The Founding Principles of Science

 …hand-copying of algebra texts and illuminating their pages with olive leaves and cheerful cherubim surrounding tables of logarithms…
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, chapter 7.

Miller was describing a monk, in a future Dark Age, laboriously decorating a scrap of mathematics. Across a millennium, in a monastery in the south-west of the USA, the monk and his order kept all the bits of paper that had survived a nuclear war and its aftermath, copying and decorating them as they faded.

In my youth, I read a lot of science fiction. Come to think of it, if reading that genre defines my youth, then I must still be in my half past morning tea time, but I have to admit that it was many years ago that I encountered that scene which has remained with me ever since, even if I recalled the passage featuring an illuminated printed circuit as the object of veneration.

Now, I am almost in the frame to be venerated as a relic, but over the years, that image of the monk has stayed with me and, writing about history and science, I often wonder what would happen if our society went belly-up (or, more realistically, when it collapses). With climate change surging, totalitarian states on the rise, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and bungled epidemic management, I have long thought chaos was likely to break out.

Still, we earth-dwelling humans keep lurching on, but in the 1990s, my concerns led me to pose the following question on an email list (remember those?) called Science Matters:

You anticipate a new Dark Age, and you wish to engrave key information on indestructible plaques, the idea being to assist later people of wit to pass through their Renaissance faster by giving them the working tools of science. You only have a thousand plaques, each good for 160 characters: what are the most important ideas to pass on?

Several players immediately mentioned Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur, but he was a time traveller taking late 19^th century workshop practice back to the Middle Ages, while what I wanted (and want) to do is to provide a scientific framework for a fractured society to build on. I want solid foundations, not olive leaves and cherubim in the margins.

Most lay respondents answered in terms of explaining how to make steam engines or how to harness nuclear energy, both hard to do in thirty words or so. The plaques may be separated, so it would not be safe to write “to be continued” on plaque 8 and proceed with more detail on plaque 9.

The bigger issue is that any technology, if sufficiently advanced will, as Arthur C. Clarke explained to us, seem like magic. That is why I set the limit, because it helps people concentrate on the basics, things which are easily grasped, but hard to find unless you know where to look. Magnetic lines of force, phlogiston and electrons orbiting a nucleus may have helped us think for a while, but they didn’t and won’t help us discover new things.

Most suggestions from science-trained people offered things like a recipe for soap starting with extracting tallow and making lye, the recipe for gunpowder, principles of radio, how to generate and convey electricity, how to make transformers and AC motors, basic hydrodynamics, the periodic table, how to make steel, a map of the world, the scientific method or trigonometry.

Other suggestions included notions like Mendelian inheritance, the second law of thermodynamics, and principles like evolution, the activity series of metals and the law of superposition in sediments. Some of them even offered draft texts:

·       To see tiny animals: carefully grind two clear glass discs into convex shape. Polish these very finely. Look through these together at various distances. Fix in tube.

·       Copy writing. Carve wooden blocks into letter shape. Arrange into words. Apply ink. Apply paper. Metal can be cast into letter shapes and put on drum which rolls over paper.

This was the format that I later chose, because it constrains you to think each idea through, to hone it to perfection, but they made a manual, not a guide. I have since concluded that I would probably start with:

·       Wash your hands, boil your water. Many types of illness are caused by small living things, too small to see. They get into wounds and our digestive systems.

Awareness of this idea would save a great deal of suffering, because looking back, finding out about microbes has not been easy, and knowing what to do after we did find out about microbes was just as hard. Without a healthy population education does not happen, poverty is rife, and progress is blocked. Above all, a framework has to facilitate growth, well-being and a revival of humanity.

Our human voyage is not yet over, but we are quite possibly on a lee shore, with the engine seized from lack of maintenance. The main question is whether we have recourse to the anchors or the lifeboats. Either way, it seems to me that a new Dark Age, driven by stupidity, greed and the fightback of the microbes, is so close that we should sharpen our burins and start engraving the plaques. One thing, though: I decided to go long-form here, stating reasons and background for my choices. I leave the wording and engraving to you, the reader.

I began my adult life wanting to be a pre- and post-Islamic Mediaeval Javanese historian (honest!), but outside events drove me to get a science degree instead. I have practised science most of my life, and taught science at every level from kindergarten to undergraduate, plus adult classes. Over the past two decades, after six years as a science journalist, I drifted back to writing history again, much of it tied to my familiarity with science and technology, and I think that leaves me well-placed to offer a plan.

And now, having said we need principles not recipes, there are a few recipes that will greatly assist the proto-scientists of any New Renaissance. The two key things that define humans are using fire and tools, but even after a nuclear meltdown, the survivors will know to bang the rocks together. Making fire, finding materials and making things, and ensuring health, though, all of these require recipes.

So where would you begin?