![]() “We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 19. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”Īdding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. ![]() It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge ' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.īut is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. ![]() In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow. I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension. “A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science.
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