically relevant.

Charles Eliot acknowledges this much with his selection of scientific writing, which is as current as possible. The writers here include geologist Sir Archibald Geikie, who may be the only writer in the entire Shelf who was living when it was published, and astronomer Simon Newcomb, who died only a few months before this volume first appeared. One can't really help that their work has since fallen out-of-date in a way that, say, Homer never will.

But there is a second, deeper problem that attends this first one. Humanism also depends on the individual's ability to judge what he reads, to choose for himself what of it he will and won't accept. But a general discernment isn't enough when it comes to judging these texts; that requires empirical work unavailable to the common reader.

The problem here can be seen with Newcomb's lecture, The Extent of the Universe. Newcomb is a wonderful writer and a thoughtful teacher, and he even anticipates our difficulties:

We cannot expect that the wisest men of our remotest posterity, who can base their conclusions upon thousands of years of accurate observation, will reach a decision on this subject [i.e., the extent of the universe] without some measure of reserve. Such being the case, it might appear the dictate of wisdom to leave its consideration to some future age, when it may be taken up with better means of information than we now possess. But the question is one which will refuse to be postponed so long as the propensity to think of the possibilities of creation is characteristic of our race.

What follows is a ten page consideration of the size and shape of the universe. The universe, so far as we can see it, Newcomb concludes, is a bounded whole. He considers but abandons the possibility that their are stars beyond this visible limit:

It has long been known that, were the universe infinite in extent, and the stars equally scattered through all space, the whole heavens would blaze with the light of countless millions of distant stars separately invisible even with the telescope.

Now, I'm mostly sure that this isn't true. As I understand it, the truth is that we can't possibly see any stars that are farther from us in light years than the universe is old in years, but that we have every reason to believe that they're there. But I only know this because Nova told me so. There's no logical inconsistency in Newcomb's work, nor any personal experience I can test it against.

Eventually Newcomb estimates that the outer boundaries of the visible universe are a distance from the earth between 100,000,000 and 200,000,000 times the distance of the sun. Is he right, at least about the visible universe, if not the universe as a whole? The answer is that I have no idea. I could probably find out with a Google search, but that wouldn't really be in the spirit of things. Probably he's right about some of this stuff. And the same can be said about the other writers here. At least some of what we thought about physics and chemistry and geology a hundred years ago we still think today. But much of it we've abandoned. And to the layman, who has no way of saying which is which, it might as well all be wrong.

Does this mean that this volume wasn't worth reading? I don't think so. Eliot was himself a chemist by training, and he was right to include some space for the natural sciences among this parade of philosophy and poetry and politics. Science offers a vital way of thinking about the world. And however much the conclusions have changed, this writings can show us much about the methods. Even if I can't trust Newcomb's raw numbers about the size of the universe, I can trust his assertion that the propensity to think of the possibilities of creation is characteristic of our race.


--CRB, September 8, 2007

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