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You may ask: Why should we look at history when we know that these inventors were wrong? Can’t we just look at what we now know?
It’s a good question but you should know that science is based on progress. Without knowing what came before, it’s impossible to know what progress requires.
You are going to make a contribution to science as well. It might not be on a global scale and it might not be in the natural sciences. Your contribution might be limited to a new way of working in the company you work for. Even on that small scale, a new way of working might fail utterly if you don’t know what the company has tried before you came along. Your idea might include parts that are unfavourable to certain co-workers, they might have struggled for years to get rid of those parts and you won’t make any friends by re-introducing them. Your new ideas might even not be new at all, they might have been tried and failed before. Without knowing what came before, you run a considerable risk of working backwards, no form of science is based solely on “what is now”.
In this first chapter, we’re going to look at inventors who sought an explanation for the things that they saw and this started in antiquity, few sources have been preserved but it’s more than likely that an ancient Greek, Persian or Cretan wondered why lime juice had an effect on certain stones and not on others. What was so different about those stones? What was that stone made up of?
From that moment on, humanity has been busy trying to find out how matter, from stones to molecules, atoms and subatomic particles, is constructed. There have been many theories that came and went, models that seemed to solve everything until they didn’t. As recent as 23 March of this year, a paper was published showing that the “standard model”, the model that describes the subatomic particles, doesn’t quite fit new observations. We’re clearly not done trying to find out the structure of matter.
Of the history, you should know:
Which model belongs to which inventor?
What's the model all about?
In which way does the model differ from the previous model?
In which order have the models been invented?
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