Counterfactual Science History
- From: "Lance" <lachenicht@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 23 Aug 2005 05:49:28 -0700
What if...? Exploring alternative scientific pasts
20 August 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Gregory Radick
Who hasn't wondered what their life would be like today if some past
event had turned out differently - that inconsequential decision, for
example, that led you to meet the love of your life. Sometimes, small
choices change everything. And that is just as true of world history as
it is of your personal life.
Time was when the past was seen as a long march towards an inevitable
present. But historians have come to realise that the present is
anything but inevitable. And so New Scientist asked a panel of experts
to speculate on the scientific pasts that might have been. Follow the
links below to find out what might have happened if Darwin had not
sailed on the Beagle, or Einstein not had his miracle year, as well as
many other scenarios. Or read on while Gregory Radick makes the case
for virtual history.
What if...the Nazis had won; Newton had abandoned science; electric
motors had pre-dated steam engines; Darwin had not sailed on the
Beagle; Charles II had no interest in science and a young Einstein had
been ignored?
ANYONE who has read Robert Harris's book Fatherland is familiar with
the concept of counterfactual history. The idea is simple: pose a "what
if..." about the past, in Harris's case, "what if the Nazis had won the
war?", and then answer it with a plausible and entertaining account of
what might have been.
Counterfactual history might sound like a frivolous exercise, fit only
for airport potboilers and lowbrow TV drama-documentaries. But a
growing number of historians consider it an indispensable tool,
especially for understanding political events. What kind of world would
we be living in now, for example, if Al Gore had been declared the
winner of the 2000 US presidential election?
But science is another matter. There is no shortage of tantalising
what-ifs: what if Newton had carried out his threat to quit science?
What if Darwin hadn't sailed on the Beagle? What if Einstein hadn't
found a job that allowed him so much time to daydream? The trouble is
that until recently, the answer to these questions seemed to be
disappointing: science would look much as it does today.
As far back as the 1820s, British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay
concluded that science had a life of its own. Once knowledge had
progressed to a certain point, he argued, discoveries became
inevitable. We could be confident, he wrote in his essay on the poet
Dryden, that "without Copernicus we should have been Copernicans, that
without Columbus America would have been discovered, that without Locke
we should have possessed a just theory of the origin of human ideas."
Macaulay's general conclusion lives on. Who hasn't heard it said that
while only Shakespeare could have written Hamlet, somebody else would
have come up with evolution by natural selection if Charles Darwin
hadn't? (Famously, Darwin thought somebody else had.)
However humbling for individual scientists, this mindset pays great
tribute to science itself, by granting it an authority which nothing
else in our culture enjoys. If scientists are bound to arrive at
roughly the same conclusions whatever the accidents of history, then
science must reveal how nature truly is.
Not everyone has been prepared to accept this cosy conclusion, however.
In the 1970s and 1980s, some sociologists and historians of science
developed an aversion to it, with results that were often subversive.
In his well-known 1984 book Constructing Quarks, for example, Andrew
Pickering, now at the University of Illinois, suggested that physicists
only came to believe that quarks were real thanks to an entirely
arbitrary preference for particular types of particle accelerators,
detectors and other hardware. Had they chosen differently, physics
might be flourishing just as happily - but without quarks.
Such extreme claims unsurprisingly horrify many scientists and, in the
1990s, they precipitated what are now known as the "science wars".
These were regrettable on a number of counts, but they had the salutary
effect of rousing scientists and science-watchers alike from their
dogmatic slumbers concerning counterfactual history. There is now an
acceptance that the question of inevitability in science is not an idle
one. On the contrary, it goes to the very heart of our basic
understanding of what science is, how it has developed, and how much
respect it deserves. And with this acceptance has come a willingness to
ask what might have been.
That is not to say that science historians are now all beavering away
on "what if" questions. At least one of the old prejudices against
counterfactual history remains stubbornly in place. This is the idea
that we can never really know what might have happened, so it's
pointless to enquire. Despite recent rebrandings as "virtual history"
or "rerunning the tape", counterfactual history still looks to its
critics like so much worthless speculation.
It's undeniably true that we can usually speak much more confidently
about what actually happened than what might have. Suppose I state, for
example, that on 26 June 2000, the rough draft of the human genome was
announced in Washington DC. If challenged, I could produce stacks of
newspaper reports, TV clips, official documents and so on, all
corroborating this statement. No counterfactual argument can ever be
backed so conclusively, so why bother?
But there is, I believe, a very good reason to bother. Showing
conclusively that something happened isn't the be-all and end-all of
history. Historians must also try to explain the past. And, whether
they like it or not, doing so involves asking and answering "what if"
questions. It is widely accepted that the rough draft of the human
genome was completed when it was because Craig Venter's private project
put pressure on the public one. But this claim has a flip side: were it
not for Venter, the sequence would have taken longer. And whatever
plausible evidence you can produce in favour of the factual claim
doubles up as evidence for its counterfactual counterpart.
There's no opting out, then, from counterfactual history. The choice is
between engaging it furtively or openly. So, let us now ask, what if
Newton had abandoned science? What if Darwin had not sailed on the
Beagle? And, of course, what if the Nazis had won the war?
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg18725131.500
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