insecurities and mistakes as any other field. Just as in politics or sport, there will be personality clashes and power grabs, misunderstandings and betrayals; and, just as in these fields, the people who rise to the top, who achieve the most, are likely to be driven and bloody-minded. As astrophysicist Virginia Trimble points out: ‘nobody who does something earthshaking is likely to be easy to get along with. You only achieve things like that by being more single-minded than your friends and relations are likely to regard as totally reasonable.’
Nasty, brutish and smart
Above and beyond this, however, the nature of science means that conflict is built into its DNA. Science in its purest form is a process of trial and error: hypotheses are formed through observation and experiment, and then these hypotheses are tested with further observation and experiment. If they are supported, they become theories – ‘true’ models of how the world works, perhaps even laws of nature – but even the most solid theory can be revised or overturned if new evidence comes to light (see pages 98–101). This ideal of the scientific method has led some theorists of science to apply Darwinian ideas of natural selection to science itself: ideas are engaged in a constant battle for survival, in which only the fittest will prosper. If science really is so combative by its very nature, it is only to be expected that conflict will result. When the natural proclivities of driven, single-minded individuals are added to this, a combustible mixture results.
Scientists are defined by their ideas and entire careers can hang on a theory, model or interpretation; inevitably they will fight their corners and oppose those who hold competing ideas. Modern science introduces many exacerbating factors – the scramble for funding, the imperative to publish, the politics of academia. Perhaps feuding is the default state for science, and instances of collaboration and concord the real curios.
British bulldog. A caricature of T.H. Huxley from the January 1871 issue of Vanity Fair. Huxley was one of the most pugnacious scientists of his era, and delighted in fighting Darwin’s battles for him, earning Huxley the nickname ‘Darwin’s bulldog’.
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KELVIN
vs
LYELL, DARWIN,
HUXLEY, et al.
FEUDING PARTIES
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) – physicist, grand old man of British science
vs
Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875) – geologist;
Charles Darwin (1809–82) – naturalist;
T.H. Huxley (1825–95) – biologist;
and many others
DATE
1861–1904
CAUSE OF FEUD
Debate over the age of the Earth
Early scientists, including Newton, generally believed that the biblical account of the Creation was literally true, and therefore that the internal chronology of the Bible could be used to calculate the age of the Earth. Newton himself arrived at a figure of around 6,000 years but it was the Anglo–Irish Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, who, in a feat of formidable scholarship, determined that Creation began in the early hours of Sunday, 23 October 4004 BCE.
‘Incomprehensibly vast’
Ussher’s 1654 calculation remained the mainstream view until the 18th century saw the birth of a new science, geology – the study of how the earth was shaped. It became obvious to the practitioners of this nascent science that the processes and phenomena they observed must be acting on timescales much larger than the few millennia allowed by biblical literalism. The deposition of rocks, the uplift and folding of strata and mountains, the erosion of valleys and cliffs; all these spoke of slow processes operating over long periods. The emerging evidence of fossils, with their record of strange forms now vanished from the Earth, also suggested a long passage of time. Indeed, to geologists such as Charles Lyell, author of the seminal Principles of Geology, it seemed likely that natural processes of rock formation and erosion had been occurring for an effectively incalculable length of time; if not for a limitless period, certainly of the order of billions of years.
Meanwhile, another group of scientists was approaching the problem of the age of the Earth from a different angle. Naturalists were becoming increasingly convinced that species of plants and animals had changed over time through some form of evolution, but that this transformative process operated extremely slowly, and therefore constituted its own brand of evidence for the great age of the planet. The expanses of geological time opened up by Lyell were a key plank of Darwin’s argument in his 1859 publication On the Origin of Species, in which he cautioned: ‘He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology and yet does not admit how incomprehensibly vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.’ To illustrate just how vast these periods had been, Darwin included a rough estimate he had made of the length of time it must have taken for the ocean to erode the Weald (a geological feature in the south-east of England), putting it at around 300 million years.
Lord Kelvin objects
To many at the time, such immense numbers seemed equivalent to eternity, and Lyell and, by extension, Darwin were seen as the standard-bearers of a school of geological thought called uniformitarianism. In its most extreme form, the uniformitarian view was that the Earth had effectively existed forever, and might well continue to do so, its geological processes endlessly cycling through the creation and destruction of landscape features. Lyell and Darwin did not subscribe to this extreme view, but they nonetheless became targets of the ire of a man who had proved that this theory of a never-ending cycle was impossible.
William Thomson, elevated to the peerage as Baron Kelvin of Largs in 1892 (the first scientist to be so honoured) and hence conventionally referred to as ‘Lord Kelvin’ or ‘Kelvin’, had elucidated, among other achievements, the laws of thermodynamics. Briefly stated, these meant that new energy could not be created out of nothing, and that the energy of any system would tend to dissipate. The laws meant that a perpetual-motion machine was impossible, and the endlessly recycling and eternal Earth of the extreme uniformitarians was effectively just that. Kelvin was having none of it.
Chronological confusions.
