Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

For Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the universe was governed by precise laws which could not only be formulated but mathematically proved to a certainty. These physical laws were not sporadic or local; they were universal and extended “everywhere to immense distances,” as he wrote in The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, first published in 1687. Newton's three laws of motion may not apply at the atomic level or under conditions approaching the speed of light, as we now know, but they apply everywhere else. The fall of that famous apple was no less an effect of universal gravitation than the rhythms of the tides or the orbits of the planets.

But to prove the law of gravity, though an unparalleled accomplishment, was not to understand its final cause. Newton wrote, again in The Principia, that “I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity.” (That “as yet” demonstrates both Newton's supreme self-confidence and his rigorous honesty. To this day no one else has deduced those “properties” either.) In a statement that stands as his scientific signature, he added, “et non fingo hypotheses”—“and I do not feign hypotheses.” Even so, this same scorner of the hypothetical would spend much of his career after the amazing two-year period of his greatest discoveries in 1664–66 dabbling obsessively in alchemy, as well as pursuing increasingly fantastic numerological investigations of Scripture.

Scientific discoveries are not only cumulative but a bit haphazard. They emerge in reaction to wrongheaded hypotheses as well as from moments of sudden insight. Often they occur inadvertently or by sheer dumb luck. Almost always, despite the genius of their discoverers, they are the product of the long, stubborn investigation of other scientists who remain obscure. Neither James Watson nor Francis Crick would have arrived at an understanding of the double helix without the prior work of Rosalind Franklin at Cambridge, for instance, but their names, and not hers, will forever be associated with that breakthrough.

And there are other even more obscure collaborators. The fruit fly, the evening primrose, and the guinea pig would seem to have little in common. And yet, along with a few other unassuming creatures, they have a just claim to be considered the unsung heroes of biology. As Jim Endersby notes in his fascinating "A Guinea Pig's History of Biology" (Harvard, 499 pages, $27.95), progress in biology owes as much to the hawkweed and the humble corncob as it does to the brainstorms of scientists. Mr. Endersby has had the happy idea of tracing the successes of modern biological research through the subjects which have made it possible. Each of his chapters focuses on a particular plant or animal, from the now extinct quagga, a cantankerous relative of the zebra, to microscopic bacteriophage, or "bacteria eaters," and culminating in the genetically engineered OncoMouse®, one of the first rodents with a full-fledged patent all its own. As he points out, "the history of biology has, in part, been the story of finding the right animals or plants to aid the search."

That search was twofold. It drew on practical considerations: to improve breeding lines, beginning with racehorses but extending to

Much of the genius of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) lay in a mix of audacity and exactitude. His boldest leaps of insight sprang from laborious plodding. Years of careful computation, based on sporadic stargazing with the crudest of instruments, lay behind his astonishing discoveries: Our earth was not the fixed center of the universe, nor did the sun and the stars move around us in perfect epicycles, as Ptolemy had argued more than a millennium earlier; in fact, our earth not only revolved around the sun but rotated on its axis. Nor were the heavens themselves static: They moved as well.

When his "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" finally appeared in 1543, after decades of delay — he saw the first printed copy on the very day of his death — he not only turned human beings out of the cozy nest of their fondest assumptions, but rejoiced in the eviction. In the first book of his great work, he states, "Indeed, the Sun as if seated on a royal throne governs his household of stars as they circle around him." A heliocentric cosmos demonstrated to him "the marvelous symmetry of the universe."

As Jack Repcheck demonstrates in his excellent "Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began" (Simon & Schuster, 255 pages, $25), the Polish astronomer and mathematician is not simply the pure empiricist we might recall. Born as Mikolaj Kopernik in the town of Torun on the Baltic coast, Copernicus combined religious fervor with scientific rigor in almost equal measure.

Of course, this wasn't unusual in the 16th century: Virtually all scientists then were believers, but most of them looked to nature only

In one of Aesop's Fables a stag takes refuge on a cliff to escape his hunters. He feels safe as long as he can survey the landscape below him. But a boatload of hunters coming upriver spot his silhouette against the sky and bring him down from his blind side. The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (1640-1705) resembled that unfortunate stag. He was so fixated on the threat from France and the aggressive designs of Louis XIV that he underestimated a far worse menace from the East. That, combined with his legendary procrastination, almost cost him Vienna and his empire.

In 1683, the Ottoman Turks under Mehmed IV, still smarting from the failure of Suleiman the Magnificent to take Vienna in 1529, began preparing for a new assault on the ultimate prize. Victory, which lay almost within their grasp, would have spelled the end of the Holy Roman Empire. The heartland of Europe would have become yet another unruly Ottoman province.

In his splendid study The Siege of Vienna, the Oxford historian John Stoye provides a detailed account of the intricate machinations, involving a bewildering cast of characters, that led up to this near-debacle. For this was not simply a contest between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans but a quarrel among a host of nations and factions -- Hungarians, Serbs, Poles, Tartars and others -- each of which had its own vital interests and strategic agendas at stake.

In the 1970s, when the big-bang model for the origins of the universe at last seemed firmly established, Christian, Jewish, and even some Muslim preachers and exegetes took heart. Hadn't modern cosmology at long last proved what scripture always claimed? The universe emerged in a single indefinable instant. Creation out of nothing stood confirmed. Genesis had been vindicated.

The troublesome fact that big bang cosmology offers a model of how the cosmos came into being from a dimensionless point of infinite density but says nothing about what—or who—precipitated that primordial explosion (whose effects still determine our world, some 15 billion years later), hardly fazed these eager explicators. But the question nags. How far are we entitled to draw metaphysical inferences from scientific models?

Believers aren't alone in shoring up doctrine with data. Skeptics, including many scientists, do it routinely. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins draws on Darwin to promote an atheistic agenda of well-nigh evangelical intensity, and he's hardly an isolated instance. Yet even the most stubborn doubter can occasionally be touched by puzzlement. The great English astronomer Fred Hoyle, a convinced atheist, was shaken when his researches into the way elements are formed in the hot hearts of stars showed that the nucleus of carbon possessed unique qualities that guaranteed its abundance, as though this fundamental component of life had been provided for—virtually designed into—the cosmic crucible. Hoyle grumbled about someone “monkeying with” the cosmos, which he now suspected was “a put-up job,” and this rattled his atheism.

The anecdote comes from a remarkable new book by a Harvard astronomer and historian of science, Owen Gingerich, titled God's Universe (Harvard University Press, 144 pages, $16.95). Based on his William Belden Noble Lectures, delivered in 2005, Mr. Gingerich's work is a survey of the conflicts—and confluences—between hard science and deep faith; along the way he provides a brief but magisterial history of science that is as astute as it is original. He's a superb writer too, handling scientific and theological complexities with equal aplomb but enlivening his account throughout with poetry, dramatic anecdote, and snippets of autobiography.

Scientists were once happy to be known as natural philosophers. The title implied not merely that they studied nature but that they thought about it in such a way as to discern its hidden laws. They weren’t concerned only with the how of things but with the why. The beautiful line of Virgil, “Happy is he who can recognize the causes of things,” epitomized the endeavor. Causation in all its forms, from the collisions of solid bodies on earth to the remote arrangements of the First Cause beyond the empyrean, underlay natural laws. Goethe’s Faust, the mythic prototype of the philosopher-scientist, was driven to despair, as well as near-damnation, by his passion to know “what holds the world together in its deepest core.” But Faust represents the end of an ancient tradition; for all his knowledge, he’s tormented by the world’s ultimate unknowability. And that bafflement “scorches his heart.”

Is nature finally unintelligible? Even more disturbing, is nature intelligible in itself but beyond the power of humans to comprehend? These and other questions form the theme of Peter Dear’s excellent new book, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (University of Chicago Press, 233 pages, $27.50). Mr. Dear, a historian of science at Cornell, provides a succinct history of modern science from the 17^th century to the present by drawing on two complementary but conflicting aspects of the scientific method. The first involves the search for “intelligibility,” or the truth about nature; the second concerns “instrumentality,” or the practical uses scientists make of their discoveries. As he demonstrates, in lucid prose and well-chosen illustrations, these two aspects aren’t quite compatible, and yet, both have proved essential to the advancement of science.

The criterion of intelligibility sounds obvious but isn’t. As Mr. Dear shows, even Newton was harshly criticized, by the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huyghens, among others, for his inability to explain the phenomenon of gravitation. He could describe the force and derive laws and inferences from it but he couldn’t account for it in a satisfactorily philosophical manner. The criticism stung Newton because he agreed with Huyghens. The seemingly insuperable problem was “action at a distance.” How could one object—whether a heavenly body or the earth beneath an apple tree—influence another without some sustaining medium through which gravity could act? Mr. Dear cites a letter in which Newton protests, “Pray do not ascribe that notion to me, for the cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know and therefore would take more time to consider of it.”

It's almost impossible for us to recapture the pre-Darwinian notion of a species or an individual creature as having issued in its final configuration directly from the hand of its maker. We can't escape an awareness of the countless mutations and adaptations that every being, including ourselves, has undergone in the long process of evolution. Poets attempt to recover this lost sense of essence. When Rilke writes about a flamingo, he sees it “under the aegis of eternity.” It would have been interesting and startlingly original had he somehow glimpsed, and been able to convey, the shadowy precursors—all those vanished proto-flamingos—that went to form his transcendental waterfowl, but this would have destroyed the Platonic fiction on which his vision depended.

As a young man, Charles Darwin himself was an avid reader of poetry; he “took intense delight,” he tells us, in Shakespeare but loved Milton and Shelley, Byron and Coleridge, as well. In his later years he lost this taste and found poetry intolerable, preferring the popular novels his wife read aloud to him at stated intervals over each working day. His growing indifference to poetry, as well as to music, puzzled and disturbed Darwin; he saw it as a possible symptom of mental decline.

Darwin recounts this change in the account of his life and career that he wrote at the request of his family over a five-year period from 1876 to 1881, a year before his death. Like much else in The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (Totem Books, 154 pages, $15), it leaves a faint sense of puzzlement. All his life Darwin suffered from a mysterious illness, involving severe headaches, prolonged bouts of vomiting, and enervating weakness, that disabled him for months at a time. He has been retrospectively diagnosed as suffering from everything from Chagas disease, picked up during his five years aboard the Beagle, to neurotic hypochondria, caused by anxiety over the reception of his theories. But sickness, though it slowed him down, never deflected the stubborn progress of his research or writing, nor did it impair the singular vigor of his prose. The cause must lie elsewhere.