If I told you that the world has a storage problem – you can only keep our history of music or our history of science, which would you choose? It is easy to recognise the works of Bach, Beethoven and the Beatles as valuable treasures, but what is the value of Edison, Ehrlich and Einstein? I would say to you that when you switch on a light you are hearing the music of Edison. If you shake a tub of pills, that’s the sound of Ehrlich. When your pint of milk beeps as the barcode is read by reflected lasers, that’s Einstein.

We owe a great debt to the scientists who gave us things we now take for granted, but respect alone is not a good enough reason to learn about the history of science. Unlike music, (or art, or literature), science is not a museum of finished achievements. It is a continuous progression in which scientists throughout history have played their part. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most important scientists of all time, famously wrote the selfless lines: ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’

Of course, it is wise to learn from the mistakes of our past, but perhaps it is wiser to learn from the achievements. Knowing how these ‘giants’ thought, planned and worked is fascinating in itself, but it is valuable to know what inspired them, what motivated them and what helped them to make progress – so that we can do the same for today’s scientists. President John F. Kennedy motivated a generation with his philosophy that ‘we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’

Great science often requires persistence, self-sacrifice and investment. In every new era there is a turning point, an inspired scientific advance that brings about a new way of living. From age to age, we have progressed through pyramids and roman legions to modern industry and the electronic chip, but man has remained physically the same. As Jacob Brunowski said in his television series The Ascent of Man, ‘this series of inventions by which man has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution, not biological, but cultural evolution.’ The history of science is central to understanding how mankind has literally shaped our world.

Just as the Victorians could not imagine how we live today, it is impossible to imagine what the world will be like one hundred years from now. It is the next generation of scientists who will make the strides that continue to change our world and who will battle the problems of our changing environment and increasing poverty. It will not be easy, but by reflecting on our past we can continue to guide, inspire and encourage our future scientists to take their place in history.

Image by cliff1066 via Flickr