5 Steps to a 5 by Beth Bartolini-Salimbeni

Author:Beth Bartolini-Salimbeni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw Hill LLC
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Science in an Industrial Age

Advances in gas theory and a spirit of scientific realism dominated the physical sciences in the nineteenth century. Physicists in this period concentrated on providing a scientific understanding of the processes that drove the engines of the Industrial Revolution. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius and the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell developed the Kinetic Theory of Gases. Their theory envisioned gas pressure and temperature as resulting from a certain volume of molecules in motion. Such an approach allowed them to analyze, and therefore to measure and predict, pressure and temperature statistically. Later in the century, physicists such as Julius Robert von Mayer, Hermann von Helmoltz, and William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, pursued this kind of statistical analysis to articulate the laws of thermodynamics.

The success of “matter-in-motion” models in physics created a wider philosophical movement that argued that all natural phenomena could and should be understood as a result of matter in motion. The movement, known as “scientific materialism,” was first articulated by a trinity of German natural philosophers: Karl Vogt, Jakob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner. By the end of the nineteenth century, scientific materialism had become the foundational assumption of the scientific view of the world.

The natural sciences of the nineteenth century were dominated by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. As a young man, Darwin had sailed around the globe as a naturalist for the H. M. S. Beagle. During the Beagle’s five-year voyage, commencing December 27, 1831, and ending on October 2, 1836, Darwin collected specimens for shipment home to England and made observations on the flora and fauna of the many continents he explored. Twenty-three years later, he published a book titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin offered an answer to the two questions at the heart of nineteenth-century natural science: Why was there so much diversity among living organisms? and Why did organisms seem to “fit” into the environments in which they lived? Darwin’s answer, unlike earlier answers that referred to God’s will and a process of creation, was materialist. He argued that both the wide range of diversity and the environmental “fit” of living organisms to their environment were due to a process he termed “natural selection.” The fact that many more organisms were born than could survive led, Darwin explained, to a constant “struggle for existence” between individual living organisms. Only those individuals who survived the struggle passed their physical characteristics onto their offspring. Over millions of years, that simple process had caused populations of organisms to evolve in ways that produced both the amazing diversity and the environmental “fit.”

On the Origin of Species went through six editions, and Darwin’s theory became the central organizing principle of the science of biology, which developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1871, Darwin published The Descent of Man,

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