Written by: Alexander Ford, Jessica Li, and Julia Kravchenko
To those outside of science – our progress appears in bursts. Nothing nothing nothing, and suddenly you can take penicillin for your pneumonia. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and now the first internal combustion engine lets you travel farther and faster. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then they’ve suddenly split the atom.
Yet “nothing” is never truly nothing. Each of these discoveries is an amalgam of countless smaller discoveries, countless stories, countless journeys, and countless scientists tenaciously repeating the cycle of the scientific method. Science is the means by which we humans expand our knowledge of cause and effect in the physical world. It is the process by which we create wonders and terrors, save lives and destroy them. It is – fundamentally – a framework that we never stop building upon, the path our species has travelled along to get us to today, and the path that spirals out ever outwards into the future.
The title of this 5th anniversary edition is drawn from the famous quote by Isaac Newton in a 1675 letter, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”, a metaphor for the great discoveries he himself had come to, from calculus to gravity, and how even these accomplishments are derived from a lineage of work stretching back thousands of years to the ancient mathematicians. It emphasizes humility, and acknowledgement of that long lineage of scientific advancement under the surface of every discovery.
It’s fitting that this quote itself stands upon literary shouldersgoes back even further – originating in the 12th century with the French philosopher Bernard of Chartres who wrote:
“We are like dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance—not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical height, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant stature.”
Within this edition, we cover some scientific discoveries that have helped us see farther than ever before. and take time to explore our connections to our scientific giants, and how much we build on their legacies when we create our own. John Donne perhaps said it best, “No man is an island, Entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main” – and the institution of scientific discovery is no different in the reciprocal connections to the lives of nearly every human being and every discovery.
As we look ahead to the future, we must also look down – and remember that we all – in our own ways – stand on giants of our own.
