conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Following, Little, History with the genre: History, World?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'A Little History of Science'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Little History of Science
  Darwin made biological evolution a valid scientific theory. Some scientists were not convinced, but most were, even if they sometimes proposed their own versions of how and why it had happened. Many of the details of Darwin's great work have been corrected by later scientific work. It wasn't utterly perfect. It didn't have to be – science is like that. But from his study and garden at Down House, Darwin ensured that we would never look at life on earth in the same way again. The evolutionary history of our planet is simply the greatest show on earth.
  There are things we simply cannot see or hear. Many stars are beyond our gaze, and we can't see atoms, or even the tiny creatures that teem in puddles of rainwater. We can't hear sounds that many birds or mice can. But we can still learn about them, asking questions and using instruments that let us see or hear far better than with our eyes and ears alone. Just as telescopes let us see further into space, microscopes help us see further into the tiny building-blocks of living creatures.
  In the seventeenth century, the pioneer of microbiology, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, had used his small microscopes to look at blood cells and the hairs on a fly's legs. A century later, more advanced microscopes were allowing naturalists to examine these finer details of anatomy, and the wonderful array of tiny life. A 'compound' microscope could make things appear even bigger than a simple microscope. It is a tube with two lenses, the second of which magnifies the first image, so you get their combined magnification. Many thoughtful people did not completely trust microscopes. Early compound microscopes produced distortions or illusions of various kinds – for example, strange colours or lines where none existed. At the same time, there were only crude methods of cutting things into thin slices to examine them, and of trying to fix these slices on to a slide (a thin glass sheet). Consequently, many scientists thought using microscopes was not worth the effort.
  Yet doctors and biologists wanted to understand how bodies work in the finest possible detail. In France, Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) began to investigate the different substances – what we call the 'tissues', whether hard like bone, soft like fat, or liquid like blood – that make up the human body. Bichat realised that the same kinds of tissues behaved in similar ways, no matter where they were in the human body. Thus, all muscles were composed of the same sort of tissue whether they were busy contracting in legs, arms, hands or feet. All tendons (the bits connecting muscle to bone), or the thin coating called serous tissue (like that surrounding the heart), were similar in all parts of the body. The study of cells and tissues is called 'histology' and Bichat was 'the father of histology'. Yet Bichat was one of those who were suspicious of microscopes, and he used only a simple magnifying glass.
  Bichat's work inspired others to try to understand plants and animals in terms of their smaller, and more basic, building-blocks. In the early decades of the 1800s, there were several competing ideas about just what these fundamental building-blocks of plants and animals were. The technical problems of compound microscopes began to be solved in France and Britain from the late 1820s. From then on people looking down their instruments could be more confident that what they were seeing was an accurate picture of what was really there.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Max Planck's packet, or quantum, of energy, and Albert Einstein's realisation that mass and energy are merely two aspects of the same thing: these discoveries changed forever the way that the universe could be understood. Mass and energy; wave and particle; time and space: nature has revealed herself to be 'both... and...', not 'either... or...'. And while all this helped explain the structure of atoms and the creation of the universe, it also helps you get home at night. Satellites are so far above the earth that Satnav must include special relativity. If it weren't factored in, you could soon get lost.
  What we experience of the earth's history in our lives is a tiny snapshot, the smallest of moments in a very long process. Geologists have scientific techniques, but they must also use their imaginations, thinking 'outside the box'. All good scientists do, even if they are working in the laboratory, checking their ideas against the evidence at hand.
  Our nineteenth-century geologists used the traditional tools: fossil finds, analysing and classifying rocks, looking at the effects of earthquakes and volcanoes. All this they wove into a reasonable history of the earth. Much of what they learned still holds true today. But there were a number of problems that nagged at them, and needed a new kind of bold idea. The old 'catastrophists' had relied on the idea of different sorts of forces, or perhaps even miraculous interventions – great floods such as Noah's Flood described in the Bible. Instead, the new focus would be on time – immense periods of time called 'deep time'. What was the earth like, 200 million years ago, or twice or three times that number of years ago?
  How could deep time help answer three key questions? First, why did the major continents look as if they could be cut out from the oceans and stuck together, like pieces in an enormous jigsaw puzzle? The east coast of South America would fit pretty snugly into the west coast of Africa. Was this an accident?
  Second, why were the rock formations of South Africa so like ones found in Brazil, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean? Why, in such a small island as Great Britain, were there dramatic variations between the Highlands of Scotland, with its crags and lochs, and the gently rolling Weald of Sussex in the south? Indeed, had Britain always been separated from the European mainland? Or Alaska from Asia?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Max Planck's packet, or quantum, of energy, and Albert Einstein's realisation that mass and energy are merely two aspects of the same thing: these discoveries changed forever the way that the universe could be understood. Mass and energy; wave and particle; time and space: nature has revealed herself to be 'both... and...', not 'either... or...'. And while all this helped explain the structure of atoms and the creation of the universe, it also helps you get home at night. Satellites are so far above the earth that Satnav must include special relativity. If it weren't factored in, you could soon get lost.
  What we experience of the earth's history in our lives is a tiny snapshot, the smallest of moments in a very long process. Geologists have scientific techniques, but they must also use their imaginations, thinking 'outside the box'. All good scientists do, even if they are working in the laboratory, checking their ideas against the evidence at hand.
  Our nineteenth-century geologists used the traditional tools: fossil finds, analysing and classifying rocks, looking at the effects of earthquakes and volcanoes. All this they wove into a reasonable history of the earth. Much of what they learned still holds true today. But there were a number of problems that nagged at them, and needed a new kind of bold idea. The old 'catastrophists' had relied on the idea of different sorts of forces, or perhaps even miraculous interventions – great floods such as Noah's Flood described in the Bible. Instead, the new focus would be on time – immense periods of time called 'deep time'. What was the earth like, 200 million years ago, or twice or three times that number of years ago?
  How could deep time help answer three key questions? First, why did the major continents look as if they could be cut out from the oceans and stuck together, like pieces in an enormous jigsaw puzzle? The east coast of South America would fit pretty snugly into the west coast of Africa.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The enormous machines built during the war were valuable, but they were limited by those overheating valves. Next came an invention that has changed the computer and much else: the transistor. Developed from late 1947 by John Bardeen (1908–91), Walter Brattain (1902–87) and William Shockley (1910–89), this device can amplify and switch electronic signals. Transistors were much smaller than vacuum tubes and generated much less heat. They have made all kinds of electrical appliances, such as transistor radios, much smaller and more efficient. The three men shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work, and Bardeen went on to win a second one for his research on 'semi-conductors', the material that makes transistors and modern circuits possible.
  The military continued to develop computing during the Cold War of 1945 to 1991. The two great superpowers, the USA and the USSR, distrusted each other, despite having been allies during the Second World War. Computers were used to analyse the data each country collected about the other's activities. But increasingly powerful number-crunching computers were a great help to scientists, too. Physicists made the greatest use of these new and improving machines during the 1960s. High-energy particle accelerators created so much data that it would have been impossible for an army of people with pencils and paper to make sense of it all.
  More and more, computer scientists became members of a range of scientific teams, and research budgets included their salaries and equipment. So it made a lot of sense if one team could speak to another not just person to person, but computer to computer. After all, the telephone had been around for a century, and sending messages by telegraph wires was even older. Then, in the early 1960s, 'packet switching' was invented. Digital messages could be broken up into smaller units, and each unit would travel by the easiest route, and then be reassembled at its destination, the receiving computer screen. When you are talking on a landline, you're in 'real time', and no one else can call you. But you can send or receive a message on a computer – an email or a post on a website – and it will be available whenever someone wants to read it.
  Computers continued to change the way academic communities worked and communicated with each other. One of the largest collections of physicists in the world worked at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which houses the Large Hadron Collider, the world's fastest particle accelerator (Chapter 39). Computer specialists at CERN took networking and data analysis to new heights in the 1980s and 1990s. One expert was Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955). Berners-Lee was always fascinated by computers. He grew up with them, as both his parents were early computer pioneers. Berners-Lee studied physics at Oxford and then went to work at CERN. In 1989, he asked for some research funds for 'Information Management'. His bosses at CERN gave him some help, but he persisted with his idea of making the increasing amounts of information available on the Internet easily accessible to anyone with a computer and a telephone line. Along with his colleague Robert Cailliau (b. 1947), he invented the World Wide Web. At first it was used just at CERN and one or two other physics laboratories. Then, in 1993 it went public. This coincided with the massive growth of personal computers not just at work but in the home. People who led the personal computer revolution, like Microsoft's Bill Gates (b. 1955) and Apple's Steve Jobs (1955–2011) are modern scientific heroes (and became very rich). So 1955 turned out to be a good year for computers: Berners-Lee, Gates and Jobs were all born then.
  Yet the science of our day is more powerful than ever before. Computers are good for criminals and hackers as well as scientists and students. Science and technology can be abused as easily as they can be used for our common good. We need good scientists, but we also need good citizens who will ensure that our science will make the world a better place for us all to live in.