"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied."
I think it may be more important to tell them about bacteria. But in reality, I think passing down a single sentence is almost completely useless. If that's all that's passed down, they will have to make the exact same discoveries we made, although we may be able to lead them towards these discoveries.
Also, expecting all of future human kind -- more developed than we are now -- to value some sentence passed down by their oh-so-knowledgeable ancestors (us) seems a bit self-centered to me. A more intelligent future mankind will make their own discoveries, and not care much about any single sentence, regardless of who wrote it.
AFAIK, that is empirically established to be true in the US, and seems largely due to the fact that environmental factors that impede full development of intelligence are being addressed. I'm less aware of research on global trends but it seems likely to be generally the same.
I would go further than that even. Human beings are becoming more and more intelligent by the day. I know things today I didn't know yesterday, and certainly much more than I knew a year ago.
I don't disagree that knowledge is different from intelligence, but surely there's a connection between the two.
It seems to me that intelligence has more to do with the acquisition of knowledge, than whatever you have in possession. If we define intelligence as possession of knowledge, then a dog is more intelligent than humans in many aspects (eg. it can smell a lot better, so it can recognize who was recently in a room that it enters). But if we define intelligence as the ability to acquire new knowledge, then humans are vastly superior to all other species.
In that way, it seems possession of knowledge is more like a symptom of intelligence, rather than being intelligence itself.
That's the problem with benchmarks. For IQ tests, we measure a small subset of skills, and then extrapolate to make conclusions about other, unmeasured skills.
This works fine as long as the tested humans are unaware of the methodology, because extrapolation doesn't work when the subjects have specialized, specifically, in the subset of skills from which we extrapolate. In other words, if we keep measuring intelligence through IQ tests, sooner or later we will only be good at solving IQ tests -- and that's not very intelligent.
I think in that event, teaching them how to fish would be more important than giving them a fish.
My suggestion would be something that would promote free thought. "All men are equal and thought, ideas, and speech should never be punished" or something along these lines.
while I obviously agree those are important ideas, a lot of our knowledge in "science" was done during times when this didn't apply, so I feel like free thought/equality is something that arises naturally as science marches on.
Other than the already mentioned experimental method, IMO the most efficient idea (which also would end up encouraging free thought) would be: "spread knowledge, build libraries, and don't burn books".
Perhaps simply the idea that knowledge could be transcribed onto physical objects and conveyed to other people across intervening time and distance would be a good candidate as the most important idea in human history?
If we only have one sentence, we'd best make sure we cram as much information into that sentence as possible.
Finally those years of studying Latin are paying off.
> "Emotions take much longer to change than thoughts." or something like that. (for communication: "Emotional messages need repeating to sink in.")
If a future generation could start off being able to distinguish between their primal brain-functions and their thoughts, they might progress much faster than we do.
What would you do with that knowledge, without also knowing the scientific method? Whereas the scientific method allowed us to discover the atomic hypothesis, and so is more powerful.
Presumably people were doing roughly the scientific method long before anyone popularized some formulation of the scientific method. Heck, animals (probably even plants) do "trial and error" which I would argue is a very basic form of scientific inquiry. In the context of this thought experiment, I think we're supposed to assume that humans are still capable of rational problem-solving, and the sentence we choose to pass on is a more specific piece of knowledge. After all, we're clearly assuming that some basics (like the ability to understand the sentence) are maintained.
Before the scientific method, there was the philosophical "the idea that sounds the most convincing is true" method, and the biological "the ideas that my unconscious sensory system implants in me are true" method. It took a fairly long time for people to realize that the former's severe issue with many things sounding convincing could be addressed by carefully designing situations (experiments) where the latter would prune them down.
That's the thing though, they weren't! Occasional smart people did follow something similar, but not with the methodical approach required to produce real results. Up until fairly recently, almost all humans believed that you could divine everything you needed to know about the world from pure contemplation. The idea that your hypothesis is worthless until backed by hard evidence is relatively new, and coincides pretty well with the sudden rapid advancement of technology.
I hoped it has to do something with math, not just "it's atoms". We already know hard key points in our scientific history — next generations could use these initially obscure fragments to prevent spending time on already invalidated methods and theories.
I just read two books that I thought would be unrelated, but ended up being very related in a way that was fascinating to read the two in tandem — The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.
The Swerve is about Epicurus and Lucretius — who both helped popularize atomism 2000+ years ago. I never thought much of the philosophical implications of the world being made of up small, somewhat interchangeable parts — but this idea was at the core of Epicureanism, and had many implications.
If you're interested in learning more about the history of atomic theory, I'd highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
It goes through the general history of science from the 1890s to the 1950s. There are brief biographies of people who played an important role — Ernest Rutherford, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein (to name a few). Those were exciting times to be a physicist.
A very, very good book. Also, mention should be made of Leo Szilard who was the first person that we know of to be aware of the nuclear chain reaction.
Atomism assumes unchanging building blocks which antimatter disproves. Which is really the problem when trying to link philosophical ideas with physics the real world is very odd and nobody actually came close.
Even just from a chemistry standpoint atoms don't fit atomism unless you treat electrons and the nucleus as separate things. The name was copied before we really understood what was going on.
The general principle that any problem you face, no matter how big, can be broken down into smaller and easier to solve problems, recursively, is the most important idea in human history.
Atomic theory is just a special case of this insight.
What is special about atomic theory is the supposition that there is an endpoint to recursive reduction. That at some point you cannot find anything simpler.
There is a subtle difference between this and reductionism. Suppose your big problem is you are hungry. You could break this big problem into little problems in many different ways, e.g. [drive to McDonalds, get food], or [go to fridge, eat leftovers], etc.
Either way, you have solved your original problem, but you haven't reduced your original problem. Your original problem was not that you had to go to Mcdonalds, nor was it that you had to got o the fridge. Your original problem was that you were hungry, which is distinct from the solutions.
Microorganisms as a source of disease seems a pretty important concept; we take it for granted now, but ignorance of this was a huge deal up until about 150 years ago.
I think you're right. I think that _is_ a more important concept.
Why?
Because it does many things at once.
1) Establishes natural biological causes for the transmission of diseases, thereby supplanting all sorts of other theories like hex-casting, bad omens, malevolent deities, and so on and so on
2) It says that there are things that can't be seen with the naked eye that share our biology, which opens the door to atomism anyway
3) It says that biology shares a common substrate which is a useful concept in itself
4) And practically speaking, if the information that microorganisms are disease vectors is coupled with the knowledge that certain routines such as cleaning and washing prevent said transmission and that other substances act as anti-bacterial agents then human and animal welfare is promoted and suffering is reduced allowing for more rapid societal progress
That is a very important idea, but it was atomism that lead to it.
For thousands of years, people explained natural phenomena like disease through alleged supernatural causes. Then Greek science-philosophers attempted to explain them through thoroughly natural causes. They tried various ideas like everything is fire, but it was atomism that was successful, and it lead to modern science in general.
Especially vaccines. It's such a counterintuitive concept : injecting yourself with a small doses of a disease to prevent that disease. Do you want some polio, it's good for you? Er, no, go away you freak! Contrast that with atomic theory: nearly everybody can grasp the concept that bigger parts are made of smaller parts.
> That the world is not solid but made up of tiny particles
I'm not sure that's how most people understand it. "Tiny particles" still maintains the notion for most of us of a physical / materialist world when things truly exist, with some kind of an inner essence or structure or core, which we would associate to these "particles".
Se we think that a tree, or a car, is a bunch of those particles. And that we too are a bunch of particles. It doesn't shake the notion of physical existence so it has no profound impact on the way we see ourselves and the world and the way we behave.
It's very hard to let go of this view though. A very healthy and middle step that I wish was taught everywhere is to start looking at the world as an interdependent system, including us, and understand nothing truly exists in isolation.
More important, I think, is the concept of objective, empirical, peer-reviewed science. Democritus made up the concept of atoms, but it took 2,000 years before science made them real in Einstein's paper on the Brownian motion.
I doubt anything will beat property ownership, agriculture, and money, in that order. I reckon if you remove those these three things and wait a year and the human race will be unrecognizable from a cultural point of view.
I think property ownership is an instinctive trait. Just like you don't have to tell a cat to piss against all the trees to assert ownership, you probably don't need to tell people about property.
I guess we could tell them "communism is bad" but that's a bit too cold war even for me.
Is property ownership instinctive? I'd definitely agree that [usage] is instinctive, in that one may want to use something without interruption or threat of having it taken away during usage. However, the idea that one needs to own something after it has been used, no longer needs to be used, or simply is no longer in use seems interesting.
Maybe I'm too idealistic, but I could imagine a society where everything is communal. I just think we started off in a way that would make it too difficult to transition to that now (too many people have too much to lose).
Consider 'ownership' as 'control' of a resource instead if it helps (control of access, of distribution, of use, etc.).The word has a lot of subjective baggage from our own culture and economic system that can cause confusion in these sorts of discussions. Whether you're talking about private or communal ownership, it's still just a form of ownership. Even when we talk of communal ownership, such as Hawaiian lands pre-Cook (actually, it's a pretty fascinating subject to read about, especially with how they wound up transitioning over a relatively short time and the protections they tried to build into that transition),[0] there's still some method of controlling access and use. That can be as simple as cultural norms that exemplified a sort of "don't be a jerk" attitude towards shared property that's widely accepted, or some sort of ruling authority that granted access, dictated acceptable usage, punished misuse, etc.
Some concept of ownership of the kind of things that are the subject of tangible personal property seems to be nearly universal and likely reflects something inherent. Other categories of property (real property, intangible personal property) this is less true of.
Ah, but can any of those things actually be removed? Each is not just an idea, but a representation of the one constant limitation to human economy: resource scarcity. The particulars might change, but the basic idea--some means of distributing resources--will arise to limit and shape whatever civilization might follow. We don't have to tell them anything; it'll instinctively develop on its own.
David Graeber does a good job of debunking the theory of currency as a replacement for barter in his book _Debt_ (if that's what you're getting at with the ordering).
I completely agree. I personally believe barter is implicit in property ownership. Since you can't barter anything you don't own, and once you do own something bartering (in my opinion) is inevitable.
I am a physicist by education and value the subject highly but let's not take things for granted. Where would we be without toilets? In the middle of a pile of ...
Well to me, your way of taking a dump seems backwards and barbaric. Does not mean my way of doing is the correct one. I'm not insulting, just saying that there are cultural preferences.
Instead of focusing on the toilet itself (whatever type one might use), I would focus more on overall sanitation systems and clean water. Yes, it is true that a billion people (more actually) do not have access to clean water or safe disposal of human waste. From my standpoint, this honestly is a huge deal -- clean water and proper sanitation would most likely improve health in many areas of the world tremendously.
(In a way, this does tie in with the micro-organism disease theory mentioned by another poster above. When it comes to "most important ideas in human history", in terms of human lives saved, this has to be one of the top ones.)
Durable information storage. Mass distribution of information. Universal literacy.
Too little of what was written in antiquity was accessible to the vast majority of people, and too much of it was lost.
We're left with fragments of early mathematical, literary, and historical works and our attempts to figure out what ordinary people were up to are almost stuck with just graffiti on the few hard surfaces that have survived.
For all the greatness of Democrites in so many ways, I'm always a bit wary of reading too much in classic thinkers predating what we now know about the physical sciences. Without experiments, introducing the concept of atoms was speculative. Conversely, even today an improved understanding of how matter actually behaves at very small scales, still doesn't make the case for atheism or materialism.
" Atoms are indivisible; they are the elementary grains of reality, which cannot be further subdivided, and everything is made of them"
Well, it would be ironic, if human kind wipes itself out in a nuclear holocaust (which means dividing too much "undividable" atoms) and future life finds about our fate and our "most important idea"...
An (maybe) interesting fact is, that in Germany the notion „scientific method“, to my knowledge, is largely unknown. For example, there is no link in the english wikipedia entry you have given to the german wikipedia. When I studied physics in Germany no one ever used that term.
Could you elaborate? As an American who hasn't traveled as much as he should, this came as a surprise to me. I always assumed the "scientific method" that we were taught in school was some universal international standard.
Because science does not works by a "scientific method". It work with some really simple things :
- Be sceptical
- Believe the data
- Keep asking questions.
All the rest is just fluff. Most of the time you have experiments before hypothesis. Or an intuition that only match part of it. Or publish some food for though and it will only be proved to be false hundreds of years later. The whole "hypothesis -> experiment -> theory" miss so many things.
From the french wikipedia entry
Très souvent, le terme de « méthode » engage l'idée implicite de son unicité, tant auprès du grand public que de certains chercheurs, qui de surcroît la confondent parfois avec la seule méthode hypothético-déductive. L'étude des pratiques des chercheurs révèle cependant une si grande diversité de démarches et de disciplines scientifiques que l'idée d'une unité de la méthode est rendue très problématique.
Quick and bad translation :
Most of the time, the term "method" push the implicit idea of unicity, to some scientists but also to the public, who also reduce it to the solely "hypothetico-deductive" method. The study of scientists practices reveal a so big diverity of method and scientific fields that the idea of an unicity of the method is highly problematic.
When I was in school "scientific method" wasn’t teached as a separate topic, but more like the result of "osmosis": you are given many examples of how science works and you somehow learn by this the process of science itself. Ok, you are taught how do do proofs in maths and how to do experiments, but no direct reference to a concept like the scientific method.
In the US we do teach about the scientific method as an abstract idea, especially in grade school and high school, but working scientists mostly learn by osmosis here as well. I'd say it serves a role similar to the way finance guys use math models, or musicians use advanced music theory: an idealized description of the way things are done on the ground that you study in school, but rarely use day to day.
To find out the truth about how the world works - observe it, collect evidence, make a hypothesis that explains it, use it to make predictions, and do experiments to test them.
The Golden Rule is flawed, as the Wikipedia article explains in the criticism section. Your comment bought to mind this quote from Deutsch:
"The Golden Rule (treat others as you would wish to be treated) has the same fatal flaw as future-is-like-the-past inductivism: it justifies anything and nothing, depending on what attributes of the other person you choose to imagine yourself having. And so, like induction, it only seems to yield some specific moral conclusion if you had already reached that conclusion by other means." - David Deutsch.
Here, "other means" is just the scientific method (conjecture, criticism) generalised to morality. So I'd say that the scientific method, (and a good epistemology in general), is a more valuable concept than the Golden Rule.
Yes, humans can rationalize anything. And yes, you don't know everything about the other person's situation. But the Golden Rule is still a huge step up from "Spend all your time trying to find ways to screw the other person over".
Conversely, the scientific method has no human warmth to it. It doesn't give us much of a mechanism to build better societies given our human flaws. As an example: take the death of a loved one. The scientific method tells us "shit happens for no reason". The golden rule tells us to comfort our companion. Truth is a fine thing, but there are things in our experience that aren't limited to simple veracity of facts.
And just like there are people out there who disagree on what the golden rule means, so too are there people who disagree on the scientific method - I've lost count of the number of times that I've had to say here on HN that the scientific method extends beyond 'test the null hypothesis'.
> it justifies anything and nothing, depending on what attributes of the other person you choose to imagine yourself having.
Only if you apply it in a flawed or superficial manner. Heuving's example of "I'd like someone to punch me in the face" is a clear example of this. The scientific method has equally poor results if you apply it in a flawed or superficial manner.
In any case, regardless of opinion on which is better, they're both far more important to us as humans than atomic theory :)
If the problem domain isn't amenable to the crude reductionism puny human brains are capable of, then there are other ways of "dealing with it." (Other than applying a hydraulic press.) Science can help you be a good dog owner, but not all of the problem solving strategies and wisdom most dog owners will be the scientific method. The same goes for being a human being.
(Until now I didn't even know that this German word is also used in the English language.)
The "state of law" is a combination of the Golden rule (which works only within small groups) with some aspects of the scientific method (reproducible results and independence of the subject: If I do the same thing as somebody else, in the same circumstances, it should be equally okay. Or, if it is not okay, we both should face the same consequences).
Indeed! This principle enables a civilization to discover all important things they need, on their own, in a reasonable speed.
Having said that, I see two areas in science where we have serious issues.
1) In some sciences, strict application of scientific method is not possible in large scale, due to unhealthy influence from the outside.
The classic example from the middle age is the research on astronomy and physics being suppressed and/or heavily influenced by the church and political leaders.
Today, one of the best examples is research on economy. That is heavily influenced (and sometimes even paid) by various types of financially strong bodies. This leads to heavily biased results. Also, suddenly results become acceptable even though they are based on almost comically far-fetched assumptions.
2) In some sciences, the scientific method cannot be applied in all rigor, due to the nature of the topic of research.
For example, complex psychological tests cannot be done with a huge amount of people, because you won't find enough people doing so volutarily. Also, you can't simply repeat an experiment on the same human being, because are are influenced from and learned from the previous experiment, so will react differently than an "unused" human being.
Economics falls under the second category quite a bit as well. In particular its hard to reason about impacts of individual policies on any kind of real complex economy because there are so many confounding variables. And it's not like you can conduct experiments because time travel isn't possible and no two economies are even similar, let alone the same.
I agree that the empirical part of economics is hard, but manageable in modern times [1]. However, the real problem is that even the theory has so many flaws, yet it is used as if it was evidence, which is why I think the real problem is 1).
[1] Some very popular multi-player games have a quite advanced economy, where the individual actions of each participant are recorded and can be analyzed. While this is not "real", it gives more detailed information about human economic interaction than all the mass surveillance in the "real word" right now. Also, the game developers have god-like powers in the virtual world, so they can run controlled experiments,. As far as I know, they already do so. And and if something goes really wrong, they still have the ultima ratio to reset everything to the state of a few hours or days ago. Or, they can re-interpret the last actions of the players in a more appropriate way. That may still make some players unhappy, but won't crash a real economy.
> Is atomic theory the most important idea in human history?
One might ask if the theory is a correct one though. If you look for something hard enough, chances are you will find it. Perhaps a more realistic model for the universe is as a continuous blob of stuff, with some more condensed clumps that we now call atoms.
Given the presumed goal to convey as much as possible in as few words as possible, to me it's a tie between atomic theory and evolution. Maybe we could cram both into a carefully worded sentence.
What an awful article, elementary school quality stuff drawn from mediocre school texts. It is littered with historical inaccuracies, caricatures of philosophical positions, and maudlin sentiments and hagiographic bromides that contradict the very atomism that it celebrates (such at the addled paeans to Epicurus or delusional hymns to some incoherent New Age-y "unity"). Democritus himself was not blind to at least a couple of the problems with his atomism. Why is there no mention of his own objections or the objections of others? Furthermore, materialism and rationalism are a highly problematic positions with serious objections against them. Quoting philosophical ignoramuses (and that's putting it nicely) is doing this author no favors.
Atomism is NOT the most important idea in history. Try getting a real education, dear author. You make a mockery of yourself.
> I vote for the special and the general theory of relativity.
Out of curiosity, why?
I can think of several possible reasons, but I'd like to know yours.
FWIW, I'm inclined to agree with Rovelli about atomism when "atoms" in the most general sense of the smallest particles are like-for-like substitutable. Following from that, the two theories of relativity set conditions on when "like-for-like substitution" is exact and when it's approximate.
In other words, I think that atomism is more reductive than SR or GR even in their modern formulations, and reductive materialism is a crucial tool in a scientist's mental toolbox. (One could also snarkily say that atoms and subatomic particles are the "material" without which SR and GR are effectively useless and even justify that via the hole argument.)
I think it's about as important now as the clockwork was in the 19th, or the computer was in the 20th century. We make these fundamental discoveries about how the world works, and then there is a period where that metaphor is used to gain subatantially new understandings in every field.
We are just starting to absorb quantum ideas: non-causality, waveform collapse, etc. We'll spend the next decades seeing how those ideas can change our understanding of all kinds of things. Then the metaphor will go in our knapsack with all the others.
In that sense you are both right. He's right that the quantum metaphors are very important right now. You're right that they are just some of many.
You're probably more right than he is though. Most important "of all time" is almost certainly wrong.
- RP Feynman, Vol I FLP