TO THE READER
The 850 words of Basic English -- the language used in this book -- are given on a folded page at the front. This short list is not a first state in the learning of English (though it may be used as such) but the apparatus of a complete language-machine which is itself a part of normal English. With this language it is possible to give an account of complex ideas, and its solid structure may safely be used as a base for the higher levels of science.
At these higher levels, as was made clear in Basic English Applied (Science). short special lists are needed -- 100 words for general science and 50 words for any one branch of it. In addition to these, the great number of special words which are international among men of science may be used for expert readers.
But though these additional to Basic are necessary when it is used by experts writing for experts, nothing but the 850 words of the general list are needed in writing about science at a simple level for a wider public. In fact, there is much to be said for the view that this list is the best election for the purpose even in England and America, because anyone limiting himself on Basic lines will automatically put things in a way which is clear to the general reader -- if he himself has a good knowledge of what he is writing about.
At a time when public opinion may have increasingly important effects on the future of science, the general reader is a person the experts would do well to take more seriously ; and the current view that any newspaper story is good enough for the public may do great damage to the cause of science. With the help of Basic, such accounts may be made simple without becoming bad science. Mr. S. L. Salzedo's A Basic Astronomy is an interesting example of what may be done in this connection.
In this book, however, a somewhat different sort of test is being made. Mr. Empson has taken material noted for its value to the general reader, and put it into Basic in the interests of an international public. If such material has been turned into Basic without great loss of thought or feeling, we may be certain that the range of the language is great enough for the needs of general science.
This is one of two Basic books which have been made from a selection of have been made from a selection of Professor Haldane's papers in Possible Worlds and The inequality of Man. It puts together some accounts of the theories of present day science so as to give a general picture of our position on the Earth as living beings. The other book, Science and Well-Being, gives the views of a biology worker (and a man uncommonly fertile in his ideas and wide in his knowledge) on important questions of general public interest. No complete line of division is possible between the questions covered in the two books (that, in fact, is why they are important) and anyone interested in one book will be interested in the other.
There is good reason for giving international form to the sort of views put forward in these books, because their purpose is itself international. The thoughts here are in no way dependent on the tricks of one language. And because the different countries are now becoming more dependent on one another, with quicker transport and more complex trade relations, the need for the international outlook of science is becoming greater.
The English or American reader may be interested in making the comparison for himself between the papers in their Basic form and in normal English. It is our hope that he will do so. Professor Haldane has a very straightforward way of writing, and though there may be some loss of its force in Basic, the feeling is not much changed. As to the sense, Professor Haldane has been kind enough to go through the book, making a number of suggestions, and has given his authority for it to be printed in its present form. He was even ready to say that in some places the argument is the better for being put in this form.
In addition to the 850 words printed at the front, Mr. Empson has naturally made use of the general international words fixed as part of the Basic system and of words which are international for science. Where other words have been used their sense has first been made clear. In addition to these, a small number of special names have been kept in simply as examples. These are not necessary to the argument but make it more detailed.
At the end of the book there is a list of words whose sense is given on one page of the book and which are then used on later pages.
C. K. OGDEN.
The Orthological Institute,
10, King's Parade,
Cambridge.
11
1 . HOW LIVING BEINGS FIRST CAME INTO EXISTENCE
Till about the last 150 years it was the
general belief that living beings were
forming all the time from dead material.
Worms were said to be made by meat when
it was going bad. In 1668 Redi made clear
that this did not take place if insects were
kept out with enough care. And in 1860
Pasteur took this farther by keeping out
the bacteria which, as he then made clear,
are the cause of meat going bad. It seemed
almost certain that all the living beings
of which we have knowledge take their
start from other living beings. At the same
time Darwin gave the question a new
interest by making us see its connection
with ourselves. It had seemed unimportant
that some Worms might be formed
from earth. But if man came from worms
this fact had to be looked at in a new way.
It would make the development of living
beings as much a chance process as the
growth of monkeys into man. Even if the
later stages of man’s history were dependent
on natural causes, his self-respect gave
him a feeling that some more than natural,
some at any rate surprising, cause was
responsible for the existence of his earliest
fathers. So a number of men, who had been
forced into agreement with the arguments
of Darwin, were greatly comforted by
Pasteur’s decision that living beings may
be produced only by other living beings.
It made it possible to take the view that
living beings had been formed on earth
millions of years back by some process
outside natural law, or that they came
to the earth from outer space on a mass
of iron or stone or in the form of very
small freely-moving bodies. But a great
number of workers in biology, possibly
most of them, kept the belief that at some
time far off in the past living beings had
come into existence on the earth from dead
material through the working of natural
processes.
When Darwin put forward the theory
that man came from animals there was
much interest in the idea of the ‘ Missing
Link,’ the living connection between ourselves
and the monkeys. When Dubois
made the discovery of the bones of
Pithecanthropus some experts said straight
away that they were the bones of an
animal, others were equally certain that
they were the bones of a man. Men of
science are now in agreement that one
view is as good as the other, the only
question being what sense is given to the
word man. Pithecanthropus was a being
which might rightly be named a man or a
monkey, and its existence made it certain
that the two are different only in degree.
The new work which has been done on
beings so small that one is unable to see
them even with a microscope has given at
Least one parallel example, that of the
' bacteriophage,' a discovery made by
d'Herelle. This is the cause of a disease,
ur at any rate of a condition unlike the
normal bacteria. Before the discovery of
the size of the atom there was no reason
for doubting that :
Great fleas have little fleas
Upon their backs to bite ’em ;
The little ones have lesser ones,
And so ad infinitum.1
But it is now clear that this is not possible.
15
. . .(more) . . . 18 pages . . .
2 . MAN AS A SEA ANIMAL
Kings, and writers voicing the opinion
of their newspaper, commonly say ‘ we ’ in
place of ‘ I.’ If we all did this, and saw
ourselves in that light, we would have a
much better idea how our body does its
work. Every one of us is an organization
of about a hundred million million cells,
and the work these cells do together is our
process of living. This condition is made
possible, in a great measure, by the system
of the nerves, which is very beautiful and
delicate. But it is an important fact that
a great number of the cells -- in fact, most
of them-have no nerve threads. Their
behaviour is fixed by two things, the electric
and other physical forces acting on them
from cells near them, and the chemical
effects of the complex liquid by which they
are covered, or which is given to them by
other units. We may see how important are
these forces, which have no connection
with the nerves, from the fact that the
development of the other parts of an
animal before birth are complete before
34
any nerves have been sent out to them
(from the brain and the cord of nerves
down the backbone), and will go on doing
so almost normally even if the growth of
the nerve-system is stopped. If we make
the common comparison between the
body and a nation we may say that most
of the persons living in the nation of a
man’s body are not servants of the nation
but are working for private reasons, such
as the desire to make as much money for
themselves as possible, without any orders
straight from the head government. In
addition, a great number of the cells in
the brain, the seat of government, are
watching for the smallest changes in their
chemical conditions; and their reaction
is to send out orders for some such act as
increasing or cutting down the breathing,
which will make the conditions normal
again.
If we put separate living cells -- such things
as protozoa, bacteria, or diatomacae, and
other very small plants -- which are the food,
at first or second hand, of all animals -- in
sea water, it is frequently very hard to
keep them living. The very smallest
changes in the liquid round them, specially
in the amount of chemical base (‘ alkali ’) in it,
35
will be the cause of their death or
make great changes in their behaviour.
In fact they are quite as dependent on
having the right amount of potassium (K)
and calcium (Ca) salts round them as on
having the right amount of oxygen (O
2) or
food. A great part of their powers is used
up in overcoming conditions in the liquid
round them. For example, water generally
gets through the skins of the protozoa in
rivers, and they have to have a special
apparatus in their bodies, the ‘ contractile
vacuole ' for getting it out. When
they are placed in salt water this apparatus
is used very little, and then only for
sending out waste produce.
Our cells do their special work much
better than protozoa, but fixed and complex
conditions are necessary to them. It is
the business of different parts of the body,
such as the breathing -- apparatus,
liver,
skin, stomach, and
kidneys, to keep
these conditions right. In the same way
a man in a complex and ordered society is
generally far better at his special trade
than one in a small simple society,
but only if most of his needs are
looked after by other men who make his
house, his bread, his clothing, and so on.
36
The conditions inside us are fixed by the
blood, or possibly l had better say by the
liquid part of it which takes up the small
solid parts. We are not conscious of all
the processes by which the condition is
kept regular. For example, if the amount
of sugar gets low, the liver makes new
sugar from a substance named glycogen
which is stored in its cells. lf the amount
of any substance in it gets over a certain
amount, the
kidneys (which make urine)
take some away, and so on. Sometimes,
however, the conscious mind and our
powers of decision do their part. If there
is not enough water we are conscious of the
need for it ; if there is not enough sugar,
and the
liver is not able to put some more
into the blood quickly, we are conscious
of the need for food ; if there is not enough
oxygen we are conscious of breathing
quickly ; and these effects may become so
serious as to take up all our attention.
37
The liquid part of the blood of a number
of sea animals is almost the same as sea
water, with the addition of a little sugar
and other food substances on its way from
the stomach to the cells, and some waste
produce on its way from the cells to the
parts which send it out of the body. A sea
molluse's heart muscle will keep up its
rhythm when placed in sea water, though
quite a small change in the chemical
substances in it, for example taking out
the calcium salts, would make the sea
water a poison to it. We animals with
backbones have a blood liquid which is
almost the same as one part of sea water
mixed with three parts of water without salt.
Great amounts of such a liquid may safely
be put into a man’s blood-vessels with a
hollow needle. The chemical agreement is
so near that it is certainly not a question
of chance. Though all cells have more
potassium than sodium (Na) in them, the
blood liquid has 15 times as much sodium
as potassium, and sea water 27 times as
much. ln the same way the relation of sodium
to calcium is 39 : 1 in blood-liquid, 27 : 1
in the sea. For magnesium (Mg) the agreement
is not so good. It is the view of some
experts that in the same way as the blood
liquid of present-day sea animals without
backbone is almost sea water, so ours is like
the sea water of a far-off time. It was then
that, in the process of our development
a breathing-apparatus was produced which
would keep out the salts of sea Water (as in
the fish). The fish of the present day, even
38
those living in the sea, have a blood liquid
which has very little salt in it, much like
ours, so probably it was some early relation
of theirs and ours which first got its blood
completely shut off from the sea. Now,
the sea is getting salt all the time from the
rivers, and only sometimes giving it up
(in drying stretches of sea water cut off
from the sea) so it becomes more and more
salt as time goes on, and our blood liquid
is a sign of a time when it had less than
half its present amount of salt.
It is not only the cells of our body which
are living like water animals in this way.
Most sea animals, with and without back-
bones, send out their eggs and male seeds
into the sea, and the number of eggs which
become fertile is dependent on the numbers
and swimming power of the male seeds.
Our output of eggs has been cut down to
one or two a month, but we still, unlike
a number of insects, and animals such as
crabs1 go on producing male seeds which
have to go great distances to get to the
egg, and so are needed in surprisingly
great numbers. That they are a development
from sea animals is clear from the
fact that they are only able to go on living
39
in a liquid with much the same salts in it
as the blood liquid. And after our development
is started, by the joining of an egg
and a male seed, we go through our first
nine months as water animals, supported
in and kept safe by a salt liquid. At the
start we are salt water animals.
Two parts of our sense-apparatus give
surprisingly clear signs of our earlier
development in sea water. Under the skin
of a fish there are a number of very small
pipes sometimes, but not generally, opening
on the outside. There is a complex
system on the head, and one on the left
and right sides of the body, frequently
marked by a clearly-formed band on the
skin covering it.
These pipes have in them groups of very
small hairs with a great number of nerve
threads running to them, so delicate that
it would not be possible for them to be
placed on the outside of the body. The
fish’s motions through the water, and
small currents and wave motions in the
water itself, put the liquid in the pipes in
motion so that the hairs are bent over.
In this way the fish gets a knowledge of
the rate and rhythm of the motion of the
water in the pipes, as a cat might get some
idea of the force of a wind by the degree
to which its long face-hairs were bent.
40
Two parts of the pipe system on the
sides of the head go down deep into the
bone of the head and have very special
uses. One is used for answering to quick
and delicate waves in the water, in fact
to sounds. The other is made of three
curved pipes at right angles, the ‘ semi-circular
canals'. The only connection this
apparatus has with the sea is through a
long narrow canal sometimes shut when
the animals get older. But when the fish
is turning round, the water on one or more
of these curved canals is kept back, like
the water in a glass which is suddenly
turned, and is forced up against the hair
cells in the canal. In this way, while the
canals in the outside system give the fish
knowledge about its motions in relation
to the water round it, those of the inner
curved canals make it conscious of its
turning motions.
41
We land animals with backbones have
given up most of the fish’s system
of canals, but we have still the two sorts
of special instrument in the head, forming
our inside ear; this is open to the water
round it in the early part of our development
before birth, but becomes shut long
before birth, or before birds come out of
the egg. The tightly-stretched skin, across
the inside of the ear, and a complex
system of small bones, take the shaking-motion
from the air to the water in one
part of the ear. The motion in the water
has an effect on the hair cells at the end of
the nerve threads used for hearing, and
these in turn give an impulse to the parts
of the brain used for hearing. When our
heads are turning, the salt water moving
in the curved canals is forced up against
the hair cells. They are joined to the eye-ball
muscles by a complex system of nerve
threads in the brain, and when we give our
heads a turn our eyes are turned in the
opposite direction, so that we are still
looking the same way. This is an automatic
reaction not under the control of
our conscious mind ; in fact it is not
possible to give one’s head a sudden turn
while keeping the eyes fixed in relation
to it.
42
The curved canals sometimes give us
false news. In a turning basin the water
slowly comes to rest in relation to the
basin, that is, it takes up the basin’s rate
of turning. The liquid of our inside ears
does the same if we go on turning at the
same rate. So no further impulse is given
to our eye-muscles and we are able to go
on looking at anything turning with us,
for example the face of the person one is
dancing with (in the sort of dance they did
before the war) while at the same time
things round one, which are at rest, are
not fixed by the eye. But when the basin
or the man comes to rest the liquid does
not, and the eyes go through motions not
under conscious control, so that everything
seems to be turning round him. And it is
possible to get the same effect in an
upright plane, by turning round a number
of times with the head bent forward. This
makes the liquid go round in a level
plane which becomes upright when the
head is lifted up. The legs and body take
part in the automatic reaction, which
would be the right one if one was falling
over; but in fact it frequently makes us
go down in the opposite direction.
43
In some ways an instrument of direction
like the ship’s needle, with its power of
attraction, or a weighted turning wheel of
enough weight, would keep our balance
better, but living material has never
made use of the wheel or of this sort of
attraction.
The development of man’s body has
been like that of the British form of government.
It is full of things handed down
from the past, as strange as the judges’
heads of false hair, or the trade companies
in the City of London, but most of these
things have been put to a new use.
44
3 . ON BEING THE RIGHT SIZE
The different animals are more clearly
different in size than in any other way, but
for some reason writers on zoology have
given strangely little attention to this. In
a zoology book before me there seem to be
no statements about the sizes of the
animals, though some facts are let out by
the way about the size of the mouse
1 in
comparison with the
elephant.2 But it is
simple enough to give reasons why it is
not possible for a mouse to be the size of an
elephant. For every sort of animal there
is a best possible size, and a great change
of size makes a change of form necessary.
Let us take the simplest example possible,
of a man sixty feet high -- about
as high as the great bad men who kept
attacking the good man, in the stories we
had as boys. These strange men were not
only ten times as high as the good man,
but ten times as wide and ten times as
thick, so that their weight was a thousand
times his, or about eighty or ninety tons.
45
. . .(more) . . . 13 pages . . .
4 . ON SCALES
"The unending quiet of those unending spaces," said Pascal, looking at the stars and between them, "puts me in fear," and this fear, which has little enough reason in it, has been sounding on in men's minds for hundreds of years.
It is common to say that one is unable to get any idea of the distance even of the nearest fixed stars, and to make no attempt to get an idea of the number of
atoms2 in one's thumbnail. This tendency makes it quite unnecessarily hard for the man in the street to get clear in his mind about the chief discoveries of present-day science ; a great part of which are quite straightforward, but for the fact that the numbers they are based on are of some size. Pascal's feeling, in fact, has nothing to do with science, or with religion. "I will be over the top of him in a short time," said Sir Thomas More, when he took his last look at the sun before his head was cut off ; and in the view of the present-day expert in astronomy the sun is a somewhat small but more or less representative star.
There is no reason for the belief that outer space is unlimited. Very probably all space is of fixed size, and certainly the distances to all the stars we see are not outside the range of man's mind. To be unlimited is a property of mind and not of material things. We have the power of reasoning about what is unlimited but not of seeing it. As for the quiet of outer space, one would be unable to go on living in it, and so would be unable to say if it was quiet or not. But if one was shut up in a steel box in it, like the men in Jules Verne's book who went to the moon, there would probably come to one's ears quite frequently, at any rate when near a star, the sound of a very small bit of dust moving at a very great rate and coming up against the box.
The common man frequently makes the protest that he is unable to get any idea of the eighteen million million miles which is the unit used in astronomy in connection with the fixed stars, and is named a
parsec because the parallax of a star at that distance seems to be a second ; in other words, the circle the earth makes round the sun would take up an angle of two seconds at that distance, or seem the size of a halfpenny three thousand yards away. Naturally one is unable to see a parsec in one's mind. But one may have thoughts about it, quite clear ones.
Every person of education has got used to a process which is most complex, and makes necessary a quite surprising change of scale. That process is map-reading. Our smallest unit for everyday use is about a centimeter, or two-fifths of an inch. It is not necessary for most of our normal measuring to make less error than this. Now if we take a look at a map of the earth on a ball measuring 16 inches round, we are using something on a scale of one in a hundred million (10
-8), and the common man is able to see its purpose and make use of it. An Englishman hearing that his son is going to New Zealand has only to take a look at the map to see that letters will take longer to come from there than from his other son in Newfoundland. But though we are quite happy with this scale (a scale of 1,000 kilometers, or about six hundred miles, to a centimeter) so long as we keep to the earth, the normal person has still not got used to the fact that on the same scale the sun is a mile off and about the size of a church.
Our sons' Sons will have got used to the opposite trick, that is to say, they will be happy working with things on a scale of a hundred million to one. On this scale the common sorts of atom are seen as less than an inch across, and
molecules of quite complex substances from living bodies are a foot or so long. The
electrons in these atoms and the
nuclei which, on the present view, they go round, would be so small as not to be seen, but the way they go might be marked out, as railway lines are on a map, though only by making them wider than they would in fact be. it is to be doubted if there would be any purpose m having a greater scale than this. When we come to events inside the atom it is no longer possible to give an account of them in space and time ; or at any rate the properties of space and time in very small amounts are so unlike those of common-sense space and time that scale-copies are not of much value. On the other hand scale-copies of molecules, based on X-ray discoveries about
crystals, are of great use as guides, and are taking us forward to a new stage of chemical discovery.
Let us now take a second step in the opposite direction, and make a scale-copy such that in it the ball will be made as much smaller as the earth was made to get it down to the size of the ball. That is to say, our copy will be on a scale of one in ten thousand million million (10
-16). This would, in fact, do very little for us, because not only the earth, but the circle it makes round the sun, would be so small that we would be unable to see it, and even the circle made by Neptune would go with comfort on a pin's head, which would at the same time give the size of the greatest star we have knowledge of. But unhappily, even on this scale the nearest fixed star would be four yards away, and only about a hundred would be less than thirty yards off. The
Galaxy would be a good day's walk across. Light would go much more slowly than a
snail, but quicker than the growth of most plants!
There would probably be some purpose in taking a third step in the same direction. If we again made our scale smaller by a hundred million times, the Galaxy would be so small that we would be almost unable to see it at all,
the nearer
'spiral nebulae' would be only a small part of an inch away from it, and probably all the 'spiral nebulae' which we are able to see with the best instruments would be less than half a mile away. It is not clear that we would be able to do the operation a fourth time. Because the general theory of
Relativity seems necessarily to take us to the belief that space is limited, and that to go straight on in any direction would in the end take one back to the starting-point. An attempt to make a copy on this scale would possibly give an outcome as false as that got when, by Mercator's system, we make an attempt at copying all the earth on one plane. On the fourth-order scale the size of all space might be as small as one hundred thousandth part of a solid measuring a millimeter long and a millimeter wide, though this is a lower limit.
We have now seen that it is possible, and frequently of use, to make copies of things up to a hundred million times their true size and down to a scale of about a million million million millionth. Outside these limits space does not have the properties given to it by common sense, and it is no use attempting to get pictures of things. We have to go into the mathematics of the
Quantum Theory at the small end and of Relativity at the other end. But long before that is necessary, the normal man's powers of thought have come to a stop, from a fear, it seems, of the word ' million.' This is because it is generally used for things like a million bits of gold or a million years, which it is hard for us to get an idea of, though in fact a quite normal room would take a hundred million bits of gold money, as long as the floor did not give way. But it would be a good thing for us to get into the way of using millions by keeping in mind that our bath every day has about ten million drops of water in it, and at we have frequently done ten million millimeters in a day, walking.
It is to be regretted that outside India one has no chance of seeing a million men and women, because such numbers only together for the great Hindu journeys for purposes of religion, and very interesting they are. Sometimes three million men and women may be seen at the Kumbh Mela, a public event which takes place every twelve years (it last took place, if my memory is right, at Allahabad in January 1930). Anyone who is unable to get an idea of a million would do very well to go and see it. And it is said, by the way, that by going to it you get out of two or three million future births.
In science we get used to these great numbers. The astronomer quite happily goes from measuring the distance of a star in
kiloparsecs -- light takes 3,000 years to go a kiloparsec -- to measuring how long the waves of its light are, with an error much less than an 'Angstrom' unit, which is a hundred-millionth of a centimeter. And there is a certain shock of pleasure when the outcome of a mathematics operation in which one has made use of hundreds of millions, comes out at one or two -- when up till the last minute it seemed as if it might have been anything from a million to a millionth -- and so gives you a simple theory. I have in mind, for example, the great discovery of Eddington as to why stars have so little weight (not one of those whose weight has been measured is as much as a hundred times the weight of the sun). Starting from the facts of physics he got at the degree of heat inside the stars ; and because waves of heat or light give a push to the material they come against he was able to see by mathematics what part of the weight of a star of given mass was supported by the waves of the heat or light produced in the star itself. The part which is supported in this way is so small as to be unimportant for stars of less weight than the sun, but comes up to half the weight in a star about five times the sun's weight, and a star with much more weight is in danger of bursting. In this way, through a waste of millions, we come to a clear account of why all stars have about the same weight.
In the same way Gorter and Grendel, and Fricke and Morse, have made it clear by quite different tests that the thin skin of oil round a red blood-cell is two molecules thick. Gorter got the oil separate from the blood-cell and put it on water so that a thin skin was formed ; Fricke took the measure of the power of the blood-cells as
condensers by putting blood in a very quickly changing electric field. They made use of such numbers as the five thousand million blood-cells in a milliliter and the six hundred thousand million million million atoms in a gram of hydrogen (H
2), but the answer at the end was 'two' for Gorter and 'one or two' for Fricke. It is the agreement of such processes which makes it necessary for a person trained in science to put belief in the numbers on which they are based.
-68-
5 . WHAT MAN MAY BECOME
(more)
6 . THE LAST JUDGING OF THE EARTH
(more)
SPECIAL WORDS
A list of words which are not in Basic and are used in more than one page, with a guide to the page on which the sense is made clear.
cell, 16
crab, 39
elephant, 45
flea, 15
gene, 18
mammal, 25
mouse (mice), 45
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