The book "The Rise of Humanity. Preface of Richard Dawkins »

Each era has its own turning point - the emergence of a new world view. In this book, Jacob Bronowski invites you on a journey through the highest achievements of man, our intellectual history. The first experiments of alchemists, complex arithmetic calculations of Mayan astronomers, astronomical clocks in Europe, Machu Picchu stone structures and much more, which had a significant impact on the development of mankind, and still astounding modern scientists.

Introduction

I began to write the script of the first series of the popular-science film “The Ascent of Humanity” in July 1969, the installation of the last - the thirteenth - series, we completed in December 1972. It was an exciting and very difficult job. She demanded from me a complete immersion in the material and the stress of all mental and physical strength, so I had to postpone for the time all the other studies. I think it’s worth explaining what motivated me to take it.



First of all, I was fascinated by how sentiments in science have changed over the past 20 years (since the 1950s): researchers have moved from observing the nature of physical phenomena to the study of life. Scientists began to pay much more attention to the problem of human individuality. At first, I did not know how much information I had to process and that I would have to consider the image of a person as a separate scientific form. Fortunately, my basic specialization (physics and mathematics) gave me a good toolkit for analyzing and systematizing all the collected scientific facts. I applied the methods of the exact sciences, with their clear and precise logic, to humanities. I regarded social history as the ascent of man, his path from the very first steps to the present state.



Kenneth Clark, art historian and producer of the BBC, suggested that I create a popular science program on the evolutionary problems of civilizations. Television gave me a unique opportunity to show a person's ascent comprehensively: to illustrate the story with rich visual material, to transfer the viewer to the places and times in question, and to tell in simple human language how historical events of any era relate to people's actions and actions.

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The last merit of television, in my opinion, is most significant, because it allowed me to diversify the material with personal experience, autobiographical facts and my emotions. The fact is that knowledge in general and science in particular consist of ideas that do not exist by themselves, but are created by man - from their origin to the current peculiar models. For this reason, I decided to build the basic concepts chronologically - from the simplest and primary cultures to the greatest achievements of modern man. The development of science seems to me a complex conglomeration of intelligence and specific human qualities, because discoveries are made by living people, with all their advantages and disadvantages. If you do not talk about this in the popular science program, then there is no point in doing it.



Creating my series, I set myself the task: to reconstruct the historical and social prerequisites for the emergence of specific ideas, not forgetting that the telecast differs from both the lecture and the printed article. The television audience is huge, but should be addressed to two or three specific viewers who sit in front of one screen. The speech becomes one-to-one conversation, one-on-one, cozy and re-cutting at the same time. This is the power of television: it is very convincing, affordable and attractive to present the most serious philosophical and scientific problems, which allows to attract a wide audience to them. This property is related to television with a book.



In this case, the book, as well as any printed media, gives greater freedom in presenting the facts. The reader can stop, comprehend the statement, go back a few pages back, compare the facts. And most importantly, the abundance of details will not confuse him. When transferring television material to paper, I took into account this difference in printed text from colloquial speech.



Research on the topic of human evolution has been a lot. If you try to cover the most authoritative and convincing of them, then you can track a lot of unexpected connections and wonderful oddities. It is a pity to lose even the smallest details. So I tried to describe the maximum number of important discoveries made by people. At the same time, I really did not want to turn the book into a textbook for undergraduate students, I intend to address it to the general reader.



Getting rid of science, I brought the text closer to colloquial speech. For me it was important to preserve the immediacy of reasoning, convey on paper the process of thought originating and simulate the spontaneous flow of the conversation. This approach allowed me to reveal the essence, make the essays more vivid in style and at the same time not to lose the logic that was and remains the basis of science and which nothing should overshadow.



Especially I want to talk about the content of essays, because it actually goes beyond the stated topic. Speaking about the ascent of humanity, I did not mean only its first steps, I was primarily interested in cultural evolution. If you view this book in the context of all my research, scientific articles, literary opuses and other works, you can see that I am working on creating a philosophy of the XX century, where the whole world would appear as an inseparable unity. In other words, the priority for me was and remains the philosophy of nature, and not the philosophy of science. I would call it modern natural philosophy, which has noticeably changed since its inception. In addition, recent discoveries made in the field of human biology have given this science a new impulse, which causes a transition from the general to the personal (individual). And now, perhaps, for the first time after the Renaissance, we will once again be able to open the doors to the world of the knowledge of the laws of nature.



Another aspect is very important for me: people make scientific discoveries, therefore, there is no philosophy unrelated to a person’s individuality. I hope that I managed to prove this thesis in my book. Observing nature, we can understand the nature of man and his place in the universe.



I tried to show a theoretical study of nature and related scientific experiments as an endless adventure. I have to express my heartfelt gratitude to everyone with whose help my plan became a reality. First of all, I thank the Salk Institute for Biological Research (La Jolla, California), which has long supported me in studying human nature and who has provided me with long-term creative leave to participate in the filming of the series. I am eternally grateful to the management and creative staff of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Special mention deserves Aubrey Singer - the author of the idea to create a similar series with my participation. He spent two years convincing me to take part in this television project.



In general, the list of those who helped me is so great that it would be worth publishing it in a separate chapter. I was incredibly pleased to work with these people, and I thank them so much for their joint work. I can not fail to mention the producers of the series, who stand at the head of the list, - Adriana Malone and Dick Zhilling. Thanks to their assistance, my ideas, fantasies and words have acquired flesh and blood.



Two wonderful ladies, Josephine Gladstone and Silvia Fitzgerald, helped me to work on the book. Josephine has inspired me to work since 1969, Sylvia helped me cope with the scenarios. I sincerely declare that I could not even dream of the best colleagues.



J. B.

La Jolla, CA

August 1973

MUSIC SPHERE

Mathematics is in many respects the most complex and sophisticated science, at least as it seems to me as mathematics. Therefore, I find particular pleasure in telling about the progress in mathematics as part of human knowledge. There are some ideas that every story about mathematics should include: a logical idea of ​​proof, an empirical idea about the accuracy of the laws of nature (and in particular space), the emergence of the concept of operations and the transition from a static description of the world to a dynamic one. This chapter is devoted to this.



To begin with, even primitive peoples have a system of calculus. Of course, they do not always know how to count beyond four, but they know that if we add two exactly the same to two subjects, we get four in total, and always will be. With this fundamental rule begins the construction of many numerical systems, usually existing in writing and based on the same principles. The Babylonians, the Mayans and the people of India, for example, independently of each other invented essentially the same way of recording large numbers as a sequence of numbers, which we actively use in modern life.



Thus, there is no place or time about which I could definitely say: “Arithmetic has appeared here and now.” In each culture, people began to count and speak at the same time, so arithmetic, like language, began in prehistoric time. But mathematics, in our understanding, operating on numbers, is a completely different matter. And to find the roots of this legend, I go on a sea voyage

to the island of Samos.



In prehistoric times, Samos was the center of worship for Hera - the Queen of Heaven, the legitimate (and very jealous) wife of Zeus. The temple of Hera that has survived to our day, sometimes called Geraion, dates back to the 6th century BC. e., built his tyrant Polycrates. On the same island in 580 BC. e. born the first genius of mankind and the founder of Greek mathematics Pythagoras. Due to disagreements with Polycritus, he was forced to leave the island, but, according to legend, for a long time he was hiding from the wrath of the ruler in the mountains. Trusting tourists today are happy to show a small white cave in which Pythagoras supposedly lived.



Samos is a magical island, its air is filled with sea, greenery and music. For me, Samos is the island of Prospero from Shakespeare's Storm, the shore where the scientist became a wizard. Most likely, Pythagoras seemed to be a wizard to his followers, because he taught that numbers control nature. He said that there is harmony in nature, unity lies at the heart of diversity, and he has a language: numbers are the language of nature.



Pythagoras found the basic relationship between musical harmony and mathematics. The history of this has reached us only as a legend, as a folk tale, but its essence remains accurate. The sound, or main tone, forms the vibration of a single tensioned string. Sounds that sound harmoniously with him are obtained if the string is divided into an equal number of parts: exactly into two parts, exactly into three parts, exactly into four parts, etc. If there is a point where vibration is least, it does not fall into one of these points, the sound is disharmonious.



Thus, shifting the “non-vibration point” along the string, we recognize sounds that are harmonious. So, the string pressed in the middle gives us an overtone, which is an octave higher than the main tone. Moving another 1/3 of the length of the string, go one fifth higher, another 1/4 more by a quart and at the same time move two octaves away from the main tone. Go up another 1/5 (although Pythagoras didn’t offer to do this) - get the sound of the third.



Pythagoras proved that the chords that sound harmoniously - for the western ear - correspond to the exact division of the string into whole numbers. The discovery of the Pythagoreans seemed a real sorcery: so surprising and convincing was the agreement between nature and numbers. On the basis of the overtone structure of sound, they together came to the conclusion that all the laws of nature are built on the same principle.



For example, to calculate the orbits of celestial bodies, which, in their opinion, rotated around the Earth, it is necessary to connect them with musical intervals. In other words, the Greeks claimed that all the laws of nature are musical, and they called the movements of celestial bodies the music of spheres.



More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.

Table of contents

Excerpt



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