In October, Americans celebrate the Columbus Day in honor of the guy who started this whole American business. Calling days after people seems like a catholic tradition. In modern time sentiments to saints changed and now we have occasions like the system administrator appreciation day. Columbus Day doesn’t have a fixed date, but is celebrated in the US on the second Monday of October, concurrently with the Canadian thanksgiving. I am sure Americans are fed up with Columbus stories, but he is not well remembered in the rest of the world and I though it is worth reexamining on Wikipedia.
Columbus was an explorer and adventurer, but for me the interesting question is whether Columbus was a scientist. I would answer yes. Because at the heart of his voyage was the hypothesis that he could get to Asia by sailing west and that route is shorter. In other words, science is not a competition for who can climb the tallest mountain, but there should be some new thinking underlying the activity.
As happens many times in science, he got his calculations wrong. In fact, people told him that the route should be much longer than he thought and no ship could carry enough food for that distance. In simple words, if America was not stuck there in the middle, we would never have heard the name Columbus. This has many common characteristics of science. First, the whole story is a classical case of serendipity. The list of important scientific discoveries that happened by accident can fill an encyclopedia. The lesson is that in science people don’t have to be right all the time. But they need to be wrong in original ways. Second, real scientists put their life on the gambling table. As a contemporary example, although a quantum computer has not been built yet, researchers started to develop quantum complexity theory. Either this computer will be built, and they will be remembered as pioneers, or it will be discovered to be impossible, or the question will not be settled in their lifetime, in which case they will not know if what they spent their life working on is realizable. But this is still a valid science since in real science people don’t know the answers in advance.
The story also has a less widely known Chinese facet. Around 1400, the Chinese were capable of building larger ships than Europeans. A series of voyages was conducted by admiral Zheng He that reached as far as east Africa. But around 1435 they stopped the expeditions and dismantled their fleet. The voyages were expensive, all they found was more land and primitive tribes, and they didn’t need to find the way to China. But if they really wanted, chances are they could have landed in America before Columbus was born. This was a critical mistake, in a 600-years retrospective. This situation occurs frequently in science. Sometimes it is not clear what the direct benefits of a fleet of researches are. Although scientists will claim that their picture of the world is incomplete, it is unclear what can lead to things that were not already found. It is not simple for researches to compete on funding in countries that still have hungry children.
Columbus was not the first to discover America, nor was he the last. The first European to land in the continent of America after the Vikings was probably John Cabot. Why is Columbus the one who is remembered? In science, the list of works that have been rediscovered many times would fill a wikipedia. Some names are remembered, and some appear as footnotes. Marcel Duchamp once said that an important part of what defines good art is the interaction of the work with the society that receives it. In science, the people who are remembered are those who make the discoveries just before the society is ready to accept them. A famous example is Charles Darwin. Darwin was collecting evidences for his theory of natural selection and evolution for twenty years without publishing it. He thought that the social atmosphere was not ready for these ideas, especially the evolution of humans. When the political atmosphere was ready, he got a paper draft from Alfred Wallace about the same theory. Colleagues convinced Darwin to attach his writings to that draft and publish it with Wallace as a co-author. Wallace accepted the arrangement after the fact. It is conceivable that had he not sent the paper to Darwin, you wouldn’t remember the name Darwin today.
Are people remembered because they are extraordinary or just because of random series of historical coincidences? It may sound like a hypothetical question, but a couple of years ago researchers performed an interesting experiment in this emerging field of computational sociology. The experiment allowed participants to freely download songs from the internet and rate the artists. Participants were randomly divided into several channels. In some channels they could see the votes of other people, in others they couldn’t. The result was that very popular songs in some channels were only mediocre in others, possibly because randomness in initial votes created a snowball effect. Columbus was just in the right place at the right time to start this mega-snowball that generated this research at Columbia University.
