On the Shoulders of Giants

(Edited, with commentary, by Stephen Hawking)

A book review by Keith Hendren

Forget, if you can, everything you learned from that third grade science docent
with the baking soda and vinegar. Wipe away the memory of those colorful slides from
the junior high astronomy course. Discard the gems of knowledge from the two
mandatory high school science classes. Now imagine yourself stripped of all that
precious knowledge and placed out in nature with no human contact and only two
elementary study tools: a telescope and a notebook. When you look up in the sky, what
would you imagine of the things you saw there? What conclusions, if any, would you
reach about the world around you? Would you be right?

Less than five centuries ago, most humans in those circumstances would envision
themselves on a flat planet at the very center of a lone universe. How did we get from
there to here? That is the question answered by the book On the Shoulders of Giants,
edited and compiled by Stephen Hawking, a world-renowned physicist in his own right.
Hawking takes five of the “giants” from the history of astrophysics and provides
commentary and illustrations as garnishes to summaries of their most famous theorems.

While it is generally not my practice to read scientific works for enjoyment, I do

very much enjoy hearing about great ideas, and how the great minds over time have
produced them. I find it a shame that for many, myself included, it did not take much
effort to imagine forgetting these momentous principles. They seem to belong to a
universal category of knowledge—without ethnic or national heredity, but the common
heritage of human curiosity of pursuit of knowledge. For those without the attention span
to read the entire book (which is only a summary of the original works), see the main
works and discoveries below.

Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres

Prior to Copernicus, the world largely followed the views of the ancient Egyptian
Ptolemy, namely the “geo-centric” principle that the earth is the center of the universe.
Copernicus, through decades of stellar observation, could not rectify the things he saw
there with the theory of geocentricism. Instead, he cautiously proposed a near-
heliocentric (sun-centered) theory as an interesting way to explain star trajectories. The
hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church at the time created the need for precise
verbiage. Several contemporaries, namely Antoli Bruno, were burned at the stake for
proposing similar concepts as truth.

Galileo Galilei: Dialogues Concerning the New Sciences

While Copernicus toiled in cautious anonymity, Galileo was much more outspoken about
his theories, and it very nearly cost him his life. Galileo published his works, furthering
the heliocentric principles. He took the newly discovered telescope from a novelty to a
useful scientific tool. This allowed him to see Jupiter’s moons and begin discussions on a
unified theory of gravity. Additionally, Galileo’s work in the theory of motion set the
groundwork for Isaac Newton to later unify the principles of kinematics.
Johannes Kepler: Harmonies of the World
Kepler held that the Copernican heliocentricism was correct, but that the orbits of the
planets were elliptical, not circular, as had previously been assumed. Kepler worked with
a mystician by the name of Brahe to collect huge amounts of celestial data, and actually
empirically proved the heliocentric theory.

Sir Isaac Newton: The Principia

The title of Hawking’s book comes from a quote of Isaac Newton, “If I have seen farther,
it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” While the words are generally invoked as a
metaphor for the accumulative nature of human knowledge, Newton was actually
bragging to his nemesis, Robert Hooke, about his superior accomplishments in optical
theory. Bragging aside, the analogy is fitting for how discoveries have been made: one
discovery begets another, as great minds throughout the centuries build upon the genius
of their predecessors. Newton’s three main contributions were the following laws of
motion:
1. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion
unless an external force is applied to it.
2. The relationship between an object's mass (m), its acceleration (a), and the
applied force (F) is F = ma.
3. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Albert Einstein: The Principles of Relativity: A collection of Original Papers on the

Special Theory of Relativity
Einstein is perhaps the most famous physicist in modern culture, and for good reason.
After three centuries of few radical changes, his discoveries were the first major changes
in the field. His most famous theorem is E=Mc², or energy equals mass times the speed of
light squared. This theorem means that energy and mass interact with each other. It was
actually proven by measuring the position of stars before and after a solar eclipse; the
theory being that during a solar eclipse, the light from the star is bent by its proximity to
the mass of the sun. Einstein went on to propose theories of general and specific
relativity, both of which were revolutionary.

If Hawking’s goal was to elucidate the masses, I would say he scored a four out of
five. I was intrigued and read with great interest and relative understanding the theorems
of the first four authors, but lost all interest about half way through Einstein’s treatise, as
my mind began to wander. Some say that if you cannot explain an idea simply, you
simply do not understand it. I doubt that is the case with Hawking. Perhaps Einstein’s
principles do not translate simply, at least not in common day parlance.

Along with the convoluted chapters on Einstein, the book had a few other
shortcomings. The copy I read is the illustrated version, but it seemed like little effort had
been put into the often cryptic pictures, which more often resembled dreamy
impressionism than explanatory diagrams. Despite its shortcomings, Hawking managed
to compress 600 years of humankind’s greatest discoveries into half that many pages, and
to take some of the most challenging, elevated concepts of physics and lower them to the
plane of the less than scientific mind. While few are likely to use this book to stand atop
the works of these past giants and peer out upon new horizons of science, Hawking has at
least offered the rest of us a stepping stool.