COSMOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY 95 



he worked a chemical revolution. Copernicus' work forced a re- 

 appraisal of die nature of the cosmos and of man's place in it; La- 

 voisier's work forced nothing of the sort. 



With the name of Newton we associate a genuine revolution in 

 cosmology. For example, the Newtonian conception of "natural law" 

 leads through Locke and others to the outlook of the Age of Enlight- 

 enment. The elegance of the mechanism of the cosmos Newton him- 

 self regarded as absolute proof of the existence of God; but elabora- 

 tion of the "world-machine" led inexorably to Laplace's conviction 

 that, in celestial mechanics, the hypothesis of God is a superfluity. 

 Consider now: in science Dalton's atomic theory did for chemistry, 

 and Maxwell's electromagnetic theory for physical optics, very much 

 what Newton did for physical dynamics. But Dalton's work or Max- 

 well's work is never called "scientific revolution"! Even the violent 

 overthrow of the long-entrenched caloric theory by the kinetic 

 theory (in which action Maxwell also distinguished himself) fails 

 to win estate as "scientific revolution." Naturally! The effect in sci- 

 ence of a theoretical advance is almost irrelevant to any claim on that 

 title, the sine qua non for award of which is the production of a major 

 upheaval in cosmology. This is precisely what was produced by the 

 work of Darwin. Darwin destroyed no established scientific theory: 

 indeed the idea of evolution (though not evolution by natural selec- 

 tion) had been "in the air" for more than half a century. Surely it is 

 obvious that the genuine revolution in which Darwin figures ( and in 

 which, significantly enough, Huxley figures even larger) is a revolu- 

 tion in cosmology. And the discrimination expressed when we speak 

 of a Darwinian or Newtonian ( or Freudian ) revolution— but never of 

 a Daltonian or Maxwellian revolution— itself defines for us the do- 

 main of cosmology: it is the locus of primary impact of what we call 

 "scientific revolutions." 



THE CLIMATE OF OPINION 



Contemplating the very irregular appearance of genius, scientific and 

 otherwise, Kroeber hypothesizes that of many seeds of potential gen- 

 ius, produced sparsely but relatively uniformly in all places and 

 times, only those few flower that are reared in the cultural environ- 

 ments of certain particular places and times. Consider, as an example, 

 the astonishing galaxy of scientists who grew up in or near Budapest 

 around the turn of the present century. Hungary had not earlier, and 



