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406 [624] SPENCER
SPENCER [624] Under such circumstances, substances seem to glow in the dark. Becquerel’s son, A. H. Becquerel [834], in carrying on his father’s interest in fluorescence was to discover a totally unexpected phenomenon of the very first importance, which Becquerel himself died five years too soon to witness. [624] SPENCER, Herbert English sociologist
27, 1820 Died: Brighton, Sussex, Decem ber 8, 1903 Spencer, the son of a schoolteacher, remained a lifelong bachelor and had lit tle formal education because of his ill health and was tutored by his father and his uncle, a minister. He was a coura geous thinker, however, always ready to speculate and theorize on any subject. The speculations, though always interest ing and sometimes valuable, were often superficial and occasionally quite wrong. In his twenties he was a railway engi neer and tried his hand at invention, though not very successfully, and in 1846 or 1848 he moved to London and went in for journalism. He began to write on sociology and psychology, serv ing as a pioneer in both subjects. His health continued bad in adult life and it was aggravated by that most in curable of all diseases, hypochondria, but his will to express himself rose trium phant over all and he wrote volumi nously. He was always an evolutionist. Even before Darwin [554] had published his Origin of Species, Spencer was specu lating that human society and culture had begun at some homogeneous and simple level and evolved to its present heterogeneous and complex state, just as Baer [478] had shown that the homogen eous germ layers of the embryo devel oped into heterogeneous organs. Once Darwin’s book was published Spencer seized upon it with great delight and applied Darwinian principles to the development of societies and cultures in complete disregard of the fact that this was an application for which the princi ples were not suited. Spencer popularized the term “evolution” (wjhich Darwin himself hardly ever used) and also the phrase “survival of the fittest.” It seemed to Spencer that human indi viduals were in continual competition among themselves, with the weaker nec essarily going to the wall. Since this en sured the “survival of the fittest,” Spencer considered it a good thing. Car rying this notion to its extreme, he ar gued in 1884 that people who were unemployable or burdens on society should be allowed to die rather than be made objects of help and charity. The same sort of argument would have al lowed people suffering from disease or physical imperfections to die (or perhaps be helped over the threshold to avoid a waste of time). Such Spencerian philosophy was ex tremely influential outside science. It was used to support the crudest sort of indus trial competition, with the winner always justifying himself as the fittest. It led to a brutal form of might-makes-right philos ophy in international relations and a glorification of war as a means of weed ing out the “unfit.” It naturally justified whatever racist views a particular person might have, since other races or nation alities could always be judged inferior and therefore rightly put out of the way as “unfit.” To be sure, Spencer did not invent the evils of war, racism, or even cutthroat competition; he did not even go as far as many of his disciples did. However, Spencerism managed to throw a false glitter of “science” over many abomina ble practices, and it tended to discredit the Darwinian view among people who felt kindness, pity, and mercy to be vir tues.
Spencer’s application of Darwinism to social development was, of course, quite unjustified and Darwin himself would have nothing to do with it. Darwinism dealt with changes that required mil lions of years, while social evolution was a matter of centuries and millennia. Moreover the rules of Darwinism were far too simple to cover the complex
[625] RANKINE
TYNDALL [626] changes and manifestations of develop ing culture. As a matter of fact the only way Spencer could justify the rapid changes in man’s history was to adopt a form of inheritance of acquired characteristics after the fashion of Lamarck [336], He believed that scions of civilized groups of men inherited the essence of civilization, and the descendants of primitives lacked the capacity for civilization, having failed to inherit its acquired essence. This brought him into conflict with Weismann [704] and while Weismann, representing the opposite extreme, was not entirely right, he was far closer to what now seems the correct state of affairs. [625] RANKINE, William John Mac- quom (rangTdn) Scottish engineer Born: Edinburgh, July 5, 1820 Died: Glasgow, December 24, 1872
Rankine, the son of an army lieuten ant, was first taught by his father. He read Newton’s [231] Principia in the original Latin when he was but fourteen. Although trained in physics (but having left the University of Edinburgh in 1837 without a degree), he took up civil en gineering and became professor of en gineering at the University of Glasgow in 1855. He brought theoretical princi ples down from the rarefied realm of ac ademic learning and placed them before the earthy practitioners in the field. In particular his Manual of the Steam En gine, published in 1859, introduced working engineers to the realm of ther modynamics for which he introduced much of the modem terminology and notation. He made use of a temperature scale beginning at absolute zero but counting upward by Fahrenheit degrees rather than centigrade degrees as in the Kelvin [652] scale. The former is called the Rankine scale and is abbreviated ° Rank. It is virtually never used by scientists. He also popularized the use of the term “energy,” which had first been in troduced by Young [402] a half century earlier.
Rankine, although handsome, sociable, talented in music, gentle, and popular, never married. [626] TYNDALL, John Irish physicist
August 2, 1820 Died: Hindhead, Surrey, England, December 4, 1893 Tyndall was a descendant of William Tyndale, a sixteenth-century translator of the Bible who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1536. His education was rather haphazard. After some schooling he became a civil servant and then a rail way engineer. However, he had a great drive toward learning, read widely, at tended what lectures he could and finally entered the University of Marburg in Germany, where, along with Frankland [655], he studied chemistry under Bun sen [565] and obtained his doctor’s de gree in 1851. In 1852 he was elected to the Royal Society. He was chosen professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution in 1854 and was a colleague, for over a decade, of Faraday [474], whom he greatly admired. He succeeded to Fara day’s post on the latter’s death and wrote an admiring biography of him. Tyndall’s most important professional work involved the manner in which gases conducted heat, but he is best known for his analysis of the behavior of a beam of light passing through solu tions. If the beam of light passes through pure water or through a solution of the type of substance Graham [547] called crystalloid, the light was not interfered with. Its passage through the water or through the solution when viewed from the side could not be seen. If, however, the beam of light passed through a solution of a colloid, the parti cles of the colloid were just large enough to scatter the light. Some of the light “bounced off” the particles in all direc-
[626] TYNDALL
ROCHE [627] tions. If the beam of light was viewed from the side, it would therefore be fog gily visible. Tyndall’s investigation of this phenomenon in 1869 led to its popular name of the Tyndall effect and earned for him the Rumford medal. A genera tion later Zsigmondy [943] was to de velop the ultramicroscope, based on this phenomenon. Rayleigh [760] was able to show that the efficiency with which light was scat tered varied inversely as the fourth power of the wavelength. In other words, a beam of violet light, with half the wavelength of a beam of red light, would be scattered to 24 or sixteen times the amount Ate red light would be. Tyndall was able to use this to explain the blue of the sky. Sunlight is scattered by the dust particles (of colloidal size) always present in the atmosphere. It is this scattering that makes shadows light enough to read in, for on a world like the moon, which lacks an atmosphere, shadows are pitch black. It is the light waves at the blue end of the spectrum that are most scattered, and the clear sky of day is blue with this scattered light. When sunlight passes through a greater thickness of atmosphere (as it does at sunset), particularly when the sky is unusually dusty, as after a major volcanic eruption, enough of the longer wavelengths are scattered to give the sky a greenish hue. The sun, which is then seen only by the unscattered light at the red end of the spectrum, turns orange or even red. Tyndall was also able to show that some of the dust in air consists of mi croorganisms and this finally explained why broths so easily became riddled with life forms. It was this that so long misled biologists into accepting spontaneous generation. Pasteur [642] was to prevent the infestation of broth by doing no more than keeping out dust. In middle life, Tyndall grew fascinated with the Alps and began to spend his summers mountain climbing. He married at the age of fifty-six and with his wife spent summers in a house he had built, a mile and a half high in the Alps. Tyndall was more famous in his own time as a popularizer of science than as a scientist. He was the first to present for popular consumption the theory of heat as molecular vibration according to its new development by Maxwell [692], This was contained in his book Heat as a
went through numerous editions. He also popularized Helmholtz’s [631] law of conservation of energy. He was one of the first who really appreciated Mayer’s [587] work and had the courage to sug gest that life, in the beginning, had per haps evolved out of inanimate matter. Other books on popular science fol lowed, dealing with water, light, and dust in the air. In 1872 and 1873 he traveled to the United States, where he gave a series of successful lectures, donating the proceeds to a trust for the benefit of American science. He died of an accidental overdose of sleeping medicine. [627] ROCHE, fidouard Albert (rohsh) French astronomer
ber 17, 1820 Died: Montpellier, April 18, 1883 Roche earned his doctorate at the Uni versity of Montpellier in 1844, then worked for three years at the Paris Ob servatory. He gained a professorial ap pointment at Montpellier in 1852. Roche was more a mathematician than an observer, and he worked on the shapes of an astronomical body under the influence of its own gravitational forces, those of near neighbors, and of centrifugal effects. His conclusions are still useful in modem astronomy and are used in studying very closely spaced bi naries, especially in binaries where one of the members is a neutron star or a black hole. Roche is best remembered for his studies of the manner in which the gravi tational forces of a large body can im pose tidal forces on a smaller circling body that are sufficient to break it up. He showed that if the circling body were held together by gravitational forces only 409 [628] LOSCHMIDT MORTILLET
and if chemical bonding could be ig nored, it would be tom apart if it ap proached within two and a half times the radius of the larger body. This is Roche’s limit, and Roche advanced this sugges tion in 1849. Saturn’s rings lie entirely within Roche’s limit, for instance, so that they might represent a satellite that has broken up or one that, under tidal influences, could not form in the first place.
[628] LOSCHMIDT, Johann Joseph (loh'shmit) Austrian chemist
in Czechoslovakia), March 15, 1821
Loschmidt was the son of poor peas ants but showed so much promise that the village priest arranged for his educa tion. By 1839 he was studying at the German University in Prague. He could not obtain a teaching position and his at tempts to make a living in business ended in bankruptcy in 1854. That was a turning point. In 1856 he qualified as a teacher and pretty soon he began publishing papers. He was the first to represent double and triple bonds in organic molecular structures by two and three lines respectively and to show that when a molecule contains more than one alcohol group, each one was attached to a different carbon atom. He also recog nized that certain “aromatic compounds” (so-called because they had a pleasant aroma) all had the benzene ring as part of their molecular structure. Thereafter, the term “aromatic” was applied to any organic molecule containing a benzene ring regardless of the nature of its aroma.
Loschmidt was also the first to attempt to work out the actual size of atoms and molecules, using the theoretical equa tions of Maxwell [692] and Clausius [633] in their work on the kinetic theory of gases. He concluded that the small molecules in air had a diameter of some thing less than a ten-millionth of a centi meter, which was very good for a first estimate, but is a little high. [629] CAYLEY, Arthur (kayflee) English mathematician Bom: Richmond, Surrey, August 16, 1821 Died: Cambridge, January 26, 1895
Cayley’s father was a merchant living in St. Petersburg. Cayley was bom during a short visit of the family to England and he spent most of his childhood in Russia. He entered Cambridge in 1838 and grad uated »first in his class in mathematics. He was no narrow individual, however, for he proved himself outstanding in lan guages as well. He studied law so that he might practice it just enough to finance the mathematical researches that were his real interest. He worked on «-dimen sional geometry, which had been pio neered by Grassman [556], and further developed the algebra of matrices, which Jacobi [541] had introduced. These were to be of importance, respectively, to Ein stein’s [1064] relativity and to Heisen berg’s [1245] contributions to quantum mechanics some three quarters of a cen tury later. Cayley finally obtained a professorial position at Cambridge in 1863, and there he not only continued to work on his mathematics but labored to assure the admittance of women to education at the college level. [630] MORTILLET, Louis Laurent Gabriel de (mawr-tee-ay7) French anthropologist Bom: Meylan, Isère, August 29, 1821 Died: St. Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines, September 25, 1898 Mortillet, although he had a Catholic education, became a freethinker. He took part in the Revolution of 1848 and thought it the wiser part of valor to leave France thereafter. He spent sixteen
[631] HELMHOLTZ HELMHOLTZ
years in Switzerland and Italy, returning to France only in 1864. While abroad, he had worked on zool ogy and as a science writer, but once back in France, he turned to anthro pology. He studied and gathered together all that was known concerning human “prehistory,” a term that came into use only in 1865, and popularized it. He was the first to try to divide the Stone Age into periods based on the level of sophis tication of the stone tools uncovered. Such terms as Chellean, Acheulian, Mousterian, Solutrean, and so on (based on the regions in which the tools in question were found) were used right into the twentieth century. [631] HELMHOLTZ, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von German physiologist and physicist
August 31, 1821 Died: Charlottenburg (near Ber lin), September 8, 1894 Helmholtz, the son of a schoolteacher, was a descendant on his mother’s side of William Penn. After a sickly childhood (he continued to suffer from migraine and fainting spells even in adulthood), he studied medicine at his father’s insis tence, although he himself preferred physics. In medicine, he could qualify for government aid, you see, but not in physics.
He attended the Royal Medicosurgical Institute of Berlin, from which he gradu ated in 1842. J. P. Müller [522] and Mitscherlich [485] were among his teachers there. In return for the aid he had received, he practiced as surgeon in the Prussian army for some years. In 1848 Du Bois-Reymond [611] obtained a lectureship in anatomy for him at the Berlin Academy of Arts. Then, in 1849, through the interest and influence of Humboldt [397], Helmholtz obtained an appointment as professor of physiology at the University of Königsberg. Later, in 1858, he taught anatomy at Heidel berg and still later, in 1871, physics at Berlin. In his broadness of interests Helmholtz much resembles Thomas Young [402], another physician-scientist. Like Young, Helmholtz made a close study of the function of the eye, and in 1851 he invented an ophthalmoscope, with which one could peer into the eye’s interior—an instrument without which the modem eye specialist would be all but helpless. (Babbage [481] had in vented a similar instrument three years before, but Helmholtz’s work was quite independent.) Helmholtz also devised the ophthalmometer, an instrument that could be used to measure the eye’s cur vature. In addition he revived Young’s theory of three-color vision and ex panded it, so that it is now known as the Young-Helmholtz theory. Helmholtz studied that other sense organ, the ear, as well. He advanced the theory that the ear detected differences in pitch through the action of the co chlea, a spiral organ in the inner ear. It contained, he explained, a series of pro gressively smaller resonators, each of which responded to a sound wave of progressively higher frequency. The pitch we detected depended on which resonator responded. Moreover, he pointed out, the quality of a tone depended on the nature, num ber, and relative intensities of the over tones (the overtones being vibrations more rapid than the basic vibration to which the sound source was subjected, the more rapid vibrations being related to the basic vibration by simple ratios). The basic tone plus the overtones caused resonators to react in a specific pattem so that the identical note sounded by two different instruments would be distin guishable by ear because the quality would differ. He also analyzed the fact that combi nations of notes sounded well or discor dant on the basis of wavelengths and the production of beats at particular rates. He thus applied the principles of science to the art of music (something he must have particularly enjoyed, for he was an accomplished musician). Helmholtz was the first to measure the speed of the nerve impulse. His teacher, Müller, was fond of presenting this as an 411
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