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| Lord Kelvin |
In an
earlier post in this blog I spoke about the myth of the Enlightenment, which
gave rise to the theory of indefinite progress and the forecast of enormous
advances for humankind that would be within our reach in the not too distant
future. Although the first half of the eighteenth century was a brake on almost
all the cultural activities of our civilization, including science, they were
delighted with themselves. Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm (1723-1807),
expressed it with unequaled candor, in these words [1]:
The eighteenth century
has surpassed all the others in the praises it has lavished on itself.
One of the ideas in vogue by that time was the
assumption that scientific advances would let man reach immortality, not too
far in time. Although the idea, as a distant possibility, goes back to Roger
Bacon, it seemed much closer in the late eighteenth century. Hence the anecdote
told of the octogenarian wife of marshal Villeroi, who exclaimed, while looking
at Professor Charles’s ascent in a hydrogen balloon:
Yes, it is true! They’ll
discover the secret of not dying, after I’ll be dead!
The optimistic ideas of the eighteenth century suffered
a sudden, impressive turn in the nineteenth, when came to dominate a
pessimistic vision of the future of mankind, based mainly on two scientific discoveries:
