Come to think of it, I have always found this one thing strangely irritating all through my school... at the end of every theorem or hypothesis, there used to be section focusing on the limitations of the landmark achievement.....Imagine reading all about Rutherford's neutron scattering experiment and his very sharp hypotheses about the structure of the atom and then bang ! comes the next paragraph highlighting the drawbacks of the model... all of course based on the information available from present day science and the technology it permits. I have always felt (even as a teenager) that one ends up being extremely harsh on these great minds in the light of information which was unavailable to them... We ended up judging the past in the light of future.
This entire thought of course was lying in some corner of my mind till i came across it again in the essays of Stephen J Gould (he of course, needs no introduction for biologists but for the others, he is an evolutionary biologist who has had a lot of impact on the field and he has a rather unique style of writing essays). He has very wonderfully highlighted the bis we approach history with and his ideas have been beautifully described in the following excerpt from his essay -
"History reveals patterns and regularities that enhance our potential for understanding. But history also expresses the unpredictable foibles of human passion, ignorance, and dreams of transcendence. we can only understand the meaning of past events in their own terms and circumstances, however legitimately we may choose to judge the motives and intentions of our forebears. Karl Marx began his most famous historical treatise, his study of Napolean III's rise to power, by writing, 'Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please'."
This entire thought of course was lying in some corner of my mind till i came across it again in the essays of Stephen J Gould (he of course, needs no introduction for biologists but for the others, he is an evolutionary biologist who has had a lot of impact on the field and he has a rather unique style of writing essays). He has very wonderfully highlighted the bis we approach history with and his ideas have been beautifully described in the following excerpt from his essay -
"History reveals patterns and regularities that enhance our potential for understanding. But history also expresses the unpredictable foibles of human passion, ignorance, and dreams of transcendence. we can only understand the meaning of past events in their own terms and circumstances, however legitimately we may choose to judge the motives and intentions of our forebears. Karl Marx began his most famous historical treatise, his study of Napolean III's rise to power, by writing, 'Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please'."
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