Head-to-head: when scientists do battle
1 NUMERO UNO OF CALCULUS
Isaac Newton, born in 1643, is perhaps the most celebrated scientist of all time. He was also a notoriously terrible teacher who gave lectures to empty rooms at Cambridge, spent a large part of his life as a clandestine alchemist and wrote more about religion than science.
When he first demonstrated the use of calculus, he did so in an offhand manner, and didn’t bother to explain it for another 20 years. By the time he published on it, nearly 30 years later, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Germany had widely published his own system.
While the two men acknowledged each other’s work, an acrimonious debate about who first devised calculus ensued, mostly driven by their supporters. The English-speaking world favoured Newton, the continent Leibniz – until evidence came to light he had altered documents to support his claim. Newton, on the other hand, provided little to no proof of his claim, other than his say-so.
For all the bitterness, modern historians agree the two most likely came to calculus independently.
3 BIOLOGICAL STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION
One of the first chapters of truly modern biology featured a feud between French comparative anatomists Étienne Geoffroy Saint-hilaire and Georges Cuvier.
In 1793, at age 22, Geoffroy was made professor of zoology at the Muséum National d’histoire Naturelle in Paris. He soon hired another wunderkind, Cuvier. They worked together for most of their lives, and got along famously – until Cuvier was admitted to the Académie des Sciences, an honour not extended to Geoffroy for another 12 years. It triggered a falling out, both personal and scientific.
Their main bone of contention was an actual bone, called the hyoid. In howler monkeys, as in other primates, it is located at the base of the jaw. Cuvier believed God gave the monkeys a hyoid just the right shape to enable them to howl. Geoffroy thought the monkey hyoid had adapted to facilitate howling.
Most contemporary observers declared Cuvier’s position right, probably because he was an expert networker. Now Geoffroy is recognised as the more important precursor of evolutionary thinking.
2 PHLOGISTON VS OXYGEN
Antoine-laurent de Lavoisier, born in France in 1743, is a father of modern chemistry. He was not, however, the father of fizzy drinks. That honour goes to his contemporary, Joseph Priestley.
Priestley, born in England in 1733, invented soda water as a result of his experiments with gases (or as he put it, “different kinds of air”). His experiments, which included asphyxiating mice, did not free him from the spurious belief in ‘phlogiston’ – a substance conjectured in the 17th century to be released into the air during combustion. He famously claimed to have experimentally produced ‘dephlogisticated’ air, which could absorb more phlogiston and thus encourage combustion.
In 1774 Priestley demonstrated this to Lavoisier, who was initially impressed by the results but ultimately rejected this phlogiston nonsense. He called Priestley’s dephlogisticated air ‘oxygen’, arguing that a burning substance absorbed oxygen from the air, rather than producing phlogiston. Priestly refused to accept this, despite ample evidence. His refusal led to his isolation in the scientific community and the unfortunate moniker of Dr Phlogiston.