Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe (10 page)

The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant was one of the first to judge critically the balance between the biblical interpretation and the laws of physical science. Kant himself leaned decisively toward physics.
He pointed out in 1754 the danger of relying on the human lifetime in estimating the age of the Earth. Kant wrote, “Man makes the greatest mistake when he tries to use the sequence of human generations that have passed in a particular [period of] time
as a measure for the age of the greatness of God’s works.”
Referring to a sarcastic passage written by the French author Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle in 1686, in which roses were metaphorically pondering the age of their gardener, Kant added a “citation” from the roses: “Our gardener, is a very old man; in rose memory he is just the same as he has always been; he doesn’t die or even change.”

Around the same time that Kant was ruminating on the nature of existence, the French diplomat and geologist
Benoît de Maillet carried out one of the first bold attempts to use actual observations and methodical scientific reasoning to determine the age of the Earth. De Maillet took advantage of his position as French general consul at various spots around the Mediterranean to make geological observations which convinced him that the Earth could not have been created fully formed in one instant of time. Rather, he inferred a long history of gradual geological processes. Being fully aware of the risks involved in challenging the dominance of the church’s orthodoxy, de Maillet composed his theory on the history of the Earth in a series of manuscripts that were collected, edited, and published under the title of
Telliamed
(“de Maillet” in reverse) only in 1748, ten years after de Maillet’s death. The work was written as a fictional string of conversations between an Indian philosopher (named Telliamed) and a French missionary. While de Maillet’s original ideas have been somewhat watered down by the tinkering of his editor, the Abbott Jean Baptiste le Mascrier, it is still possible to discern the basic argument. In modern terms, this was a theory of what is now known as sedimentation. Fossilized shells in sedimentary rocks near mountaintops led de Maillet to conclude that water entirely covered the young Earth. This hypothesis offered a potential solution to a question Leonardo da Vinci had already agonized over two centuries earlier:
“Why the bones of great fishes and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snail are found on the high tops of mountains that border on the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?” De Maillet married his idea of a water-covered Earth with René Descartes’s theory of the solar system—in which the Sun resided in a vortex about which the
planets were swirling—to say that the Earth was losing its water into the vortex. Having observed in several ancient ports such as Acre, Alexandria, and Carthage a rate of decline of the sea level by about three inches per century, de Maillet was able to estimate an age for the Earth of about 2.4 billion years.

Strictly speaking, de Maillet’s calculations and the theory on which they were based were flawed in a number of ways. First, water never entirely covered the Earth—de Maillet did not realize that rather than the water receding, the land might rise. Second, his understanding of rock formation was seriously lacking. He further weakened his case by occasional wanderings into fantasy. For instance, to support his contention that all life-forms emerged from the sea (an idea that is actually consistent with present thinking), de Maillet relied on accounts of mermaids and men with tails. Nevertheless, de Maillet’s estimate of the age of the Earth marked a major shift in the thinking about this problem. For the first time, it was not the human lifetime by which the age of the Earth was determined but rather the rate of natural processes.

De Maillet humbly dedicated his book to the romantic French dramatist Cyrano de Bergerac, who died less than a year before de Maillet’s birth. He started his dedication this way: “I hope you will not take it ill, that I address my present work to you, since, I could not possibly have made choice of a more worthy Protector of the Romantic Flights of Fancy which it contains.” Today we can appreciate that de Maillet’s work was more than “romantic flights of fancy”—it contained the seeds of geochronology. Determining the age of the Earth by scientific methods was about to become a worthy intellectual challenge.

In his masterwork
Principia
, first published in 1687, Isaac Newton noted that
“a globe of red hot iron equal to our earth, that is, about 40,000,000 feet in diameter, would scarcely cool in an equal number of days, or in above 50,000 years.” Realizing he could
not easily square this result with his religious beliefs, Newton was quick to add, “But I suspect that the duration of heat may, on account of some latent causes, increase in a yet less proportion than that of the diameter; and I should be glad that the true proportion was investigated by experiments.”

Newton was not the only seventeenth-century scientist to think about this problem. The famous philosophers Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also discussed the cooling of the Earth from an initially molten state. However, the first person who appears to have taken seriously Newton’s advice about an experimental investigation—and who in addition was imaginative enough to attempt to use the cooling problem to estimate the age of the Earth—was the eighteenth-century mathematician and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.

Buffon was a truly prolific character who was not only an accomplished scientist but also a successful businessman. He is perhaps best known for the clarity and forcefulness with which he presented a new method for approaching nature. His monumental lifework,
Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière
(
Natural History, General and Particular
)—thirty-six-volumes of which were completed during his lifetime (with eight more published posthumously)—was read by most of the educated people of the day in Europe and North America. Buffon’s aim was to deal in succession with topics ranging from the solar system, the Earth, and the human race to the different kingdoms of living creatures.

In his mental excursion into the Earth’s physical past,
Buffon assumed that the Earth started as a molten sphere after having been ejected from the Sun due to a collision with a comet. Then, in the true spirit of an experimentalist, he was not satisfied with a purely theoretical scenario—Buffon proceeded immediately to manufacture spheres of different diameters and to measure accurately the time it took them to cool down. From these experiments he estimated that the terrestrial globe solidified in 2,905 years and cooled down to its present temperature in 74,832 years, even though he suspected that the cooling time could be much longer.

Eventually, however, it was not pure Newtonian physics that brought the problem of the Earth’s age into the limelight. The surge in the study of fossils in the eighteenth century convinced naturalists such as Georges Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and James Hutton that both the paleontological and the geological records required the operation of geological forces over exceedingly long periods of time. So long, in fact, that, as Hutton has put it, he found
“no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

In view of the increasing difficulty of trying to cram the entire history of the Earth into the biblical mere few thousand years, some of the more religiously inclined naturalists (but not only them) opted to rely on catastrophes such as floods as agents of rapid changes. If great expanses of time were to be denied, catastrophes appeared to be the only vehicle that could significantly shape the Earth’s surface almost instantaneously. To be sure, the distribution of marine fossils provided clear evidence for the action of flooding and glaciation in the Earth’s geological past, but many of the ardent catastrophists were at least partially motivated by their unwavering loyalty to the biblical text rather than by the scientific attestation. Richard Kirwan—one of the well-known chemists of the day—articulated this position clearly. Kirwan pitted Hutton directly against Moses in describing how dismayed he was to observe
“how fatal the suspicion of the high antiquity of the globe has been to the credit of Mosaic history, and consequently to religion and morality.”

The situation started to change dramatically
with the publication of Charles Lyell’s three-volume
Principles of Geology
in the years 1830–33. Lyell, who was also Charles Darwin’s close friend, made it clear that the catastrophist doctrine was far too frail to last as a compromise between science and theology. He decided to put aside the question of the origin of the Earth and to concentrate on its evolution. Lyell argued that the forces that sculpted the Earth—volcanism, sedimentation, erosion, and similar processes—remained essentially unchanged throughout the Earth’s history, both in their strength and in their nature. This was the idea of uniformitarianism that inspired Darwin’s concept of gradualism in the evolution of
species. The basic premise was simple: If there was one thing that these slow-acting geological forces needed in order to have an appreciable effect, it was time. Lots of it. Lyell’s followers have almost abandoned the notion of a definite age altogether in favor of the rather vague “inconceivably vast” time. In other words, Lyell’s Earth was one that was almost in a
steady state,
with snail’s-pace changes operating over a nearly infinite time. This principle starkly contrasted with the theological estimates of some six thousand years.

To a certain extent, the world view of an immeasurably extended geological age permeated Darwin’s
The Origin,
even though Darwin’s own attempt to estimate the age of the Weald—the eroded valley stretching across the southeastern part of England—turned out to be disastrously flawed, and he eventually retracted it. Darwin envisaged for evolution a long sequence of phases, lasting perhaps ten million years each. There was, however, one important difference between Darwin’s stance and those of the geologists. While he indeed required long periods of time for evolution to run its course, he insisted on a directional “arrow of time”; he could not be satisfied with a steady state or a cyclical progression, since the concept of evolution gave time a clear trend. But a controversy was starting to brew. It was not between Darwin and Lyell personally, nor even between geology and biology in general, but between a champion of physics on one side and some geologists and biologists on the other. Enter one of the most eminent physicists of his time: William Thomson, later known as Lord Kelvin.

In 1897 the
Vanity Fair Album,
a compendium of highlights from the weekly British society magazine,
published a eulogy of Lord Kelvin, part of which read as follows:

His father was Professor of Mathematics at Glasgow. Himself was born in Belfast seventy-two years ago, and educated at Glasgow University and at St Peter’s, Cambridge;
of which College,
after making himself Second Wrangler and Smith’s Prizeman, he was made a Fellow. Unlike a Scotchman, he presently returned to Glasgow—a Professor of Natural Philosophy; and since then he has invented so much and, despite his mathematical knowledge, has done so much good, that his name—which is William Thomson—is known not only throughout the civilized world but also on every sea. For when he was a mere knight he invented Sir William Thomson’s mariner’s compass as well as a navigational sounding machine, that is, unhappily less well known. He has also done much electrical service at sea: as engineer for various Atlantic cables, as inventor of the mirror-galvanometer and siphon recorder, and much else that is not only scientific but useful. He is so good a man, indeed, that four years ago he was enobled as Baron Kelvin of Largs; yet he is still full of wisdom, for his Peerage has not spoiled him . . . He knows all there is to know about heat, all that is yet known about Magnetism, and all that he can find out about Electricity. He is a very great, honest, and humble Scientist who has written much and done more.

Figure 9

This was a fairly accurate, if humorous, description of the numerous accomplishments of the man dubbed by one of his biographers the “Dynamic Victorian.” On his ennoblement, in 1892, Thomson adopted the title Baron Kelvin of Largs, after the River Kelvin, which flowed close to his laboratory at the University of Glasgow. “Second Wrangler” referred to Kelvin having placed (to his disappointment) second in the final honors school of mathematics at Cambridge. Story has it that on the morning the examination results were to be posted, he sent his servant to find out “who is Second Wrangler?” and was devastated when he was told “You, sir!” There is no doubt that Kelvin was the foremost figure of the age that witnessed the end of classical physics and the birth of the modern era.
Figure 9
shows a portrait of Lord Kelvin, possibly after a photograph taken in 1876.
Appropriately, upon his death in 1907, he was laid to rest in a tomb alongside Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. What the eulogy did not capture, however, was the eventual collapse of Kelvin’s stature in scientific circles. As an old man, Kelvin developed a reputation as an obstructionist to modern physics. Often portrayed as someone who clung stubbornly to his old views, he resisted new findings about atoms and about radioactivity. More surprisingly, even though James Clerk Maxwell relied on some of Kelvin’s applications of energy principles when he developed his impressive theory of electromagnetism, Kelvin still objected to the theory, stating,
“I may say that the one thing about it that seems intelligible to me, I do not think is admissible.” For the technically savvy person that he was, Kelvin made similarly astonishing declarations on technology, such as “I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aereal navigation other than ballooning.” It was this enigmatic man—brilliant as a young scientist, seemingly out of touch as an old one—who attempted to discredit the geologists’ views on the age of the Earth.