184 AKNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1941 



Democritus with the beginnings of an atomic theory which even the 

 opposition of an Aristotle could not down. Another century brings 

 us to Euclid, but we must wait yet another century until, around 

 200 B. C, appeared that resplendent figure of old, Archimedes, bring- 

 ing with him the law of buoyancy, the principle of the lever, the 

 discovery of light reflection and the cry of "Eureka," which White- 

 head says should be celebrated as the awakening cry of mathematical 

 physics. 



In the 17 centuries from that day to the time of Copernicus (1500) 

 physics was to remain at practically a standstill. In another century 

 these latent stirrings of the scientific spirit were brought to light for 

 the first time in the father of modern science, Galileo Galilei, whom 

 we know so well that we invariably call him by his first name. Im- 

 portant it is that he should be the first to formulate inertia, to dis- 

 cover the law of falling bodies, to invent the pendulum and the 

 telescope, to discover the four satellites of Mercury and the sun- 

 spots. More important still, says Millikan, that he should see "that 

 force is proportional not to motion, but to the rate of change of 

 motion, an idea the most profound in human thought." I dwell on 

 Galileo because he is generally regarded as the originator of the 

 modern viewpoint in science. He, asserts Einstein, "saw that all 

 knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it." Thus, 

 as Whitehead so aptly puts it, "the world waited 1,800 years from 

 Archimedes to Galileo for someone who could relate abstract mathe- 

 matical ideas to experimental investigation of natural phenomena." 



Modern scientific inquiry as such seems to have begun with Koger 

 Bacon in the thirteenth century. Leonardo da Vinci was indeed a 

 voice crying in the scientific wilderness of the fifteenth century. 

 Tycho Brahe's tables of 1601 were a first step in scientific observa- 

 tion. By means of them one could tell the position of the planets. 

 It took a Kepler (1610) to see in them the three fundamental laws 

 of planetary motion. Kepler could then tell us where the planets 

 would be. In 3 inches he condensed the voluminous tables of Brahe, 

 a tremendous scientific advance. 



And then came Newton ! Whitehead says that science came of age 

 that day with Newton in his garden. Einstein regards Newton's 

 laws of motion as expressed in differential equations as the "greatest 

 advance in thought that a single individual has ever been privileged 

 to make." He says further that Newton was the first creator of 

 a comprehensive, workable system of theoretical physics. This one 

 man, he continues, gave intellectual guidance to science for 200 years." 

 Perhaps no man, then or since, has known Newton's scientific view- 

 point as has his modern prototype, Albert Einstein, who has done 

 more than any man to supplement his work. He says of Newton, 



