We
all know the history of science that we learned from grade school
textbooks: How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was
not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the
falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space
with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of
ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant
thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary
mass of people, and in the traditional account, it is to them that we
owe science in its entirety. This belief is wrong. A
People’s History of Science
shows how ordinary people participate in creating science and have
done so throughout history. It documents how the development of
science has affected ordinary people, and how ordinary people
perceived that development. It would be wrong to claim that the
formulation of quantum theory or the structure of DNA can be credited
directly to artisans or peasants, but if modern science is likened to
a skyscraper, then those twentieth-century triumphs are the
sophisticated filigrees at its pinnacle that are supported by the
massive foundation created by the rest of us.