Major social upheavals are typically accompanied by similar upheavals in the dominant ideas in society. This is as true of science as of other ideological spheres.
The English Revolution of 1642–49, a key event in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, was followed by discoveries that included Robert Hooke’s observation of the first biological cell and Robert Boyle’s elucidation of the physical properties of gases. This moment of scientific progress culminated in Isaac Newton’s Principia, which revolutionized our understanding of planetary movements by introducing the laws of motion and universal gravitation.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the first attempt to construct a socialist society on a countrywide scale. It saw the emergence of exciting new ideas in scientific fields as diverse as genetics, ecology, and psychology, before the rise of Stalinism snuffed out these developments.
The late 1960s and early 1970s have gone down in history as some of the most socially turbulent times in living memory. Although the hopes of activists at the time for a just and equal society free of oppression and war did not ultimately bear fruit, we shouldn’t underestimate the ideological impact of the period. That impact extended to science, as illustrated by the career of Steven Rose, a renowned British neuroscientist who died last month at the age of eighty-seven.
Rose, who was born in London in 1938 and educated at the University of Cambridge, was an internationally respected biologist with a prodigious research output. He published more than…
Auteur: John Parrington
