When Galileo worked the opening pages of The Dialogue he said twice that Italian science and trade was now in danger of being overtaken by northern rivals. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 7/13: The Majestic Clockwork
His [Newton’s] achievements were solitary ... Mathematics: he invented what we now call the Calculus ... Newton kept ‘fluxions’ as his secret tool. ibid.
He had his own small laboratory and his own garden. ibid.
Newton had conceived the idea of a universal gravitation in the plague year of 1666. ibid.
He practised alchemy; in secret he wrote immense tomes about the Book of Revelation. ibid.
The village boy had made good. ibid.
The universe of Newton ticked on without a hitch for about two hundred years. ibid.
Einstein was always full of beautiful simple illustrations of such principles ... What would the world look like if I rode on a beam of light? ibid.
Light is the carrier of information that binds us. ibid.
The crux of all his papers: this unfolding of the heart of knowledge almost petal by petal. ibid.
E=MC2: that comes from a profound insight into the processes of Nature herself, but particularly into the relations between Men, Knowledge, Nature. Physics is not events but observations; relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but relations. ibid.
Revolutions are not made by fate but by men; sometimes they are solitary men of genius. But the great revolutions in the eighteenth century were made by many lesser men banded together. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 8/13: The Drive for Power
England was already the leading manufacturing nation. ibid.
Water had become the engineers’ element. ibid.
The greatest Freemason of all in that age the printer Benjamin Franklin. He was American emissary here in France at the court of Louis XVI in 1784 when The Marriage of Figaro was first performed. ibid.
The scientific entertainment of the day was electricity. ibid.
This was a heroic age – Thomas Telford felt that, spanning the landscape with iron. ibid.
Nearly a thousand pieces for Catherine the Great of Russia ... His [Wedgwood] own pottery Creamware. ibid.
Societies like the Lunar Society represent the sense of the makers of that revolution – that very English sense – that they had a social responsibility. ibid.
Cotton underwear and soap could work a transformation in the lives of the poor. ibid.
We think of pollution as a modern blight but it’s not. ibid.
Energy had become the central concept in science. ibid.
The railways – they were made possible by Richard Trevithick. ibid.
The Industrial Revolution was terribly cruel to those whose lives and livelihoods it overturned. ibid.
The story of the British gentlemen and their scientific eccentricities is not irrelevant. It was such men who made Nature romantic. ibid.
The theory of evolution by natural selection was put forward in the 1850s independently by two men: one was Charles Darwin who lived in this house in the village of Down in Kent, the other was Alfred Russel Wallace. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 9/13: Evolution: The Ladder of Creation
There are two traditions of explanation that march side by side in The Ascent of Man: one is the analysis of the physical structure of the world, the other is the study of the processes of life. ibid.
The manifestations of life, its expressions, its forms, are so diverse that they must contain a large element of the accidental. And yet the nature of life is so uniform that it must be constrained by many necessities. ibid.
It cannot be an accident that the Theory of Evolution is conceived twice by two men living at the same time in the same culture – the culture of Queen Victoria in England. ibid.
Species are not immutable. ibid.
When he was twenty-five Wallace decided to become a full-time naturalist. ibid.
Wallace had never been further than Wales but he was not overawed by the exotic. ibid.
Alfred Wallace returned from the tropics as Darwin had done, convinced that related species diverged from a common stock and nonplussed as to why they diverged. What Wallace did not know was that Darwin had hit on the explanation two years after he returned to England. ibid.
Darwin ... A mind that did not want to face the public. ibid.
Wallace ... The same book by Malthus, and had the same explanation flash on him that had struck Darwin. ibid.
Darwin received Wallace’s paper here in his study at Down House in June 1858. ibid.
Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species and published it at the end of 1859. ibid.
Each one of us traces back through that evolutionary process. ibid.
We look more deeply at the chemistry we all share. ibid.
The Theory of Evolution is no longer a battleground: that’s because the evidence for it is so much richer and more varied now than in the days of Darwin and Wallace. ibid.
Between me and the chimpanzee there is just one difference in an amino acid ... The number of amino acids differences which is a measure of the evolutionary distance between me and the other mammals. ibid.
Proteins are the constituents of all living things. ibid.
There are seven basic shapes of crystals in nature and a multitude of colours. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 10/13: World Within World
Of all the variety of crystals the most modest is common salt. ibid.
What makes these family likenesses among the elements? ibid.
What distinguished Mendeleev was not only genius but a passion for the elements. They became his personal friends. ibid.
Each element has a characteristic atomic weight. ibid.
Mendeleev didn’t have all the elements: 63 out of the total of 92 were known. ibid.
The underlying pattern of the atoms was numerical, that was clear. ibid.
J J Thomson in Cambridge discovers the electron. ibid.
The notion that there is an underlying structure – a world within the world of the atom – captures the imagination of artists at once. ibid.
The cubist painters for example are obviously inspired by the families of crystals. ibid.
Niels Bohr ... what he questioned was the structure of the world. ibid.
Ernest Rutherford who round about 1910 was the outstanding experimental physicist in the world. Rutherford was then at Manchester. And in 1911 he proposed a new model for the atom. ibid.
Energy must also come in lumps or quanta as well. ibid.
The ascent of man is a richer and richer synthesis. ibid.
Matter itself evolves. ibid.
Entropy is a measure of disorder. ibid.
Nature works by steps ... I call it stratified stability. ibid.
Physics in the twentieth century is an immortal work. ibid.
One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. Once achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that aim is unattainable. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 11/13: Knowledge or Certainty *****
There is no absolute knowledge ... All information is imperfect. ibid.
The longest of the invisible waves are the radio waves. ibid.
The infra-red waves are heat waves. ibid.
White Light is a mixture of waves lengths. ibid.
The errors can’t be taken out of the observations. ibid.
Histories has many ironies ... The errors are inextricable bound up with the nature of human knowledge. ibid.
There is no way of exchanging information that does not demand an act of judgment. ibid.