Page:The Hero in History.djvu/31

Rh necessarily have been born to do their work. Modern physics owes more to Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Huygens, Lagrange, Laplace, Faraday, Fourier, Clerk-Maxwell, Hertz, Gibbs, Planck, Einstein, and a small cluster of other luminaries than it does to modern industry and war. It may even be argued that industry and war owe more to the researches of the scientists than vice versa. Indeed, for some of the greatest scientific discoveries, for instance, the theory of relativity, it is hard to establish any plausible connection with problems of industry and war.

Nevertheless, intellectual tradition, social need, and the organization of the scientific community have a far greater influence on the discoveries of scientists than upon the creations of artists and literary men. In the latter fields the production of a new creation with a distinctive form and style is obviously the work of the individual in the sense that, for all his dependence on his culture, it would be absurd to believe that his work would have been given to the world by someone else if the individual artist or writer had not lived. Raphael’s Sistine Madonna without Raphael, Beethoven’s sonatas and symphonies without Beethoven, are inconceivable. In science, on the other hand, it is quite probable that most of the achievements of any given scientist would have been attained by other individuals working in the field.

But the degree of probability varies with the accomplishment. It is extremely difficult to see how we would go about establishing a legitimate claim that, if this or that discovery had not been made, its subsequent discovery would be unlikely. Yet certain general considerations apply. If Newton had not made his discoveries in mechanics and optics, we can readily believe that others might have done so not long after, for interest in the problems of these fields was widespread and other attempts at their solution by first-rate minds had been independently made. But some other branches of mathematics and physics show creative work along certain lines by an individual who had no outstanding predecessors in the field and from whom all subsequent investigation in the same direction stems. For example, we have no specific evidence that would warrant the judgment that Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers and Einstein’s special theory of relativity would have been developed by others. Although it would be rash to assert that no one but Cantor and Einstein would have propounded these theories, the assertion