History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes
- Mark Twain
Except it wasn't him.
His clever and prolific writing made people assume he said it even though he never did. It turns out it first appears around 1970 in a poem by a Canadian artist named Robert Colombo. When asked if he knew where it was from Colombo couldn't recall other than he might have seen it in a literary section of the New York Times a few years earlier. In fact it appears with and without attribution several times around the time of Colombo's poem in the early 70s. That said, a hundred years from now people will still think Twain said it.
The process of science is much messier than the simple order kids learn in school. There are too many dependancies to list. A few philosophers of science - notably Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn - have tried to describe how scientific revolutions and change happens. The how, where and why of scientific change. Kuhn and Popper are somewhat at odds. Kuhn's ideas were popularized and are still taught as how scientific revolutions happen. It turns out that both of the frameworks are deeply flawed and have fallen from favor with serious students of the history and philosophy of science. I came to it late, but I'm more a fan of an earlier step - trying to understand some of the history of science.
Unfortunately the history of science is often neglected in scientific training. Students are told a few selective stories from the great revolutionaries without much context. Experiments, theories and techniques are described with little background. The struggle and small steps forward and backward are missing. The world seems much too messy when you start doing real science on your own. (this is probably true in many fields!)
One gets bits and pieces of local history from the last generation or two in their subfield. This can be very powerful. I learned a lot about the development of the atomic bomb as some of the people I studied with were parts of the Manhattan Project. You need to learn the importance of failure as well as hunches and the need to distrust your own work.
The history of science, like the history of art or music, is a story of the development of ideas that can be appreciated by non-specialists. There are some wonderful books out there. The trigger for this post was one of them: Einstein's Fridge by Paul Sen. I know the technical area well, but have big holes in my understanding of how all of this came about. If you can follow articles in the New York Times science section, you'll learn a lot of what the physics is saying without the math and how it changed the world. He gives a very simple, but accurate, description of entropy and has the best description of photosynthesis I've seen that doesn't get into biochemistry. The historical motivations make it come alive. I'm stealing some of his clear descriptions.
Most of this is probably true in many other fields. About twenty years ago a friend invited me to dinner with Maurice Wilkes - his grand advisor. Even though Maurice was in his late eighties the discussion went on late into the night and continued on two more occasions. I'm not a computer scientist or engineer, but Maurice is a physicist who happened to invent a good deal of the fundamentals of computing that's still in use. Hearing him talk about the early history and the connections to our shared background made it all come alive. The problems computers had to solve as well as the nuts and bolts of designing one - provided a wonderfully rich learning experience. There was this hint of how the great mind of this humble person worked. A good history book can provide that kind of experience.