On Giants' Shoulders - Melvyn Bragg

   2009; 360 pages.  Full Title : On Giants’ Shoulders: Great Scientists and Their Discoveries, from Archimedes to DNA.  New Author? : No.    Genre : Non-Fiction, Science, Mathematics, Science History; Biography.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    I think it’s fair to label Melvyn Bragg a polymath.  Wikipedia lists him as being a broadcaster, a scriptwriter, an interviewer, a presenter, and a novelist.  He’s won 18 prestigious awards in these various areas, and his published writings include novels, non-fiction books, children’s books, and screenplays.  

    My friends in England tell me he’s a well-known TV personality; his career began in 1961, and continues even into the present, Mr. Bragg now being 78 years old.  I know of him from reading one of his non-fiction books back in 2016, titled “The Adventure of English” which is reviewed here. 

    As brilliant as he is, you’d think he’d be a nuclear physicist or a brain surgeon or something.  But in the introduction to this book, he confesses that he avoided anything even close to science throughout his schooling.

    But there came a day when he wondered if he was missing out on something by eschewing all things scientific.  After all, you never see an unhappy chemist, a math whiz who hates doing differential equations, or a physicist who’d rather be driving a truck.

    So he made it a point to look into a history and culture of Science.  He contacted some of the most eminent present-day scientists, and quizzed them to find out what made them tick.  He aired a series of programs on British radio, with the interviews and the feedback he received.  From there, he chose his personal top dozen scientists of all time, and asked his newly-befriended scientific peers what they thought of his choices.

    And then he wrote On Giants’ Shoulders so he could share his discoveries with the rest of us.

What’s To Like...

    Melvyn Bragg’s list of his 12 "greatest-ever" scientists, along with his sobriquets, is:

01.) Archimedes (287-212 BC) “The first Scientist”

02.) Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) “The Columbus of the Stars”

03.) Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants”

04.) Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1797) “The Revolution does not need Scientists”

05.) Michael Faraday (1791-1867) “The Great Experimenter”

06.) Charles Darwin (1809-1882) “The Conservative Revolutionary”

07.) Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) “The Man who discovered Chaos by Accident”

08.) Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) “Science or Art?”

09.) Marie Curie (1867-1934) “A Woman’s Place is in the Lab”

10.) Albert Einstein (1879-1955) “The first Celebrity Scientist”

11. & 12.) Francis Crick (1914- ) & James Watson (1928- ) “The Meaning of Life”

    There’s also an introduction, where Bragg discloses that the book’s overall motif will be “Science for the non-scientist”, plus an “afterword” final chapter, in which the author and his science friends contemplate what might happen in the next hundred years of science.  For the record, since I am a chemist by profession, I’ve heard of all of the people on Bragg’s list, except #7 (“Chaos Theory”), #11, and #12 (“DNA”).

    This is not a science textbook.  Bragg has no intentions of teaching you how to replicate DNA, or the physics behind the theory of Multiverses.  Instead, he focuses on the impact each scientist’s work had on the world they lived in, and discusses with his colleagues questions like:  a.) What if said scientist had not made his major discovery?, b.) What kind of drive did that scientist have that led him to his breakthrough?, and c.) Upon whose shoulders was that scientist standing in order to make his discovery?

    Both the author and his contemporary scientist friends refrain from gushing over these twelve greats, and I liked that.  Einstein is called “lazy” by some, since he never bothered to prove any of his groundbreaking theories.  He merely wrote them down and left it to others to do the verifying.  Galileo’s famous trial by the Inquisition was not a “Science vs. Religion” issue, the Church was mad that he trashed the biblical “the Sun revolves around the Earth” theory while admitting he couldn’t disprove it.  Lavoisier, guillotined during the French Revolution, lost his head because he was a hated tax collector for the King, not because he was part of the nobility.  Darwin never once used the term “Evolution” in his writings; and the term “scientist” didn’t come into use until the 1830’s.

    On Giants’ Shoulders is written in English, not American, so you have plural maths, are educated in the sixth form (I still don’t know what that means), are sceptical, have fervour, and might contract leukaemia.  Melvyn Bragg starts each chapter with a page-long timeline for each scientist, along with a portrait.  Those extras were really neat.  Finally, despite the “heaviness” of the subject matter, I found the book to be a fast read.

Kewlest New Word ...

Fatuous (adj.) : Silly and pointless.

Others : Synoptic (adj.).

Excerpts...

    Faraday did not invent the electric motor.  Faraday did not invent the electric light bulb.  Faraday did not invent any particular technology and in fact Faraday himself would have been most horrified most probably at the imputation that he was a mere inventor.  As far as Faraday is concerned, he is a discoverer of great natural philosophical principles.  He is certainly not going to be engaged in the rather sordid business of inventing, which is something that craftsmen or entrepreneurs or people who are not gentlemen do.  (pg. 145)

    We are told that the universe came into existence about fifteen billion years ago with the Big Bang.  On our earth, for most of the four thousand million years it has been in existence, there was no living creature or thing.  If we equate the age of the earth to a twenty-four-hour day, the first signs of life appear after the twenty-third hour and human beings emerge in the last few minutes before midnight.

    The analogy of the clock is often used.  It seems to me to carry a fatal pessimism.  For when midnight strikes – is that not the Apocalypse, the end of everything?  Why could our few minutes not be the first of another fifteen billion year adventure?  (pg. 360)

 We are better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it will rain on Aunty’s garden party three Sundays from now.  (pg. 187)

    I can't think of anything to quibble about in  On Giants’ Shoulders, but if you’re not of a scientific mentality, and/or don’t want to be, then reading chapter after chapter about  mostly dead mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, and chemists might get tedious.  Ditto if you were looking for someone who can make learning about Quantum Physics so easy a caveman can comprehend it.

    OTOH, there are some very interesting “speculative” questions about science posed, that are  worthy to be thought about.  Such as:

    If the (ancient) Greeks hadn’t invented science, would it have ever happened at all?  (pg. 16)

    If we razed the planet clean and started again, would Homo Sapiens inevitably turn up, or would it be purely a matter of chance?  (pg. 176)

   It's rather interesting to see the diversity in the answers that Bragg's science friends come up with.

    9 Stars.  On Giants’ Shoulders is my second Melvyn Bragg book, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed both of them.  I haven’t ventured into his fiction books yet, but I'm now tempted to go out and try to find one, just to see if he is equally adept when making things up.