Birds, Frogs, and the Unification of Science: A Historical Perspective
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Most of the great thinkers in physics of ancient times were ‘birds’. They went by the name of natural philosophers. The fact that they were birds speaks both to the raw state of scientific knowledge at that time and the attitude that these thinkers had toward what we call science, an attitude that we should resurrect. Aristotle, Plato, Newton and Kepler saw science as a seamless part of a worldview that included religion. Many of them were alchemists and astrologers. Unlike many scientists today, they saw no conflict between science and mysticism and believed both to be created by God for man to study.
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Newton was a supreme bird, seeing Nature as a book written by God, a puzzle whose solutions had room for both calculus and alchemy, both gravitation and an Arian rejection of the Holy Trinity. Newton kept his Arian convictions secret for fear of persecution. At the beginning of the third volume of his famous Principia, Newton said, “It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the system of the world”, leaving no doubt either about his ambition or his grand birdlike worldview.
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Even before Newton, Francis Bacon who can rightly be called the father of the modern scientific method of fact-finding and theorizing was a superb ‘frog’. Bacon rejected the Aristotelian theorizing that had characterized much of the history of science before him and said, “All depends on keeping the eye fixed upon the facts of Nature, for God forbid that we may give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.” Bacon firmly believed that the way to know more about Nature is to go out there and seek facts. We can build theories only after we have enough facts, which is still the way science generally works. The contrast to Bacon was Descartes, a prominent bird who famously said, “I think, therefore I am”. Descartes put a premium on thought, Bacon on fact-finding. As the somewhat apocryphal story goes, Bacon met his end while investigating the effects of cold on a chicken, thus revealing the flip side of fact-finding. Experimenters have it hard.
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One of the great and continuing themes in the history of physics is that of unifying different theories and different forces of nature. For instance it took a bevy of birds like Rudolf Clausius, Gustav Kirchhoff, Sadi Carnot, Lord Kelvin and Willard Gibbs to unify the phenomena of mechanics and heat, inaugurating the science of thermodynamics. Around the same time, the great James Clerk Maxwell was inaugurating the science of electromagnetism by unifying electricity and magnetism. Maxwell was building on the foundational work done by Michael Faraday who had proved that electric fields can generate magnetic fields and vice versa. But the example of Faraday, Carnot and Gibbs raises the interesting possibility of a new creature – the frogbird. Frogbirds are an exotic and rare species who start out as frogs, but who through their persistent and creative frog-like explorations inevitably turn into birds.
