One of the more interesting questions about the history of science is whether certain theories are inevitable. Given a set of data and the prevalent intellectual environment, does it become difficult to avoid formulating, say, a theory of evolution by natural selection? Biology would seem to argue yes. After all, Darwin and Wallace, having been influenced by Malthus and Lyell, both spent time as naturalists in the Pacific and developed matching theories within about a decade of each other. Similarly, several people recognized the significance of Mendel’s work within a few years of each other shortly after 1900, and they helped develop modern genetics at the same moment.
In a commentary in Nature Physics, MIT’s Seth Lloyd considers whether this sort of fertile intellectual environment might extend across fields of study. He considers the fact that, at the same time Mendel’s work on genes as discrete units of inheritance was being elaborated, quantum mechanics, with its emphasis on discrete energy states and behaviors, was also being developed. Is it possible that the intellectual environment was simply ready to see things in the form of quantized entities?
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