Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers: Eight Scientific Rivalries That…

Many people have difficulty understanding the motivation of scientists for precedence and the recognition it brings. While there are monetary incentives for some of the protagonists in "Acid Tongues", it is more often pride and the acceptance of one's ideas that drove the rivalries of Newton vs. Leibniz, Edison vs. Tesla, Crick and Watson vs. Pauling vs. Franklin and Wilkins. Sometimes these men (there is only one woman profiled, Rosalind Franklin) of great intellect acted in the most petty and immature fashion. Chemists will enjoy the Lavoisier-Priestly history, and the battle between Gates' Windows and Ellison's Oracle may not have seen its last skirmish. Michael White not only tells some of the most interesting history in science, but also reminds us that great science is done by human beings, with most of the same faults as the rest of us. My favorite quote from the book appears on the first page, and it is from Winston Churchill - "In science you don't need to be polite, you only have to be right". ( )

6 stars: Enjoyed parts of it.

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This book covers a number of scientific rivalries: Tesla/Edison, newton/Leibniz, Darwin/ Owen, Bill Gates/ Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle), Allies/Manhattan project vs. Axis/Heisenberg, Space Race. The central thesis is that the rivalries themselves spur and advance scientific development.

Too bad it wasn't more engaging.

I found the chapters on Tesla/Edison and Newton/Leibniz to be the most interesting. The entier second half of the book contains nothing new; all of these modern projects have been written about extensively.

I don't have much more to say about the book. It covers each section at a high level, and does not go into much detail about the people or the time. A decent introduction to multiple topics, but not for the serious scholar of history.

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A fdew quotes.

Giordano Bruno, like Leonardo, likeCopernicus, like Kepler, like all truth seekers, attacked the givens, the philosophical foundations. These men offerred no mere alternative form of worship, as Lutherans and Calvinists did, but a full blown rival ideology.

a quote contained within, by Bertrand Russell: Uncertainty in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

But equally, science cannot work properly in an atmosphere of secrecy, which goes completely against the mind set of most scientists, for whom the free exchange of ideas is the wellspring of all invention.

Science is, in the grand sense, a communal activity in which some individuals contribute vastly more than others.

Before the team of scientists had arrived at los Alamos, a vast uranium enrichment plant was built from scratch at a 52,000 acre site at remote Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Its construction involved 45,000 workers and when it was completed, 25,000 workers and scientists [including my grandfather] worked there. When operating at full capacity, it consumed more electricity than Pittsburgh.

Many people still laim the US and Soviet space program represented a waste of money and human resources. This is quite wrong. Indeed, the race to the Moon directly influences the technology of today as much as Tesla's great battle with Edison, the building of the atomic bomb, or Lavoisier's radical chemistry.

A further result of the excitement and inspiration produced by the Moon landings, is the way they influenced an enormous number of young people to become interested in science. This in turn stimulated america to pay greater attention to the teaching of science. ... the sheer glamour of space exploration captured the imaginations of perhaps millions of young people throughout the world, who found a new excitement in science and decided to pursue the interest academically. This was science fiction made reality and for a time at least, the rapid advances in space technology became a great source of inspiration and gave hope for the future of all humanity. ( )

The book is about scientific rivalries and races to be first and better in major, groundbreaking scientific discoveries. It takes us from Newton and Leibnitz arguing who first discovered calculus, through Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley fighting over oxygen and modern gas theory, to Richard Owen taking on Charles Darwin on principles of evolution, and Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla undermining each other in electricity. Edison shamelessly used Tesla, but Tesla’s A/C model won in the end anyway. Then, we read about the race to invent the atomic bomb, put together the DNA model, up to the race to the moon and information age race between Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.

I don’t know where the title comes from, but surely not from the content of the book. I haven’t encountered a single tranquil dreamer there, possibly with an exception of Albert Einstein, but he doesn’t play a major role in this tale. The only people I have met were more or less maladjusted exceptional people, more or less competitive, more or less weird. Some of them did have acid tongues like Isaac Newton or Edward Teller, but some were plainly money hungry and obnoxious fellows like Edison. Actually, I will count my loss of reverence for Edison as one of the losses after reading this book, even though it seems to me that the countless cruel experiments on dogs were more Brown’s (Edison’s partner and PR guy) idea. For me it was a revelation that he was primarily an energetic businessman employing groups of experimenters working on his ideas, and not a scientist putting ’99 percent of perspiration and one percent of inspiration’ into his work himself.
This book also adds to the controversy around Watson and Crick’s input into the DNA model. It seems that what White writes, even though he goes to a great length not to give this impression, supports the notion that Watson and Crick were big intellectuals, but even bigger opportunists eagerly using other people’s research in their race for the Nobel Prize. They themselves didn’t do any experiments whatsoever.

I am not sure if I agree with the placement of Bill Gates among the scientists, and I can only see him placed among others there as he propelled the advancement of technology (but not sure if science) through rivalry. And, as we know now, six years after the book was written, that rivalry seems to have been won by Gates, as he still remains the wealthiest man in the world and has now a 70% share in Oracle’s (Ellison’s company) field- the database. Ellison is number 9. Not that it matters to me- a billion of anything is by far an unimaginable concept for me.

All that notwithstanding, I surely gained from reading that book, too. It seems well-researched, and is very readable with some minor lapses of style from time to time, and a few typos. I liked the fact that White seemed to have actually read the sources and original publications instead of relying on other people’s summaries. ( )