If astronomy did not exist, would it matter? What would have happened to the development of science if Earth had been permanently shrouded in clouds and we had never seen any stars?
Those thoughts struck mathematician Brian Davies after spending a holiday on the Atlantic island of Madeira under thick cloud. 鈥淪ome people have claimed astronomy was an important first step on the road to science,鈥� says Davies. 鈥淚 simply wondered whether being deprived of a view of the heavens would really have set science back.鈥�
Davies, of King鈥檚 College London, scrutinised original journals dating back to the birth of modern science at the beginning of the 17th century, noticing what experiments people did and looking at their motivations. He found that people were rarely motivated by a desire to look at the heavens.
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Instead, developments in technology were more important. 鈥淎s soon as there was a technological development, people exploited it in every conceivable way,鈥� he says. For instance, the development of good-quality lenses led quickly to microscopes and telescopes, vastly expanding the range of science.
Navigation problem
Predictably, Davies says the sciences least affected on a cloudy world would be biology, chemistry and geology. One area most affected would be navigation, since sailors would be unable to use the stars to measure latitude or longitude. But this could still be overcome by technology, using magnetic compasses and gyroscopes.
鈥淚鈥檓 not saying it would be easy,鈥� says Davies. 鈥淪ailors would have had to be far braver and America would have been discovered much later.鈥�
The biggest impact of perpetual cloud cover would have been on 20th-century science. General relativity, Einstein鈥檚 theory of gravity, would not have been confirmed so quickly because that required observing light bending during a total eclipse and anomalies in the orbit of Mercury.
And the discovery that the atoms in our bodies were made inside stars would clearly have been impossible before the discovery of the stars. Astrophysics and cosmology would have had to wait for 1950s technology 鈥� specifically planes such as the X-15 that could fly at high-altitude, above the clouds.
Fragile origin
Davies鈥檚 speculations may be of more than mere academic interest now that we know of about 100 planets outside our Solar System, with the number increasing almost every week.
鈥淚f there are any permanently cloud-enshrouded planets, with gravity similar to Earth, science would develop as quickly as on our planet, as soon as any inhabitants started to combine mathematics with technology,鈥� says Davies. 鈥淭he only thing that would differ is the sequence of discoveries.鈥�
But some people insist that astronomy was a strong driving force of science. 鈥淭here is an intricately interlocking set of circumstances that has driven the fragile origin of modern science,鈥� says Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and history of science at Harvard University. 鈥淭o take away one strong driving force like astronomy could easily upset the entire pattern of development.鈥�
Davies agrees that the origins of technology and people鈥檚 realisation of the value of mathematics in explaining the world were fragile. 鈥淗owever, once that route had been taken early in the 17th century, the development of science as we know it became inevitable,鈥� he maintains. Davies has submitted his paper to the journal Isis.