by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a surprisingly compelling show on PBS,
the premiere of a new mini-series called Breakthrough: The Ideas That
Changed the World. This episode was called
“The Telescope” and it featured an object lesson in how scientific discoveries
are collaborative processes and the success of one scientist in one time and
place is dependent on other people who’ve made discoveries in other times and
places. The idea of using artificial means to better study the sky began,
according to this program, in Portugal 6,000 years ago, where the primitive
people built elaborate structures to cut off sunlight during the say so their
eyes could become acclimated to the dark and therefore they could make
stronger, more accurate observations of the stars. The show then cuts to
Baghdad in the 9th Century C.E. where a scientist named Ibn al-Kindi
invented the camera obscura
(though Wikipedia lists other claimants) and definitively proved that light is
a phenomenon from outside the
human body rather than something generated from the human eyes and beamed
outward to the objects we see. The show describes Baghdad as the international
center of learning and progress in that era — proof that science and Islam are
not incompatible (Muslims had the early
advantage in developing modern technology until they started getting
ultra-religious and doing things like imposing Sharia law and getting ultra-strict in their
interpretations of the Quran — the Western Christian world went through an
Enlightenment that exalted human reason and the Islamic world went through what
might be described as a de-enlightenment
and lost their competitive advantage in science). It also mentions a plant that
fixes salt from ocean water, purifies it and is known in England as “glassweed”
because it’s essential in the manufacture of absolutely clear glass.
he show
details 14th century Venetian art that depicts the use of eyeglasses
(though it was my understanding that glasses were originally invented in China)
and then moves on to Hans Lippershey, the Dutch optometrist who put two lenses,
a convex and a concave one, together and invented the telescope. Lippershey
applied for a patent to the Dutch government and incredibly was turned down,
meaning his invention immediately became public domain and anyone who could
figure out how to make a telescope could do so. The show then moves on to
Galileo and how he manufactured a telescope far superior to Lippershey’s — it
magnified 10 times as much and produced a far clearer image — and how he used
it to map the surface of the moon and discover the moons of Jupiter. Then the
show digresses to cover Louis Daguerre and the invention of photography, which
meant people could actually take pictures of the stars in the night sky instead
of having to rely on drawings, and on through the 19th century and
one of the unsung heroines of science, Henrietta Levitt, who discovered a means
of measuring not only how bright the stars were in the sky but how far away
they were. After that they discussed Edwin Hubble and his pioneering night-sky
photographs, from which he discovered that the so-called “Andromeda nebula” was
actually another galaxy; that there were innumerable additional galaxies; and
that the universe was actually expanding — from which derived the so-called “Big
Bang theory” that originally everything was just one gigantic ball of
undifferentiated matter and energy until it exploded … and the explosion is
still going on. Finally the show depicted the space-borne telescope named after
Hubble and the way it enabled us to photograph the stars without the earth’s
atmosphere getting in the way. Though afflicted by the overall gee-whiz
attitude of a lot of PBS’s
science shows, Breakthrough: The Telescope is a fascinating look on how scientific discoveries really are made —
by collaborators reaching out to each other over the generations — and it
reinforces Cory Doctorow’s point in his recent San Diego Central Library
lecture that intellectual property really resists commodification. Being able
to claim you “own” a discovery, and no one else can use it without paying you a
royalty (or, if you really want to be an asshole, you don’t license it so no one else can use it at all), does not facilitate scientific progress: quite the contrary,
it retards it.
