I'm busy moving into my new digs today, so no time for a fresh post. Here's an oldie but goodie.
Spanning the spectrum of mankind's achievements, there are certain key moments that stand out in each field. I'm going to cover a few here, and if you have any additions that you think I might be interested in doing a future post on, leave a synopsis and maybe a link or two in the comments.
When it comes to the heading of 'Inventions', I think the sublime moment is this:
The main character in the marvelous book 'River God' is the head slave of the imperial palace. He's one of those do-all kind of guys; physician, astronomer, architect, inventor, etc. But, as exciting as his long life is, there is one moment that surpasses all others.
The enemy has invaded and their war chariots, with long razor-sharp blades coming out of the hubs, are slicing the Egyptian legions to ribbons. The horses and riders are both covered with armor and are almost impervious to the Egyptians' weak spears and arrows. This devastating new weapon panics the remaining Egyptian solders and the battle, and finally the kingdom, is lost.
On a hill high above the battle the slave takes all of this in, but what has him reeling with shock and despair isn't the fearsome war machines before him.
It's the wheels the chariots are mounted on.
I admit, it must have been stupefying to the first Egyptians who saw them. After veritably a lifetime of rational, scientific endeavor like the hero in the book; to suddenly see something so obvious must have come as the most mind-altering, ego-shattering blow humanly imaginable.
Not to mention civilization-changing.
As I note in the piece, what's particularly baffling about it all is that we have natural axle-ready 'wheels' around us in nature, i.e., an eroded pebble in a stream bed or a sawed-off piece of tree trunk with a knot in the middle which pops out. So you'd think it would have evolved naturally, like fire, without any historical point of reference you could point to. But nope.
So, if you had to boil it down to one single moment, the great architects of the Egyptian empire seeing the wheel for the first time gets my vote.
When it comes to the cosmos, I'd go with this:
Now here's an interesting question:
Of all the astronomical discoveries over the years, which was the most profound? Which discovery, upon further examination, opened more new doors to philosophy, deep thought and science than any other?
Certainly the discovery that the Earth wasn't at the center of the solar system would be many people's pick, since it only relegated a couple thousand years of religious belief to the dust bin of history.
But when you think about it, that particular discovery didn't really alter our view of the cosmos; it was more just a matter of a small physical realignment in the immediate neighborhood. It certainly had religious repercussions, and certainly made calculating planetary orbits easier, but not much else. Switch the Sun and the Earth around and we still have no further idea what all those twinkling little lights in the nighttime sky are.
But in 1863, an Italian astronomer named Angelo Secchi invented the heliospectrograph, which breaks a star's light into its spectral bands. He eventually charted the light from almost 4,000 stars.
He then turned it upon the sun.
Our sun is a star.
With that pesky Sun-Earth business out of the way, this moment pretty much answered
everything else.
Yes, Virginia, that's what those twinkling little lights are. Yes, each one could have planets revolving around it just like ours.
Still, though, they had their fancy telescopes and circular slide rules and heliospectrographs to prove their points.
How about some sticks, eyes, feet and brains?
When it gets right down to it, I think this is possibly the grandest moment in the history of the world.
And what a beautiful, innocent age (1980) it was back then, back before global warming turned the word 'scientist' into something just below 'used car salesman' on the evolutionary scale of things.
"But Eratosthenes was a
scientist." Back when he said it, it meant something.
