One sentence

[mmcirvin]

Richard Feynman once said—somewhere in the Feynman Lectures on Physics, I think—that the most informative one-sentence statement to be passed on to future generations through some crash of civilization would describe the notion of atoms:

[...]all things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

I'm not sure what the ground rules of this game are; mashing all the sentences of a textbook together with "and" seems like it would be cheating, at the very least. In any event, if I were to nominate one sentence of comparable length to Feynman's as the most useful statement about science, it would not be that one, which after all is not too far from ancient Greek atomism, and would take a high level of technical development to apply properly. It would, rather, be something along the lines of:

Most living things are germs, creatures too small to see that reproduce from parent germs, and that cause fermentation, food spoilage and many diseases.

People could quickly get a lot of value out of that one.

I was thinking about this a few days ago, but the thing that reminded me of it was this talkorigins.org page about spontaneous generation, which includes the remarkable fact that food canning was not invented until the early 19th century, and then was suggested by recent scientific discoveries strongly implying certain parts of my sentence.

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting idea, though it might be a good idea to add some more benefits of microorganisms, such as the rising of bread, the digestion of food... something to discourage people from becoming totally germphobic as a result of the statement.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I did mention fermentation. Though, come to think of it, if you lived in a prescientific culture you might not realize that the same thing was going on in bread and beer production, despite the occasional similarity of smells.

I pondered putting something about friendly intestinal bacteria in there, but decided that was extending my sentence a bit much. But "by the way, shit is absolutely loaded with the critters" would be a useful addendum.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I recently learned about the historic believe in spontaneous generation when I saw a brief talk by a very attractive forensic entomologist, on the subject of her profession. She mentioned Louis Joblot in her brief history of the science, and how he disproved the concept of spontaneous generation. The lecture was aimed at kids visiting where I work, so she didn't use the term. Interesting page, that.

But I brought this up because while reading the amusing timekill page called Things Creationists Hate (http://www.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/things.htm). A contributor suggested that that if only the commandments had included "Thou Shalt Wash Your Hands (http://www.rice.edu/armadillo/Sciacademy/riggins/things.htm#missing)" or maybe "Thou shalt not dirty the open sore."

If you ever find yourself in the vicinity of an unattended time machine, you know what to do!