The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion

There are some great questions

that have intrigued and haunted us since the dawn of humanity.

What is out there?

How did we get here?

What is the world made of?

The story of our search to answer those questions is the story of science.

Of all human endeavours, science has had the greatest impact on our lives,

on how we see the world, on how we see ourselves.

Its ideas, its achievements, its results, are all around us.

So how did we arrive at the modern world?

Well, that is more surprising and more human than you might think.

The history of science is often told as a series of eureka moments,

the ultimate triumph of the rational mind,

but the truth is that power and passion, rivalry and sheer blind chance,

have played equally significant parts.

In this series, I'll be offering a different view of how science happens.

It's been shaped as much by what's outside the laboratory as inside.

Oh, whoa! Whoa!

This is the story of how history made science and science made history,

and how the ideas that were generated changed our world.

It is a tale of power,

proof

and passion.

This time one of the oldest questions we've asked.

These days you have to drive a long way to go and see the night sky

the way that our ancestors did.

One of science's great achievements was to create artificial light,

but, unfortunately, it does tend to blot out the beauty of the cosmos.

It's very peaceful and quiet here, which is rather surprising

because you and I are actually on a giant rock

which is spinning through empty space at at least 1,000 miles an hour.

And with our companion, the Moon, we are also hurtling round the Sun

at a terrifying 67,000 miles an hour.

And that's not all, because we are part of a huge galaxy called the Milky Way,

which consists of hundreds of billions of stars.

Out there, we have seen the birth and death of stars,

heard the whisper of creation.

We now realise our universe is a place of unimaginable strangeness.

It ls so hard to understand that it's not surprising that,

for most of history, there was a very different view of what is out there.

This is the story of how we came to know what we do know

about this bizarre and dazzling universe.

For me, the story begins in Prague, in the opening days of the 17th century,

a defining moment in the creation of modern science.

It was here that three critical factors came together,

men with daring ideas, collectors of evidence

and someone prepared to pay for it all.

Europe was in turmoil.

Forces of religious and political change were sweeping across the continent.

These were violent and dangerous times.

But out of all this tumult would emerge a new vision of the cosmos.

It all started when a couple of the age's more unusual thinkers

came to work at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II.

In those days, Prague was a major centre of power and culture.

The Emperor Rudolf was hungry for new discoveries,

new ideas to dazzle and impress his fellow rulers.

His enormous wealth and patronage drew to Prague

one of the brightest stars of the age,

the astronomer Tycho Brahe, an eccentric Danish nobleman.

Tycho was a wonderfully colourful character.

When he was a student, he lost a large chunk of his nose in a duel

and had it replaced with a metal one.

Legend has it he kept a dwarf under his table,

and he believed that that dwarf was clairvoyant.

He also apparently kept an elk,

which fell down the stairs when drunk and died.

There is, however, one thing about Tycho which is absolutely certain.

He was a passionate stargazer.

Science needs evidence and Tycho was a new sort of data gatherer.

He built a vast observatory

and equipped it with the best instruments money could buy.

And so was his commitment night after night, for over 20 years.

He was putting together a unique body of evidence

that would in time reveal the secrets of how the planets move.

Right, so we've got the Moon over there.

Now, this is how you'd make an observation with Tycho's quadrant.

It, of course, is pointing at the Moon.

You take the sighting arm, you sight it exactly upon the Moon,

you would look through the upper slit

across the upper part of that central brass peg.

Yeah.

Then the lower slit through the lower peg,

so the upper and the lower cusps of the Moon,

the points of the Moon, were between them.

You've got it lined up, essentially, and...

Absolutely lined up.

Okay, so I get that as 16 degrees and 40 minutes of arc.

That sounds perfectly reasonable.

Okay, and that is logged, the Moon, on the 26th of May at just past 10:00.

Just past 10:00.

So he would go on plotting these details throughout the night, basically.

Oh, yes.

Oh, well, of course, not for the Moon, the Moon would set,

but you'd do it for planets, as things appropriately came in the sky,

and built up these great observing logs of raw data,

and out of that, of course, is what the heart of science is.

Tycho starts this tradition of science

not just being about information and theories, about data.

Right.

Information and analysis from fresh observations.

-Books and books of it, presumably. -Absolutely.

Having seen you in action now, what I'd like to do now is look at a star,

really the pole star, the North Star.

The pole star, which, of course, everything rotates around,

the star over here.

What Tycho was doing represents something really important

in the emergence of science,

a commitment to cold, hard, obstinate facts.

I can see it, now I'm lining it up with that and...

That is 51 degrees and 36 arc minutes.

Right, excellent. So that's my first star.

It is, indeed. Not bad at all.

Thank you. I've got 776 to go.

Congratulations!

-(LAUGHING) -Thank you.

It's a shame that the craftsmen who built such beautiful instruments,

and men like Tycho, who used them, get so little credit.

Because the evidence that he gathered would in time undermine a belief system

that had dominated Western thought for over 2,000 years.

Many early civilisations developed sophisticated ideas about the heavens.

But the Western view was, above all defined in ancient Greece.

You can get a sense of Greek cosmology if you come here.

This is the sacred site of Delphi.

Its famous oracle drew people from all over the Greek world.

This is the temple of Apollo, and it's where you'd have come

and often received extremely cryptic advice.

It is also where you would have found the omphalos,

a stone which marked the centre of the world,

and therefore, for many Greeks, the centre of the cosmos.

Down the centuries, Greek philosophers argued long and hard

about the shape of the universe and what is out there,

until in the end, one particular view became dominant.

Around the 4th century B.C,,

a number of Greeks developed a model of the universe

in which the Earth was stationary and everything else moved

in giant, perfect circles around the stationary Earth.

The perfect, circular orbits of the other planets

reflecting the perfection of the gods that had put them there.

It was simple, intuitive, and, of course, it was wrong.

Yet it endured.

So why did this idea persist for so long?

Well, it's partly because it's comforting

to be at the centre of things,

but also because the alternative made absolutely no sense.

If we really are on a rock hurtling through space,

then surely we would be constantly buffeted by huge winds.

So common sense said the Earth must be stationary

with everything going round it.

But there was a problem with this idea, a pretty fundamental one.

A remarkable discovery, made just over a century ago,

gives us a striking insight into the Greek view of the cosmos.

It was the result of a freak storm.

Battered by strong winds, a group of sponge divers

took shelter on the small Greek island of Antikythera.

When the storm finally subsided,

one of the divers decided to explore the unfamiliar waters.

There were no sponges,

but strewn across the seabed were the remains of an ancient shipwreck,

its cargo 2,000 years old.

They also found a strange bronze mechanism

which would turn out to be one of the rarest and, in its own way,

most precious treasures ever recovered from the ancient world.

It is a beautifully engineered scientific instrument,

with wheels and cogs carved from bronze.

Nothing like this would be made for another 1,000 years.

But its exact purpose has long been a puzzle.

Michael Wright has spent more than 20 years

attempting to create a model of the original

and to understand its workings.

-Hello. -Hello.

Nice to meet you. And this is the mechanism, is it?

This is the mechanism.

Do you mind if I twiddle?

Of course, have a go. You won't... You won't break it.

So what's it doing when I turn this?

This is the representation of the sky as people tended to think of it.

You can picture, uh, if you like,

the Earth being at the centre of the dial,

and the planets and the Sun and Moon going round us.

That's the Moon there. That's the Moon.

And as the Moon goes round, that's presumably what, full Moon?

That's a full Moon because it's opposite the Sun pointer.

Very neat.

What impresses me is, so somebody designed this well over 2,000 years ago.

Yes.

Built it well over 2,000 years ago.

Of course, the bit you're looking at here is my restoration.

-Yes. -So, uh...

I don't guarantee the original was exactly like this

but I do say with some confidence it was along these lines.

That is very clever!

But what this mechanism illustrates

ls how the Greeks wrestled with a tricky astronomical problem,

one that comes about if you think

that the Earth is at the centre of the universe.

It's this.

The planets sometimes appear to move backwards in the night sky.

It's a problem that the Greeks recognised and agonised over.

Most of the time, they're going forwards,

which is sort of what I would expect,