Scientists and social responsiveness: contemporary
Scientists and social responsiveness in past times
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"Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall
all hang separately."
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790)
A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist,
inventor, civic activist, statesman and diplomat. As a scientist he was a major figure in the Enlightenment and
the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity.
He was an early proponent of colonial unity and as a political writer and activist he, more than anyone, invented
the idea of an American nation and as a diplomat during the American Revolution, he secured the French alliance
that helped to make independence possible.
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably
the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty,
to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was the principal author of the Declaration.
A horticulturist, statesman, architect, archaeologist, paleontologist, author, inventor and founder of the University
of Virginia.
When President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 he said, "I
think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together
at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
On the Great Library of Alexandria (Sagan, 1980)
Of that legendary library, all that survives is this dank and forgotten cellar; it's in the
library annex, the Serapeum, which once was a temple what was later reconsecrated to knowledge. This few
moldering shelves, probably once in a basement storage room, are its only physical remains. But this place was
once the brain and glory of the greatest city on the planet Earth. If I could travel back into time, this is the
place I would visit, the Library of Alexandria at its height 2,000 years ago. Here, in an important sense, began
the intellectual adventure which had led us into space. All the knowledge in the ancient world was once within
these marble walls. In the Great Hall there might be a mural of Alexander with the ceremonial head dress of the
pharaos of ancient Egypt. This library was a citadel of human consciousness, a beacon on our journey to the stars.
It was the first true research institute in the history of the world. And what did they study? They studied everything:
the entire Cosmos. Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. In a way, it's the opposite of
Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. The intricate and subtle way in which the universe
is put together. Genius flourished there. In addition to Eratosthenes, there was the astronomer Hipparchus, who
mapped the constellations and established the brightness of the stars; and there was Euclid, who brilliantly systematized
geometry and told his king, who was struggling some difficult problem
in mathematics, that there is no royal road to geometry; there was Dionysius of Thrace, the
man who defined the parts of speech, nouns, verbs and so on, and did for language what Euclid did for geometry;
there was Herophilus, the physiologist who identified the brain rather than the heart as the seat of intelligence;
there was Archimedes, the greatest mechanical genius until the time of Leonardo da Vinci; and there was the astronomer
Ptolemy, who compiled much of what today is the
pseudoscience of astrology: his Earth-centered univese held sway for 1,500 years, showing
that intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong. And among these great men there was also
a great woman, her name is Hypatia, she was mathematician
and astronomer, the last light of the library, whose martyrdom was bound up with the destruction
of this place seven centuries after its founding. Adapted from: Sagan, C. 1980. Cosmos. Chapter I. Random
House, New York.
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