Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan Read Free Book Online Page A

of this world beckoned like a liberation … The road to this paradise was not so comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.”

CHAPTER 4
     

IN PRAISE
OF SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY
     

     
    The cultivation of the mind is a kind of food
supplied for the soul of man.
MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO ,
De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum
,
Vol. 19 (45–44 B.C. )
To one, science is an exalted goddess;
to another it is a cow which provides him
with butter.
FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER ,
Xenien
(1796)
     
    IN THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century, the largely self-educated British physicist Michael Faraday was visited by his monarch, Queen Victoria. Among Faraday’s many celebrated discoveries, some of obvious and immediate practical benefit, were more arcane findings in electricity and magnetism, then little more than laboratory curiosities. In the traditional dialogue between heads of state and heads of laboratories, the Queen asked Faraday of what use such studies were, towhich he is said to have replied, “Madam, of what use is a baby?” Faraday had an idea that there might someday be something practical in electricity and magnetism.
    In the same period the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell set down four mathematical equations, based on the work of Faraday and his experimental predecessors, relating electrical charges and currents with electric and magnetic fields. The equations exhibited a curious lack of symmetry, and this bothered Maxwell. There was something unaesthetic about the equations as then known, and to improve the symmetry Maxwell proposed that one of the equations should have an additional term, which he called the displacement current. His argument was fundamentally intuitive; there was certainly no experimental evidence for such a current. Maxwell’s proposal had astonishing consequences. The corrected Maxwell equations implied the existence of electromagnetic radiation, encompassing gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared and radio. They stimulated Einstein to discover Special Relativity. Faraday and Maxwell’s laboratory and theoretical work together have led, one century later, to a technical revolution on the planet Earth. Electric lights, telephones, phonographs, radio, television, refrigerated trains making fresh produce available far from the farm, cardiac pacemakers, hydroelectric power plants, automatic fire alarms and sprinkler systems, electric trolleys and subways, and the electronic computer are a few devices in the direct evolutionary line from the arcane laboratory puttering of Faraday and the aesthetic dissatisfaction of Maxwell, staring at some mathematical squiggles on a piece of paper. Many of the most practical applications of science have been made in this serendipitous and unpredictable way. No amount of money would have sufficed in Victoria’s day for the leading scientists in Britain to have simply sat down and invented, let us say, television. Few would argue that the net effect of these inventions was other than positive. I notice that even many young people who are profoundly disenchanted with Westerntechnological civilization, often for good reason, still retain a passionate fondness for certain aspects of high technology—for example, high-fidelity electronic music systems.
    Some of these inventions have fundamentally changed the character of our global society. Ease of communication has deprovincialized many parts of the world, but cultural diversity has been likewise diminished. The practical advantages of these inventions are recognized in virtually all human societies; it is remarkable how infrequently emerging nations are concerned with the negative effects of high technology (environmental pollution, for example); they have clearly decided that the benefits outweigh the risks. One of Lenin’s aphorisms was that socialism plus electrification equals communism.