Word: copernicus
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...touchy, passionately focused introvert who could go without sleep for days and live on bread and wine, and, at an astonishingly precocious age, absorbed everything important that was known to science up to that time (the works of Aristotle and, after that, the new men who superseded him: Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes and Galileo, who died in 1642, the year Newton was born). Riding on the shoulders of giants--and correcting the giants where they went wrong--Newton began assembling and perfecting the Newtonian universe, a miraculously predictable and rational clockwork creation held together by his universal gravitation and regulated...
...centuries go, this has been one of the most amazing: inspiring, at times horrifying, always fascinating. Sure, the 15th was pretty wild, with the Renaissance and Spanish Inquisition in full flower, Gutenberg building his printing press, Copernicus beginning to contemplate the solar system and Columbus spreading the culture of Europe to the Americas. And of course there was the 1st century, which if only for the life and death of Jesus may have had the most impact of any. Socrates and Plato made the 5th century B.C. also rather remarkable. But we who live in the 20th can probably...
Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Dante, Copernicus, Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton, Rousseau, Kant, Darwin, Dickens, Tolstoy and Nietzsche...
...centuries of breakthroughs in every field from astronomy to zoology, science may have rendered itself superfluous. Sure, we may have years of work ahead tidying up the details. But while that's important, is it science? Maybe not. Maybe true science--the capital-S science practiced by Galileo and Copernicus--is behind...
...just that as these machines get more powerful they do more jobs once done only by people, from financial analysis to secretarial work to world-class chess playing. It's that, in the process, they seem to underscore the generally dispiriting drift of scientific inquiry. First Copernicus said we're not the center of the universe. Then Darwin said we're just protozoans with a long list of add-ons--mere "survival machines," as modern Darwinians put it. And machines don't have souls, right? Certainly Deep Blue hasn't mentioned having one. The better these seemingly soulless machines...