As 1999 wound to a close, we found a national media busily cranking out reviews of 20th century landmarks in literature, music, the arts, theater and popular culture. Yet comparatively little notice was taken of pivotal events in science and technology. Much less-since it is a new millennium, not just a new century we enter in 2001-has there been reflection on what changes have been wrought in this thousand-year epoch. No previous period of human history has seen greater advances in human knowledge represented by science, and its application in technology. Nor has mankind ever before seen the revolutionary changes to almost every aspect of human life than has been experienced either in this millennium or this century. Although the rate of those changes was slow early in the millennium, by the second half they were astonishingly rapid, and in this century they exploded exponentially.

To get a sense of this, consider where science stood at the opening of this millennium. Ancient Greek achievements in mathematics, physics, astronomy and medicine were considerable. Euclid had worked out plane and solid geometry and static mechanics. Archimedes had developed both simple and compound machines, and pushed to the edge of the calculus. Diophantus had developed an extensive algebra. Ptolemy had measured the length of a degree on the surface of the Earth, as well as a full, mathematical planetary theory which, while it had the Earth at the center, enabled accurate prediction of eclipses and planetary appearances. Aristotle had a sophisticated teleological biology. And Hero had discovered the law of virtual work, and invented a steam engine.

However, knowledge of all this soon vanished from Europe after Justinian, emperor of the Byzantine Empire, closed the universities and medical schools of the ancient world in the year 529. He did so on the grounds that what these schools taught did not have its source in the Bible and, thus, were wrong-an attitude that has not entirely left us. By the close of the following century, the only remaining European who still knew how to prove the Pythagorean Theorem, Boethius, was executed by an illiterate Roman emperor.

Despite this, a few scholars and books found their way to lands that later became part of Islam. There, these resources were treasured. Surviving books were translated into Arabic, and, by the beginning of this millennium the Islamic world not only had spread from the Iberian peninsula across northern Africa to the Middle East and India, but had expanded science and mathematics beyond the levels reached by the Greeks. In the process, Islamic societies built universities, libraries and medical schools.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, even the knowledge of reading and writing had become so rare that Charlemagne, after his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 ordered the building of grammar schools in each parish so the Church would have priests who could read the Bible. This led, by the opening of our millennium, to the establishment of universities in some cathedral towns where one could study anything (universitas), although the curriculum was severely limited. One of these was in Padua, near Venice.

About the same time, the united forces of Aragon and Castile took the Islamic city of Toledo in what is now Spain. They found a major library there, but let it stand. And a wandering scholar from Padua, Herman the German (it only rhymes in English), enlisting the help of locals who could translate Arabic into Latin, soon took back to his university the astronomical works of Ptolemy he discovered there. Likewise, the Crusades, while they did not always fulfill their objectives of keeping the Holy Land in Christian hands, enabled some to return to Europe with booty, which included books of medicine, algebra, geometry and physics. In Paris, Padua and elsewhere, major efforts were launched to translate these books into Latin, and to absorb their contents.

The Dawn of Science

Just before the middle of the millennium, the Byzantine emperor John VIII Paleologus, brought to the Council of Florence and Ferrara copies of the Greek originals of ancient mathematics, science, and philosophy as a gift. His hope was to end the schism between the orthodox East and catholic West, and thus bring Western armies in defense of Constantinople from the Turks.

While that hope failed, the excitement of European scholars at discovering the depth of ancient science and civilization, led quickly to the discovery that some of them could carry this same tradition to new heights, hence the Renaissance. And in a stunning technological advance, Europeans applied the Chinese idea of movable type to the Latin and Gothic alphabets, thus making the mechanical printing and wide and inexpensive distribution of books possible, relegating hand copying to an art form.

Thus, when Copernicus left, on his death in 1543, a revision of Ptolemy's planetary theory which placed the Earth as the third planet out from the Sun, many copies were published so that his views quickly became known throughout Europe. That same year Vesalius, in France, published his own anatomy of the human body, challenging ancient ideas, and displaying the results in brilliant woodcuts. Harvey, in England, offered his evidence that the heart was a pump which circulated blood through the body. And Galileo, who was born in Italy the year Copernicus died, added telescopic and mechanical evidence to support Copernicus's planetary theory, as well as offering a new theory of terrestrial mechanics.

While Galileo was subsequently condemned by the Inquisition for the "heresy" that the Earth moved, and his books were banned by the Vatican, they were published out of reach of Rome and widely sold. Hence they came into the hands of a young Isaac Newton in England, who, putting Galileo's work together with that of Kepler in Bohemia, came up with the theory of universal mechanics that bears his name. Its publication in 1683, followed by poets praising Newton's name, and his knighthood, marks the first social acceptance of what we today think of as science.

Research Revolution

Scientific societies began to be formed to serve as forums for research. Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England in 1619, advocated government support for these groups, since, he said "knowledge is power," although this did not happen for some time. Nonetheless, a revolution in scientific research was under way in fields ranging from astronomy to zoology.

The Englishman Robert Boyle, a friend of Newton's, began the task of moving alchemy into the science of chemistry. In the 18th century, Boyle's effort was rapidly speeded up by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who insisted on carefully measuring the quantities of products of a chemical reaction. As master of the French Royal Arsenal, Lavoisier thus gave his countrymen superior gunpowder. His assistant, DuPont, emigrated to Delaware and applied the same techniques to the manufacture of gunpowder for the American colonists, to the later sorrow of the British army. Lavoisier's dedication to measurement then led him to the oxygen theory of combustion and calcination, although, since Robespierre decided the French Revolution had "no need of savants," this discovery did not save his head. Robespierre anticipated neither the loss of his own (in 1794) through the new technology invented by Guillotine, nor the appearance of Napoleon and his somewhat different views both about France and savants. Nevertheless, such scientists as Avogadro, Dalton, Mendeleev, and Cannizzaro carried on in Lavoisier's tradition, and developed atomic theory as the basis for our understanding of chemistry.

Likewise, Louis Pasteur applied the same tradition in biology, solving questions regarding the causes of fermentation and of diseases in silkworms, animals and people. Techniques of anesthesia and sterile treatment of wounds were introduced to medicine early in the 19th century, and came into wide practice by its end. In 1866, an Austrian botanist, Johann Mendel, demonstrated that there must be units by which hereditary traits were passed on from parents to offspring. Charles Darwin soon developed the consequences of environmental pressures on life forms to a theory of evolution of plants and animals by natural selection, just as his English colleague, Russel Wallace, was coming to the same conclusions.

Meanwhile, work in harnessing the power of electricity grew apace, building swiftly on Michael Faraday's 1831 discovery of how to convert mechanical energy into electricity. By 1870, Clerk-Maxwell had developed an electromagnetic field theory to account for Faraday's discovery. Morse's subsequent invention of the telegraph, Bell's of the telephone, and Marconi's of wireless radio followed. Soon, the laboratories of Thomas Alva Edison would be churning out electrical generation and transmission technology, light bulbs, and sound and cinematic recording equipment.

In 1900, Dutch botanist Hugo DeVries rediscovered Mendel's work. With the newly invented Abbe-Zeiss microscope, which eliminated diffractive distortion, it was possible to actually see what chromosomes did in cells during sexual reproduction, and to suppose that the genetic units were contained in them. Thomas Hunt Morgan, an American zoologist, irradiated fruit flies in the expectation that this would somehow make changes in such units, and not only produced new traits but found visible changes in the chromosomes as well. After World War II, the genetic units were identified as large protein molecules, and Watson and Crick delineated their structure as a double helix with the four nucleic acids arranged in an order that conveyed the genetic information. By the end of 1999, one tiny organism's code had been worked out, and major efforts were under way to map the human genome. The technique of splicing new genes into organisms to make them disease resistant or resolve genetic defects is now well under way, along with limited possibilities for making genetic copies of organisms, or clones.

From Steam to the Stars

In short, by the end of the 19th century, we had reliable knowledge in wide areas of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Instead of traveling on foot or with animals or with the wind on the sea, the power of steam had been harnessed to railroads and ships, and, by the final years, internal combustion engines were introduced. Streets and homes were lighted by electricity, serial manufacture was carried on in large factories powered with steam or electricity. Contagious diseases were partly controlled through immunization, as with smallpox; or sterile techniques, as with childbed fever; or through attacking the vector which carried them, as with mosquitoes and malaria or yellow fever; or through isolation of their victims, as with tuberculosis.

But if the changes in human life wrought by the sciences and technology of the 19th century seem unprecedented and startling in human history, the task of chronicling the breathtaking pace of new knowledge and new technology proved nothing less than overwhelming-and utterly frustrating to many. For example, at the start of the 1900s, atomic theory, already the basis of rapidly growing fields of inorganic and organic chemistry, drew skeptics since no one had ever seen an atom. Many took the theory as merely a convenient calculating device, and the distinguished physicist, Mach, was openly skeptical.

Then in 1905, Albert Einstein, at the time a technical clerk in the Swiss Federal patent office, published five papers which lay the basis for work in physics the rest of the century. In a the paper describing Brownian motion, Einstein showed that particles of finely ground chalk in an oil suspension observed through a microscope with side illumination were bouncing about with the velocity one would expect were they to be bumped by the oil molecules in thermal motion. Even though the chalk was hardly molecular in size, Mach reversed his objections and supported atomic and molecular theory.

Still, if atoms and molecules are real, scientists needed to understand their structure. Bohr developed a simple model of the atom, with protons, neutrons, and electrons, introducing the dynamics of mass and charge. By the end of the century, although the simple model would no longer do, an astonishing variety of subatomic particles had been found. Bemused physicists turned to literature to name quarks, distinguish them as red, white, blue, or magic, and so forth, with the "top" quark finally identified only a year ago (with the help of a team of FSU physicists).

Einstein's other papers modified Newton's absolute mechanics to one that is relative, established mass and energy equivalences, and interpreted the photon effect as showing there were minimum quanta of action, thereby forming the basis for quantum mechanics. By 1939, Austrian physicist Lise Meitner had calculated the energy to be gained by the fission of uranium. As WWII loomed, Einstein, speaking for several physicists, used Meitner's results to advise President Roosevelt of the explosive potential of such a reaction and warn him that Hitler was already at work on such a project, as Bohr had learned.

The result was the Manhattan Project. Under the leadership of Oppenheimer, a major national effort conducted in great secrecy solved the unprecedented theoretical and technical challenges of producing weapons that would realize Meitner's calculation. The first was successfully exploded in New Mexico; the two remaining were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing the Second World War to an end.

As Stalin brought the U.S.S.R. out of the victorious alliance and made it the new potential enemy, the Cold War opened. The arms race in atomic weaponry and rocket missiles to carry them both tactical and intercontinental distances developed, and a shaky peace was maintained by "mutual assured destruction," which nearly broke down in the Cuban missile crisis. The Cold War ended only with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, but not before it produced the rivalry that led the United States into space exploration with human landings on the moon, and, in early cooperation with the U.S.S.R, landings of robotic machines on Mars.

Mastery of such techniques has much benefited astronomy, with the launching of the Hubble telescope in space, and numerous other observational devices, some aimed heavenward and some Earthward. It has also filled near space with fleets of satellites for television, radio, and telephone communication, global positioning, and military observation.

Perhaps the most notable single discovery of the last half of the century was that of the transistor by Shockley, Bardeen, and Brittain. The device controlled current flow without the need for a vacuum. This made possible the miniaturization of ever more complex electronic devices, and made computers practical and widely available, transforming almost every aspect of human life. The process is far from complete, as molecular scale models of transistors are now being contemplated.

Squandering the Gift?

But the social impact of the introduction of new technologies has alienated many. Some sit at their computers and write books bemoaning the rapidity of change and the "future shock" it produces. They do not seem to recognize the irony of their unwillingness to trade their computers for simple quill pens. Consider other developments at the close of the 20th century:

• In 1995, when Congress cancelled further funds for the most powerful particle accelerator yet conceived, the Superconducting Supercollider, the Texas congressman in whose district it was located explained his voting to kill the project by saying that what happens to "little bitty pieces of matter" is of no importance-this on the 50th anniversary of what little bitty pieces of matter did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
• Pope John Paul II called for a review of the Church's conviction and imprisonment of Galileo, but neither the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith, nor a special commission later appointed found fault with those actions.
• The National Aeronautics and Space Administration built a satellite designed to gather data to test Einstein's general theory of relativity, but it remains in a warehouse because Congress has repeatedly cancelled the funds for its launching on the grounds that it is not a matter of great importance.
• In the United States, a group maintaining that the accounts of creation in the Book of Genesis are scientific challenged the teaching of the theory of evolution in Arkansas, but the federal court ruled that "creation science," as they called it, was no science. Nevertheless, just last summer the Kansas Board of Education ruled that questions about the theory of evolution will not appear on future science tests in that state.

What are we seeing here? Clearly, the last millennium saw Europe move from a state of virtually universal illiteracy and ignorance, with Islam as the chief custodian of ancient knowledge, to our present state in which new knowledge appears so rapidly it frightens people. In the 20th century we achieved the ability to understand much of the dynamics of matter on both submicroscopic and very large scales. We understand something of the chemistry and physics of life, and the genetic code. We recognize the forces, materials, and time scale of the creation of our universe, and that we are but one planet in our system, not the center of it, in a galaxy which is but one of millions, and that, indeed, our universe may not be the only one. The only life we know so far resides on this planet, and, as it lies in our power to destroy it, its survival is our responsibility, and ours alone.

But the challenges to survival are enormous. In spite of the rapidity of communication worldwide, sadly little of our knowledge is widely understood or its consequences recognized. Universities remain under attack almost everywhere. And 70 percent of the world's population remains illiterate.

David Gruender (Ph.D. Wisconsin) became professor emeritus of FSU's Department of Philosophy in 1999. He joined the university faculty in 1967 after serving at Kansas State University and the Case Institute of Technology. He can be reached at gruender@phil.fsu.edu.

"Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops." H.L. Mencken

"A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion." H.L. Mencken