I just finished what there is of the “Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire” for the first time in probably 30 years. I found it just as weird and unfocused as I remembered, but I did notice something in it that had escaped me before: Mark Twain know a lot about science, way more than I had realized.

Although in Eddypus he’s usually getting his facts mixed up (Izaak Walton for Isaac Newton, and so on), he has a very good grasp of the development of science since the 15th century or so. His summary (p. 360 in Fables of Man) of the changes in man’s idea of the universe, and the demotion of Earth from the center of things to “a potato lost in limitless vacancy” is excellent. Elsewhere he talks about spectroscopic analysis of stars to determine what elements they contain: This was cutting-edge science in 1900, and he seems to understand it well. I wonder how many people understand it today, more than a century later?

On a related note, in “Was the World Made for Man,” he talks about the millions of years it took to for evolution to produce the oyster. To start, he decides to put the Earth’s age at 100 million years, using Lord Kelvin’s figure. The age of the planet was one of the biggest scientific debates of the time; physicists sided with Kelvin (as did Mark Twain), but geologists said the Earth had to be billions of years old, to accommodate all the changes they were sure had occurred. The discovery of the energy released in nuclear reactions finally solved the problem (in the geologists’ favor), so Twain picked the wrong horse in this debate, but clearly he knew what the issues were at the time – again, something that most people were probably unaware of.

Anyway, I just thought I’d mention this, since it’s something that had never occurred to me before. I knew Twain read history and so on, but he was also very well-read in science.

-- Bob G.