A few months ago I was rooting through my book shelf and I came across "The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences" by Isaac Asimov. Asimov initially became famous during the "Golden Age" of Science Fiction and is considered one of the Grand Masters of the genre. He is famous for inventing the "The Three Laws of Robotics". This ushered in the era of good robots to supplement the previous trope of evil monster robots. He also wrote the "Foundation" trilogy (and eventually added additional books to the series). This was an early entry in the sub-genre of Future History and posited that crowd psychology would eventually become a hard science, thus allowing broad historical trends to be forecast and possibly manipulated.
After many years of success as a Science Fiction author he branched out into several other areas. One of these was writing about science for a general audience. The "Guide" was written in 1959 and 1960, making it roughly 50 years old. Asimov did a good job of summarizing the state of the art at that time. I thought it would be interesting to do a series of posts comparing the state of Science then and now. But first let me set the scene by looking at the more general situation in 1960 as compared to the present. Let me start with a long list of "no"'s.
There were no integrated circuits. The transistor had been invented about 10 years earlier but was not in wide use. Something called a "transistor radio" would be introduced at about this time. Previously radios, and electronics in general, were powered by vacuum tubes (essentially a small light bulb with a bunch of extra wires and other stuff jammed inside the glass shell). A simple device like a radio would have less than 10 tubes. A very complex device would usually have less than 100. Modern electronics, by contrast, have the equivalent of millions of tubes combined into a single small chip costing a few dollars. Computers existed at this time but they had the processing power of a digital watch and cost millions of dollars each.
There was no Internet. The very beginnings of what would be eventually become the Internet (called ARPANET at the time) was begun in the late '60s. Since there was no Internet there was no E-Mail (invented in the '70s) or web pages (invented in the '90s) or Twitter or Facebook (both invented in the '00s). In fact, you couldn't call someone on your phone by pushing buttons. Telephones of the time had "rotary" dials with 10 holes (one for each digit). There were no Area Codes or International codes. To make a long distance call you had to contact an operator, an actual person, who would make arrangements. Long distance calls within the U.S. were possible but expensive (a dollar or more per minute). International calls were just barely possible. The sound quality was terrible. It could easily take 20 or 30 minutes to set one up and they were fantastically expensive. At the time almost no one had actually participated in one due to the cost and difficulty. You could look up a local phone number in a "phone book" (still around). To get a number for someone not in your town you had to contact an operator (again, a person) in that area who could look it up for you.
And there were no cell phones. You rented phones from the phone company. You couldn't even buy one. There were only a few models to choose from and they were all hard wired to the phone system (e.g. no "walking around" portable phones - you had to go where the phone was and it was by the wall where the phone man had wired it in).
There were TVs but there were no color TVs. Almost no one had cable so all you typically had were the few channels that broadcast over the air in your area. There were a few satellites but there were no communications satellites so there were no extra channels like ESPN or C-SPAN or USA or HBO. You were stuck with what came from your local TV stations. There were no TiVos or DVRs so you had to watch the show when it was broadcast. And a particular episode was only broadcast once (except for some reruns in the summer) so if you missed it there was no going back. At this time there were also no VCRs so you couldn't "Tape" anything. Nor could you rent movies (or download them). If you wanted to see a movie, you had to go to a theater while it was in town.
Cars all ran on leaded gas with no ethanol in it. They had no seat belts or air bags. Air conditioning was available on a few luxury models. Cars were cheaper but tended to wear out quicker. A car was old at 50,000 miles and a junker at 100,000. But car repairs were much simpler and a lot of people did their own. SUVs hadn't been invented yet and pickup trucks were only driven by people who needed them for work. The only in-car electronics were radios and they only got AM. No FM. No CD player or entertainment package. There were no navigation systems. You got free paper maps at gas stations. There was no "self serve". Someone (a "gas jockey") pumped your gas for you and checked the tire pressure, and oil and radiator levels. Cars didn't have fuel injection. They also didn't have any anti-pollution or other complicated stuff like a diagnostic computer. A mechanic had to figure out what was wrong on his own.
Finally, books were a lot cheaper. At $0.90 (1969 price), "Guide" was a little more expensive than a typical book of the time. Of course, most things were cheaper then. But you also got paid a lot less too. And, if you had a paying job, you were almost always a man. Few women worked outside the house. With that as an introduction, let's jump into the book.
The biggest telescope of the time was the 200" Hale telescope located on Mt. Palomar in California. It used large photographic plates, about 1' by 1'. They were covered with an emulsion that was sensitive for the time and designed for maximum sharpness. After processing the plates were examined by eye or perhaps with a small magnifying glass. CCDs had not been invented so there was no electronic alternative to photographic methods. And photographic methods were better than staring through the telescope with the naked eye. Another problem was that the atmosphere introduced small distortions. This was one reason no larger telescope had been built. The Hale was about as big as it made sense to go. Modern telescopes use adaptive optics (and other tricks) to deal with this (and other issues) but the technology to make a bigger telescope work better than the Hale did not exist then. There were other limitations imposed by the atmosphere. It is opaque to Infrared, Ultraviolet, X-rays, and Gamma Rays. And there were no telescopes in space (e.g. Hubble) and no big telescopes in the Southern hemisphere. So Astronomers knew little about how the Universe looked in the Southern hemisphere and nothing about how the universe looked at these other wavelengths. There were a few radio telescopes like Jodrell Bank in the U.K. but big dish radio telescopes like in the movie Contact or at Arecibo in Puerto Rico had not been built yet.
So with these limitations, how did Astronomers of the time do? They got the size of the Solar System right. They got the size of the Milky Way and our rough location in it right. But they did not know that there was a giant Black Hole in the center of the Milky Way. Black Holes at this time were an entirely theoretical concept. No one had any evidence that they actually existed. Astronomers were also able to estimate the size and distance of the Andromeda Galaxy with reasonable accuracy. That, and other observations, led them to believe that the universe was at least 5 billion years old.
The current estimate for the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. So Astronomers of the time got that wrong. But they knew they did not have good data. Instruments of the time only allowed Astronomers to see out about 2 billion years. (The constant speed of light makes distance and time equivalent. If you are looking at something that is one million light years away, you are seeing it as it was one million years ago). So they stated their estimate as "at least 5 billion years". The 2 billion year observational limit was why they had such a poor estimate of the size and age of the universe.
Asimov does a great job of explaining how Astronomers knew what they knew. Much of it was hard to figure out given the tools they had to work with at the time. This is generally true. It is easy for us to figure out a lot of things now because we now have tools that are so much better. Given the "it's easy to do now" phenomenon it's easy to fall into the trap of unconsciously thinking we are so much smarter now than they were then. But in many ways the opposite is true. They were so much smarter then than we are now because they had to be so clever and creative to figure things out with such poor tools. So I recommend picking the book up, if you can find it. It is a useful exercise in humility to see what they had to go through to figure out what they were able to.
I am going to end things here. I will pick things up starting with the next chapter in the next installment.
