An address before the Graduate College Forum of Princeton University on October 14, 1953.
1895 and 1950: The Time was Ripe for a Heresy
One hundred and eighty years ago, in 1773, Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827), then twenty-three years old, stood before the Academie des Sciences in Paris and read a paper in which he proved the stability of the solar system: all deflections of the planets from their paths are only periodic oscillations from their mean courses; and the celestial mechanism is wound up to go on forever.
Laplace's contemporary, Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), set out to demonstrate in a series of works that this earth has ever been an abode of peaceful evolution, free from spasmodic disturbances, in opposition to the dominant views of his day.
These ideas of harmony or stability in the celestial and terrestrial spheres gained ground in the
nineteenth century and became the foundation of scientific thought. In 1846 Leverrier, by announcing the existence of the planet Neptune, which was immediately thereafter discovered in the part of the sky indicated by him, proved the gravitational theory of Newton and the orderly universe of Laplace to be correct. However, in the same year, by detecting the anomaly in the revolution of Mercury, always accumulating in one and the same direction, he threw the first doubt on the infallibility of these very laws.
The theory of uniformity, as understood by Lamarck and Hutton and developed by Lyell, became the cornerstone of the Darwinian theory, and Darwin went so far as to say that anybody who was
unconvinced by Lyell's teaching should refrain from reading the Origin of Species. The principle of uniformity, or the explanation of all past events in the history of the globe in terms of the processes in action in our own age, or the denial of catastrophic crises in the past, gave Darwin what he needed most for his idea of the origin of species: almost unlimited time. In order that from the struggle for existence, or competition, new forms should evolve, and that an animal like the spider with its many legs and human beings should have had a common ancestor, untold eons were necessary.
By the end of the nineteenth century the war between the theory of evolution and the theory of creation in six days, less than six thousand years ago, was concluded, with victory to the theory of evolution. The only difficulty left was, in the view of Thomas Huxley, that no really new species had appeared on the world scene since the scientific observations were made, not even in breeding experiments. The geological record, however, spoke unequivocally of the fact: in the past lived animal forms that do not live any longer, and of the forms that live in our age, many were not present in the geological past. Laplace's theory of the origin of the solar system from a rotating nebula was replaced, by the end of the century, with a theory of a catastrophic beginning in a near-collision of the sun with another star, with debris forming the planets. But it was stressed by the authors of this new theory that the universe is orderly, and this beginning in a cataclysm was an unusually rare occurrence in the cosmos, and that the solar system is governed by the principle of stability, as annunciated by Laplace, and the earth by the law of uniformity, and the animals and plants by the law of evolution through continuity.
It appeared that, basic principles having been established, science had before it only the work of
refinement in observation and in the addition of details for the perfection of knowledge; but the time of basic discoveries was over.
This was the outlook in 1895. In April of that year Fridtjof Nansen, in an attempt to discover the North Pole, reached a point less than four degrees from it. The scientific world looked upon the discovery of the North Pole as the most coveted goal still left to be attained by science.
But before Nansen, drifting from latitude 86° 14', reached his home in Norway, the scene changed. Konrad Roentgen of Würzberg discovered the x-rays or cathode rays that pass through opaque bodies. In the same year of 1895 twenty-year-old Marconi, working at the home of his father near Bologna, made the first successful experiment with wireless transmission. That year, too, Sigmund Freud published his first paper (together with Joseph Breuer), which led to a new understanding of the realm known as the subconscious; and at the same time Pavlov made his contribution to the psychology of the reflexes.
The next year, and still before Nansen had landed on the Norwegian coast, Henri Becquerel, working on uranium, discovered the phenomenon of radioactivity. Two years later he was followed by the Curies, who discovered radium. In 1897 J. J. Thomson announced that the atom is divisible and is actually a microcosm, and he was followed by Rutherford. In 1900 Planck presented the theory of quanta, or energies dispatched in bundles or shots, and not in a continuous stream. And in the field of the origin of species, in 1900, Van Vries announced mutations in plants, observed for the first time: a process of spontaneous changes in living nature fundamentally different from the process of evolution through continuity as postulated by Darwin.
Thus in a few years, in a spectacular series of discoveries, the entire world - matter and energy and living species and the human soul - opened new horizons and everything appeared to be in incessant vibration, collisions, and transformation: the macrocosm, the microcosm, and even the subtle world of the mind, all alike.
And in 1905 Albert Einstein, then twenty-six years old, offered his understanding of the physical world, an understanding that required a new mental approach, as a testimonial that the age of basic discoveries had not ended with the victory of Darwin over the Book of Genesis.
Since then another fifty years have passed. Once more, as before the end of the nineteenth century, we are told that the fundamentals are all known; the age of basic discoveries is definitely terminated, this time for certain; and present and future generations will have to satisfy themselves with detecting details, accumulating data, and adding decimals. And though the exciting decade of 1895 to 1905 threw light on processes in matter, life, and soul, processes that are certainly not inert and are marked by spontaneity and conflict, science in its various branches adjusted the new discoveries and ideas to the framework of the old great principle reigning equally in lifeless and living nature: the law of harmony and unperturbed stability. The time was ripe for heresy.
In 1950, a book, Worlds in Collision, created an outburst of emotions almost unprecedented in science. In the Preface to the book I wrote: "Harmony or stability in the celestial and terrestrial spheres is the point of departure of the present-day concept of the world as expressed in the celestial mechanics of Newton and the theory of evolution of Darwin. If these two men of science are sacrosanct, this book is a heresy."
I came upon the idea that traditions and legends and memories of generic origin can be treated in the same way in which we treat in psychoanalysis the early memories of a single individual. I spent ten years on this work. I found that the collective memory of humankind spoke of a series of global catastrophes that occurred in historical times. I believed that I could even identify the exact times and the very agents of the great upheavals of the more recent past. The conclusions at which I arrived compelled me to cross the frontiers into various fields of science - archaeology, geology, and astronomy. The result was a book, a prolegomenon. In its concluding pages I conceded that more problems were raised than had been solved, and I promised, always reckoning with the limitations of the individual scholar, to pursue my study into these fields too. But already the implications of the fact of great global catastrophes on the earth, one of the celestial bodies, in a time so recent, had caused my critics to assert, in the words of a Harvard astronomer, that here was the "most amazing example of a shattering of accepted concepts on record."
In the heat of the debate in the press the book was pronounced "one of the most significant books written since the invention of printing," and also "the worst book since the invention of movable
characters."
Believing that an emotional atmosphere is not well suited to fruitful debate, I have entered only infrequently into the controversy. I have made short factual corrections of statements by the Royal Astronomer and by J. B.S. Haldane appearing in their reviews of my book, and I participated in a debate with your professor of astronomy, J. Q. Stewart, in the pages of Harper's Magazine (June 1951). I appeared before the American Philosophical Society, which at its annual meeting in April 1952 held a symposium on "Some Unorthodoxies of Modern Science," my unorthodoxy being the chief subject on the agenda. Otherwise I have kept myself out of the verbal conflict.
Now more than three and a half years have passed since the publication of the book, and I appreciate the opportunity offered me by your invitation to present a dispassionate review of recent finds in the three fields named in the title of my address.