The utility of history in science
Let me indulge you in a story.
A thousand and one years ago, somewhere along the banks of a mighty river in the South of India, on a nondescript summer evening, someone wondered what counting really meant. Sure, one could bypass the grammar and linguistic barriers and point stuff out with one's own digits, but what really was the meaning? Did we mean that there were 5 stars over and over until there were none? Or there were far too many stars than digits and hence we needed to reduce each star to something abstract and "countable"? Or was it an attempt at minimizing the mental span of the world as we experienced it?
This is all imagined, and metaphorical, but at the same time, this is very much real and tangible. The time is irrelevant, even the river is of no importance. We could in fact abstract away all details and boil down on that single "lightbulb" moment: What does counting really mean?
This is a thought that has repeated itself innumerable times in the history of humanity. From the ancient petroglyphs in Altamira and Bhimbetka, to the monoliths in Stonehenge and Meghalaya, to the alchemy of Europe to the thick notebooks of Peter Sarnak. Every human at some point of time has looked at their hands and tried to grasp the magic of reducing reality down to distinct, countable objects.
Now if all this sounds too philosophical, pardon me. This wasn't my aim. My aim was instead, to demonstrate to you the power of history in science. History is not the age or date when something happened, nor is it a whodunit mystery. History is a careful record of a point in time when something countable happened. You don't care about the exact emotion that Richard I felt when he led his men into battle at the age of 16. You don't worry about the sense of doom that a certain witch doctor felt when he walked down a cholera-infested village in Mozambique. Nor do you study about the joy in Churchill's heart when USA jumped into the war at the moment when England felt like it was about to plunge into irrecoverable doom. I don't mean you don't think about them. In fact, when you read history, you ONLY think about these things, and I mean when you really "read" into it. But history quantifies events. It gives us a framework to document things like dewdrops on a large, convoluted spider web. When you pluck on one, others vibrate and the past comes alive.
Science, by nature, is hardcoded with error-correcting codes. From observation, we draw data and feed them into our inference machines, churning out hypotheses that unravel reality bit-by-bit. When we include historical data, we find that our reality-unravelling machine gets a bit more robust. We end up with a clearer sense of why things are the way they are, because we begin to understand why things are the way they were. And since we are stuck with a linear sense of time, it ends up enabling us to count and weave information better.
So, in the end, history of science is essentially a better pair of glasses that enhance our vision to look beyond the obvious and find diamonds in the dirt. And why did I weave this lengthy story?
Because I want you to read into every bit of science with these glasses in hand. I want us as a species to understand the value of the shoulders we stand upon, while we gaze beyond the horizon and chart our way to the stars. These fingers learned to count way before they took shape in our mothers' wombs. Somewhere in the deep past, even before the riverbank in South India ever existed, even before the pyramids or the spoken word, somewhere high in the forest canopy, we first looked at the world around and reduced reality to a series of marks. We understood the value of segregating our experiences in boxes that could be looked at uniquely. We looked at our fingers, and grasped the beauty in counting 3...2...1...Â