They saw the difference

 I am, first and foremost, an historian of science, and I'm going to talk for the next month or so about my new e-book, soon to be a print-on-demand book, called They Saw the Difference. The thing is, I've been busy getting our block of townhouses repainted and rejigging a couple of older titles. so for now, here's the introduction to They Saw the Difference.

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When,
And How and Where and Who.
—Rudyard Kipling, introduction to ‘The Elephant’s Child’ in the Just So Stories.

Differences, seeking, cultivating and studying them, make our civilisation work. The art of noting and celebrating differences bloomed in Renaissance Europe, and detecting differences shaped modern science and technology, but the habit was there long ago.

The early hominin who saw that this rock was better than that rock for forming tools, or observed that wood burned and rocks did not, the one who noticed that water ran downhill and not up, these were the ancestors of modern scientists and technologists.

My granddaughters
seeing the difference
an echidna makes.

As the subtitle says, this is a social history of science, concentrating on the why and the how, with a good dollop of what, and something of the who, where and when, along with regular bursts of something completely different. This book compulsively pursues puzzles to their ends.

For example engineers and physicists, hunting for scraps of literary icing to decorate their published work often quote these words of Paul Ambroise Valéry (1871 – 1945): “One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn’t fall.”

If the quoters offer a source (most of them don't), it has a date of 1970, which is well after the poet’s death. By enlisting the burrowing skills of Project Wombat, I know that their 1970 source is volume 14 of Valéry’s posthumous collected works, but the quote was first published as “Il fallait être Newton pour apercevoir que la lune tombe, quand tout le monde voit bien qu’elle ne tombe pas,” in Mélange, Grandeurs, 384, Oeuvres, t. 1, La Pléiade, in 1939. I sweat the details to get the backstory.

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Silver Blaze’, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

Valéry knew what was going down when Newton’s apple fell. He didn’t imagine crazy young Isaac, sitting under a tree, thinking “apple, falling: that’s odd!”. Newton was differently equipped, mentally speaking, but he knew his apples. To him, the odd thing wasn’t the falling apple, it was the curious way the moon failed ever to reach Earth. That was his dog that didn’t bark in the night.

He saw that the moon’s orbit involved a fall that went on forever (in our time frame), the descent always cancelled out by the satellite’s forward motion. That was the difference he saw, a whole branch of science sprang from it, and Paul Valéry could see that. We will return to Isaac Newton again soon, because he could see differences, and he also made a difference.

I chose to follow, not the broad highways of science, thronged by the famous and important, but rather to stray down the alleys and dusty tracks, where the interesting people and the curious science lie in wait for us. I have enjoyed making this work, written for the child I once was and still am: I hope you find some of the same joy.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
— Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken.