Margaret Howe was nearly thirty when she married Arthur Holmes at Gateshead United Methodist Church on Tuesday the 14th of July, 1914. The daughter of one of the famous Howe Brothers, a printing firm started very modestly by her grandfather in 1863 which had grown to be one of the biggest employers in Gateshead, Maggie was the youngest of three children. Her father, a master printer, was now comfortably retired but Maggie still lived with her parents in their fine Victorian house in Saltwell View, Gateshead, overlooking the park. Her brother and sister had both married and moved away so it fell to Maggie to stay at home and look after her parents.

It is unclear how the relationship arose, Arthur being five years Maggie's junior, but he wrote to her from Mozambique so they must have known each other for some time previously. Having been ‘squashed’ by Edie it appears Arthur's attentions turned to Maggie on his return from Mozambique. In a letter to Edward Wayland dated 8th October 1912, he shed some light on the subject:

I had, as a matter of fact, wanted a girl at home for a considerable time but … someone else appeared to be in the field. Fortunately he was unsuccessful, for the girl also wanted me but was under the impression that I was not available.

This book is for the general reader who wants to know how science really works and to know how much authority to grant to experts; it is for the student studying science at school or university; and it is for those at the very beginning of a course in the history, philosophy or sociology of science. In sum, the book is for the citizen living in a technological society. The book adapts the work of professional historians and sociologists for a more general audience. The chapters are of different origins. Some are based on our own work and some on our readings of a selection of the few books and papers in the history and sociology of science that adopt a non-retrospective approach. In these later cases we have relied on the original authors for additional information, and have had occasional resource to archival material. In choosing chapters to represent science we have been limited by the materials to hand. But, given this constraint, we have covered the ground in two ways. We have selected from the life sciences and the physical sciences and we have selected episodes of famous science alongside relatively mundane science and what some would call bad science. We have done this because we want to show that, in terms of our concerns, the science is the same whether it is famous or infamous, big or small, foundational or ephemeral.

Introduction

Everyone is fascinated by memory and nearly everyone feels that they would prefer their memory to be a little better. Memorising lines in a play, or memorising multiplication tables, is the kind of hard work that people like to avoid. The slow growth of experience that counts as wisdom seems to be the gradual accumulation of memories over a lifetime. If only we could pass on our memories directly we could use our creative abilities from an early age without needing to spend years building the foundations first.

Between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s it began to look as though one day we might be able to build our memories without the usual effort. This was as a result of experiments done by James V. McConnell and, later, Georges Ungar, on the chemical transfer of memory in worms and rats. If memories are encoded in molecules then, in principle, it should be possible to transfer The Complete Works of Shakespeare to memory by ingesting a pill, to master the multiplication tables by injection into the bloodstream, or to become fluent in a foreign language by having it deposited under the skin; a whole new meaning would be given to the notion of ‘swallowing the dictionary’. McConnell and Ungar believed they had shown that memories were stored in chemicals that could be transferred from animal to animal.

Science seems to be either all good or all bad. For some, science is a crusading knight beset by simple-minded mystics while more sinister figures wait to found a new fascism on the victory of ignorance. For others it is science which is the enemy; our gentle planet, our feel for the just, the poetic and the beautiful, are assailed by a technological bureaucracy – the antithesis of culture – controlled by capitalists with no concern but profit. For some, science gives us agricultural self-sufficiency, cures for the crippled, and a global network of communication; for others it gives us weapons of war, a school teacher's fiery death as the space shuttle falls from grace, and the silent, deceiving, bone-poisoning, Chernobyl.

Both these ideas of science are wrong and dangerous. The personality of science is neither that of a chivalrous knight nor that of a pitiless juggernaut. What, then, is science? Science is a golem.

A golem is a creature of Jewish mythology. It is a humanoid made by man from clay and water, with incantations and spells. It is powerful. It grows a little more powerful every day. It will follow orders, do your work, and protect you from the ever threatening enemy. But it is clumsy and dangerous. Without control, a golem may destroy its masters with its flailing vigour.

Progress on dating the age of the Earth was slow. Years, even decades went by without any significant advance being made. But science is like that. What is often not realised when the breakthrough finally occurs is that for years previously a few individuals had been diligently working in the background, thinking and writing about the problems, quietly and persistently pursuing their goal. Arthur Holmes was one. Every few years he took it upon himself to write an article summarising the current state of play with regard to the age of the Earth. In simple and lucid language he explained to the scientist and layman alike the history of radioactivity, its application to dating minerals and the age of the Earth, and included any recent developments. Year after year he said much the same thing: Kelvin's arguments were shot down in flames, the ‘hour-glass’ methods were swept aside, and radioactivity emerged victorious. Slowly, bit by bit, this one-man campaign spread the word about the great antiquity of the age of the Earth.

He also continued to build up the database. As early as 1923 a committee had been set up in America for ‘The Measurement of Geologic Time by Atomic Disintegration’, its objectives being to collate and monitor all the dating of rocks being done around the world.