The Clockwork Universe Part 2

Chapter Nine.

Euclid and Unicorns In the early days of the Royal Society nearly anyone could attend its weekly meetings. Geniuses sat side by side with gentleman amateurs. The Society was less an ivory tower than a place to see and be seen. Giants like Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren presented their newest work, and so did such men as Sir Kenelm Digby, notable mainly for his faith in a potion called "weapon salve." Digby claimed he had used the salve to cure a man injured in a duel and given up for dead by the king's surgeons. The mysterious ointment included some unlikely ingredients-"moss from the skull of an unburied man," for one9-but the treatment was even odder than the medicine. Weapon salve was applied not to the wound but to the sword that had inflicted it, even if sword and victim were miles apart. (The wound itself was covered with a clean piece of linen and left alone, which in those pre-antibiotic days was probably a good thing.) Along with stories of miraculous cures, tales of faraway lands were always popular. So was show-and-tell. On one October day in 1660, "the Society received a present of a living chameleon," after which Wren gave a talk about Saturn's rings. At another meeting in 1660, the Society gravely scrutinized a unicorn's horn and then tested the ancient belief that a spider set down in the middle of a circle made from powdered unicorn's horn would not be able to escape. (The spider, unfazed, "immediately ran out several times repeated.") Spiders turned up more often than one might have expected. On a winter afternoon in 1672 Isaac Newton made his first formal presentation to the Society. (Reclusive as always, Newton stayed away while someone else read aloud a paper he had sent.) Newton explained how he had found, using prisms, the true nature of light. White light was not pure but was made up of all the colors of the rainbow. This discovery was one of the milestones in the history of science. Newton's paper followed one on tarantula bites.

The Royal Society quickly acc.u.mulated so many strange and wondrous objects that it set up a museum. Visitors ogled such marvels of nature as "a tooth taken out of the womb of a woman, half an inch long," and "a piece of bone voided with his urine by Sir William Throgmorton."

Meetings were a hodgepodge because for every genius there was a crank or a charlatan. The surprise, from today's vantage point, is that so often the genius and the crank were the same person. Robert Boyle, for instance, was not merely a brilliant scientist and the most respected member of the Royal Society in its first decades but also the very model of circ.u.mspection and respectability. Boyle believed that the best cure for cataracts was to blow powdered, dried human excrement into the patient's eyes.

Ideas like that, and even more outlandish ones, were perfectly respectable. Three hundred years ago the boundary that separates the possible from the impossible was far fuzzier than it is today. In 1670 the Royal Society thrilled to reports of a new invention from Europe, a "flying chariot" that moved through the air powered by oars and a sail. Such optimism had its roots in genuine discoveries. Explorers had recently found entire "new" continents. The telescope had revealed astonis.h.i.+ng new worlds, and the microscope, which was even newer, had shown that this this world contained a mult.i.tude of unsuspected wonders. The humblest drop of pond water teemed with life. world contained a mult.i.tude of unsuspected wonders. The humblest drop of pond water teemed with life.

The Royal Society's response to Kenelm Digby's claims for his magical "weapon salve" shows how much even learned men were prepared to believe. Since reliable men vouched for Digby's remedy, one highly regarded Society member remarked, "I need not be solicitous of the Cause." The world was so full of marvels, in other words, that the truly scientific approach was to reserve judgment about what was possible and what wasn't, and to observe and experiment instead. Digby's supposed cure strikes modern ears as a relic from an older, superst.i.tious age. His contemporaries drew precisely the opposite moral-taking Digby's claims seriously displayed not backwardness and credulity but up-to-the-minute open-mindedness.

John Locke, a philosopher of decidedly levelheaded views (and, incidentally, a friend of Isaac Newton), considered it likely that the seas contained mermaids. Learned journals in the second half of the seventeenth century published articles with t.i.tles that sound like headlines from an ancient National Enquirer National Enquirer. "A Girl in Ireland, who has several Horns growing on her Body," "Description of an Extraordinary Mushroom," "Of Four Suns, which very lately appear'd in France."

Anything was possible.

We think of scientists as chucking out old ideas when something newer and more plausible comes along, but that is not the usual pattern. More often, scientists take up the new but cling to the old as well. In science's early days that was emphatically so. That made for some unlikely pairings. New ideas and old shared s.p.a.ce in the same mind, like tattooed teens and hard-of-hearing dotards in uneasy coexistence in the same apartment.

Boyle, for example, held peculiar ideas about dead men and hangings. Eight times a year, on Hanging Days, immense crowds swarmed to London's gallows to see the show. The "Tyburn tree" had room for twenty-four swaying bodies at a time. Hanging Days were holidays, and crowds in dense, jolly packs lined the route from the prison gate to the gallows, like spectators at a parade. "All the Way, from Newgate to Tyburn, is one continued Fair, for Wh.o.r.es and Rogues of the meaner sort," one observer noted. The condemned man rode past the gawkers in a cart, seated atop his own coffin, his hands in manacles and his neck in a noose.

The throng at Tyburn might number twenty thousand. The rich, perched on wooden bleachers, had the best views. The poor fought for position. The crowd roared its approval for those prisoners who managed a defiant last word or a jaunty wave. A hangman who had been slipped a coin or two might make sure that his victim died quickly, but some condemned men twisted and choked, still half alive, at the end of a dangling rope. It made for extra excitement if the victim's friends flung themselves at his swinging body, frantically tugging his legs downward to try to speed his death.

For nearly everyone the spectacle itself was lure enough. Boyle and other connoisseurs knew better. One of the hangman's perks was the right to auction off souvenirs. Death ropes sold in one-foot lengths. But the hangman's most coveted trophies were an executed prisoner's severed hands, because a hand's "death sweat" held the power to heal. Robert Boyle, a giant of science, recommended this cure for those afflicted with a goiter.

The greatest figures in the pantheon of science gave equal weight to discoveries that we still celebrate and to ideas that strike us as mad. Take Rene Descartes, the brilliant mathematician and philosopher. He was one of the most important scientists of the generation just before Newton. If science is a cathedral, it was Descartes who set many of its foundation stones in place. Descartes was the ultimate skeptic, so reluctant to take anything for granted that he worried that the world and everything in it might simply be his dream. But he proposed a careful, scientific explanation for the well-known fact that if a person had been murdered and the killer later approached the victim's body, the corpse "identified" its killer by gus.h.i.+ng blood.

William Harvey, renowned to this day for explaining how blood circulates in the body, was another who discovered the new while adhering to the old. Harvey was a contemporary of Descartes, which is to say that both men came of age at a time when the belief in witches was at its high point. Everyone knew a great deal about witches. They knew, for instance, that witches rubbed their bodies with "devil's grease," made from the fat of murdered babies, so that they could slither their way through tiny cracks into their victims' homes. They knew, as well, that witches had animal companions, cats or toads or rats, provided by Satan and magically able to do their mistress's evil bidding. Harvey, a man who straddled two ages, painstakingly dissected one witch's diabolical toad to see if he might find anything supernatural.

Alchemy, which was a scientific quest for a magical-sounding goal, provides perhaps the most striking example of the coexistence of old and new. The aim was to find a substance called the "philosopher's stone," despite its name a liquid, which held the power to transform ordinary substances into silver and gold and to convey immortality to anyone who drank it. A devout belief in alchemy was standard in the seventeenth century, but no one exceeded Isaac Newton in persistence. His small, crabbed handwriting fills notebook after notebook with the records of his alchemical experiments. In all Newton lavished some half million words on alchemy, about as many as in War and Peace War and Peace.

He and countless other researchers spent long hours at their flasks and fires mixing potions according to closely guarded recipes. (Leibniz's only fear was that if gold became too readily available its price would fall.) An a.s.sistant watched Newton's experiments with reverence but without understanding. "Whatever his aim might be, I was not able to penetrate into, but his Pains, his Diligence at those Times made me think he aimed at something beyond the Reach of human Art & Industry."

A peek inside Newton's notebooks would have left an observer scarcely more enlightened. He never spoke of anything as cra.s.s as growing rich; his focus, it seems, was solely on uncovering nature's secrets. In any case, alchemical formulas were too valuable to state openly. All the language was encoded-"Saturn" stood for "lead," for instance-and the procedures sound like something from an X-rated Hogwarts spell-book. Newton jotted down recipes with such ingredients as "the Green Lion" and "the menstrual blood of the sordid wh.o.r.e."

The language is so strange, and Newton's scientific reputation is so high, that the temptation is to a.s.sume that the odd phrases merely indicate the difficulty of describing new techniques in an antique vocabulary. And it is true that in time alchemy gave rise to chemistry, and that Newton's approach to alchemy was methodical and absolutely rigorous. But it would be a mistake to conclude that Newton was a chemist in a sorcerer's hat.

On the contrary, Newton started out by studying chemistry but abandoned it in favor of what he saw as the deeper mysteries of alchemy. This was effectively a return to the past. Chemistry dealt with matter-of-fact questions like what salt is made from. Alchemy sought to explain the invisible forces of living nature. This was sacred, secret research. Throughout his long life Newton hardly breathed a word of what he was up to, and no wonder. "Just as the world was created from dark Chaos... ," he confided in a notebook, "so our work brings forth the beginning out of black chaos."

Newton's theological and alchemical writings went largely unexamined for two centuries after his death. In 1936, John Maynard Keynes purchased a trove of Newton's notes at auction. He read aghast. Newton was not the first inhabitant of the modern world, Keynes declared, but "the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than ten thousand years ago."

Scientists tend to have little interest in history, even the history of their own subject. They turn to the past only to pluck out the discoveries and insights that turned out to be fruitful-Boyle, for instance, is known today for "Boyle's law," relating pressure and volume in gases-and they toss the rest aside.

In fields where the notion of progress is indisputable, such disdain for the past is common. The explanation is not so much anti-intellectualism as impatience. Why study ancient errors? So scientists ignore most of their forebears or dismiss them as silly codgers. They make exceptions for a tiny number of geniuses whom they treat as time travelers from the present day, thinkers just like us who somehow found themselves decked out in powdered wigs.

But they were not not like us. like us.

Chapter Ten.

The Boys' Club Science today is a grand and formal enterprise, but the modern age of science began as a free-for-all. The idea was to see for yourself rather than to rely on anyone else's authority. The Royal Society's motto was "Nullius in Verba," Latin for, roughly, "Don't take anyone's word for it," and early investigators embraced that freedom with something akin to giddiness.

The meetings of the Royal Society in its young days sound like gatherings of a group of very smart, very reckless Cub Scouts. Society members gathered in a large room with a bare table and a roaring fire. In a group portrait, the men-the company was all male-would have looked more or less alike, but that was largely because everyone wore wigs. (In England and France, fas.h.i.+on followed the court. When Charles II began to go gray, and when the Sun King's hairs began to clog the royal hairbrush, the monarchs donned wigs, and soon no gentleman in Europe would venture out in public in his own hair.) Half a dozen chairs, reserved for important visitors, sat empty on most days, while spectators jostled for s.p.a.ce on two wooden benches. Seating was catch as catch can. New arrivals found places "as they think fit, and without any Ceremony," one French visitor wrote in amazement, "and if any one comes in after the Society is fixed, no Body stirs, but he takes a Place presently where he can find it, so that no Interruption may be given to him that speaks." Whisperers were hushed indignantly.

The highlights, most weeks, were "demonstrations," the livelier the better. Hooke and Boyle carried out a long series of experiments to explore "the expansive forces of congelation"-they put water in a gla.s.s tube and froze it-and then everyone settled in to watch the tubes break "with a considerable noise and violence." Noise was always a great selling point. The members of the Royal Society were forever studying giant hailstones, for instance, in the hope that they would explode with a deafening crack when thrown into the fire. As a bonus, some hailstones had a strange shape or color. In those cases, the scientists' descriptions took on the tone of a "Ripley's Believe It or Not" item about a potato in the shape of a donkey.

Hooke had a particularly admired touch. He had figured out how to pump the air from a bell jar. (Official credit for building the air pump went to Boyle, for several years Hooke's employer.) Now he carried out experiment after experiment while his fellow scientists watched enthralled. "We put in a snake but could not kill it," one onlooker wrote perplexedly, but a chicken made a better show. "The chick died of convulsions outright, in a short s.p.a.ce." What was the magical substance in ordinary air that living creatures needed in order to keep breathing, and why did some animals need more of it than others?

Soon Hooke and the others moved beyond experiments with birds and mice (and, less dramatically, with burning candles, which also seemed to need to "breathe"). On May 7, 1662, the Society needed something out of the ordinary for a particularly distinguished guest, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, cousin to the king. Out came the much-loved air pump. "We tried several experiments of Mr. Boyle's Vaccuum," wrote the diarist John Evelyn, who was in attendance. But what to put inside? Another mouse?

Robert Hooke had a better idea. "A man thrusting in his arm"-this was Hooke himself-"upon exhaustion of the air had his flesh immediately swelled, so as the blood was neere breaking the vaines, & unsufferable," Evelyn noted contentedly. "He drawing it out, we found it all speckled."

Transfusions made even better theater. On a November afternoon in 1667, forty witnesses crowded into the Society's meeting room to watch a blood transfusion from a sheep to a human. The subject was one Arthur Coga, "who, hearing that the Society were very desirous to try the experiment of transfusion upon a man, and being in want of money, offered himself for a guinea, which was immediately accepted on the part of the Society."

Coga had studied divinity at Cambridge but had suffered some kind of mental breakdown. That combination of credentials made Coga a perfect subject-his word could be trusted, since he was a gentleman, and he was mad, so he was intriguing. The hope was that the blood transfusion would cure him, though no one had any very good reason to think that might happen. While the crowd looked on, a surgeon made an incision into the sheep's leg and another into Coga's arm and then maneuvered a thin, silver pipe into place between them.

For two minutes blood pa.s.sed from the sheep into Coga's body. Remarkably, Coga survived (although he did not recover his sanity). "After the operation the patient was well and merry," the surgeon reported, "and drank a gla.s.s or two of [wine] and took a pipe of tobacco in the presence of forty or more persons; then went home, and continued well all day."

[image]

Sheep to man blood transfusion. Wellcome Library, London.

For the spectators who jostled one another for a better view of Arthur Coga's throbbing arm, every element of the scene before them was noteworthy. The experiment itself was new and untested, but the Royal Society's whole approach to the pursuit of knowledge const.i.tuted a much vaster, more important experiment.

Experiments were something new. The Society's devotion to this innovative way of probing nature amounted to a call for people to think for themselves. That idea, which seems like the merest common sense to us, struck onlookers at the time as dangerous and obviously misguided.

It's always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we've lost more than the losing side's version of history. We've lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality originality is a word of praise. is a word of praise. New New strikes us as nearly synonymous with strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved improved. But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea. When the first history of the Royal Society was written, in 1667, the author felt obliged to rebut the charge that "to be the Author of new things is a crime." By that standard, he argued, whoever raised the first house or plowed the first field could have been deemed guilty of introducing a novelty.

Most people would have agreed with the Spanish ruler Alfonso the Wise, who had once decreed that the only desirable things in this world were "old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read." The best way to learn the truth, it was often observed, was to see what the authorities of the past had decreed. This was the plainest common sense. To ignore such wisdom in favor of exploring on one's own was to seek disaster, akin to a foolish traveler's taking it in his head to fling the captain overboard and grab the s.h.i.+p's wheel himself.

Through long centuries the mission of Europe's great universities had been, in the words of the historian Daniel Boorstin, "not to discover the new but to transmit a heritage." (In the fourteenth century Oxford University had imposed a rule that "Bachelors and Masters of Arts who do not follow Aristotle's philosophy are subject to a fine of 5 s.h.i.+llings for each point of divergence.") The intellectual traits that we esteem today-like independence and skepticism-were precisely those traits that the Middle Ages feared and scorned.

That deference to authority had religious roots, as did nearly every aspect of medieval life. Good Christians showed their faith partly by their willingness to believe in the unbelievable. In a world riddled with miracles and mysteries, where angels and demons were as real as cats and dogs and where every illness and good harvest showed G.o.d's hand, skepticism was only a step from heresy. Who would set limits on the marvels the world contains? No one but an infidel.

So experiments had two linked drawbacks. To insist on making one's own investigations was bad in itself, because it veered on impiety. In addition, looking for oneself meant second-guessing the value of eyewitness testimony. And for longer than anyone could remember, eyewitness testimony-whether it had to do with blood raining from the sky or the birth of half human/half animal monsters-had trumped all other forms of evidence. To accept such testimonials marked a person not as gullible or unsophisticated but as pious and thoughtful. To question such testimonials, on the other hand, the historians Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park remark, was "the hallmark of the narrow-minded and suspicious peasant, trapped in the bubble of his limited experience."

Augustine had laid out the argument many centuries before. "For G.o.d is certainly called Almighty for one reason only," he had written. That reason was perfectly plain: "He has the power to create so many things which would be reckoned obviously impossible" if not for the eyewitnesses who could swear to their truth.

The believers' task, then, was to defer to authority and refrain from asking questions, literally to "take it on faith." Augustine railed against the sin of curiosity with a fury and revulsion that, to modern ears, sound almost unhinged. Curiosity was, he wrote, a form of l.u.s.t as despicable as any l.u.s.ting of the flesh. The "l.u.s.t to find out and know" was a perversion born of the same evil impulse that leads some people to peek at mutilated corpses or sneak into sideshows and stare at freaks. G.o.d intended that some mysteries remain beyond the bounds of human insight. Did not the Bible warn that "what the Lord keeps secret is no concern of yours; do not busy yourself with matters that are beyond you"?

Augustine's denunciation of curiosity prevailed for a thousand years. To seek to unravel nature's mysteries was to aspire to see the world with perfect clarity, and such insight was reserved for G.o.d alone. Pride was the great danger. "Knowledge puffeth up," Corinthians declared, and humankind had a duty to bear that rebuke constantly in mind. When the early scientists finally presumed to challenge that age-old dogma, traditionally minded thinkers sputtered in fury. No testimony was good enough for these maddening newcomers. "If the wisest men in the world tell them that they see it or know it; if the workers of miracles, Christ and his apostles, tell them that they see it; if G.o.d himself tells them that He sees it," one theologian thundered, "yet all this does not satisfy them unless they may see it themselves."

So the Royal Society's emphasis on experiments was a startling innovation. And experiments had still another feature that made them suspect. Experiments were by definition artificial. How could anyone draw universal, valid conclusions from special, manufactured circ.u.mstances? The problem with the new scientists' approach wasn't so much that they insisted on looking at nature rather than at books; the problem was that, not content with looking at the world, they insisted on manipulating it.

Premodern thinkers had studied the natural world closely. Astrologers scrutinized the night sky; botanists and doctors took notes on every plant that grew. But that had been a matter of observing and arranging rather than devising new questions to ask. The investigator's task had always been seen as akin to that of a librarian or a museum curator. For millennia, in one historian's words, an intellectual's "first duty" had been "absorbing, cla.s.sifying, and preserving the known rather than exploring pastures new."

The new scientists, a less patient bunch, preferred the creed of their predecessor Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare and the first great advocate of experimentation.10 Nature must be "put to the torture," Bacon had declared. No doubt the image came quickly to mind in an age that coerced confessions by stretching prisoners on the rack or crus.h.i.+ng their fingers in thumbscrews. Nature must be "put to the torture," Bacon had declared. No doubt the image came quickly to mind in an age that coerced confessions by stretching prisoners on the rack or crus.h.i.+ng their fingers in thumbscrews.

For the boisterous men of the Royal Society, spying on nature from behind a curtain was entirely too pa.s.sive. Experiments had the great advantage that they let you do do something. Preferably something dangerous. Hooke eventually managed to build a vacuum chamber so large that he could climb inside. Then, while the members of the Royal Society looked on with fascination, he gave the signal to pump the air out. The pump malfunctioned before Hooke could suffocate, but he did manage to render himself dizzy and temporarily deaf. something. Preferably something dangerous. Hooke eventually managed to build a vacuum chamber so large that he could climb inside. Then, while the members of the Royal Society looked on with fascination, he gave the signal to pump the air out. The pump malfunctioned before Hooke could suffocate, but he did manage to render himself dizzy and temporarily deaf.

Chapter Eleven.

To the Barricades!

The brilliant, frenetic Robert Hooke was a natural performer who took for granted that the best way to entertain an audience was to place himself in front of it. But the Royal Society experiments, which Hooke was charged with organizing, had a purpose beyond theatrics. The experiments also served as a call to arms against the old ways. The first rallying cry, as we have seen, was "Out of the library, into the laboratory." The second crucial message was "In plain sight." Ideas would be tested in the open, in front of witnesses. If an insight seemed genuine, other experimenters could test it for themselves.

This was an innovation. Until the mid-1600s everyone had always taken for granted that a person who made a discovery should keep the knowledge to himself, as secret as a treasure map, rather than give his fortune away by revealing it to the world. A plea from a mathematician named Girolamo Cardano, written about a century before the Royal Society's birth, highlighted the old att.i.tude. Cardano wanted another mathematician to share a formula with him. "I swear to you by G.o.d's Holy Gospels and as a true man of honor, not only never to publish your discoveries, if you teach me them," Cardano begged, "but I also promise you, and I pledge my faith as a true Christian, to note them down in code, so that after my death no one will be able to understand them."11 The Royal Society pushed for a radically new approach: knowledge would advance more quickly if new findings were discussed openly and published for all to read. Thinkers would inspire one another, and ideas would breed and multiply. Robert Boyle made the most forceful argument against secrecy. A thinker who concealed his discoveries was worse than a miser who h.o.a.rded his gold, Boyle maintained, because the miser had no choice but to cling to his treasure. To give it away was to lose it. Thinkers had no such excuse, because ideas were not like gold but "like torches, that in the lighting of others do not waste themselves." With ideas as with flames, in fact, to share meant to create create light. light.

Boyle insisted that this was ancient wisdom. "Our Saviour a.s.sureth us that it is more blessed to give than to receive," he reminded his fellow scientists, but this was a hard lesson to absorb. It remains hard today. To have found a secret that others are still scrabbling around for is to have a very special kind of private property. Modern physicists all know, and identify with, the story of Fritz Houtermans. In 1929 Houtermans wrote up a pioneering paper on fusion in the sun. The night he finished the work, he and his girlfriend went for a stroll. She commented on how beautiful the stars were. Houtermans puffed out his chest. "I've known since yesterday why it is that they s.h.i.+ne."

And no one else did. That That was the point. Before the Royal Society proposed changing the rules, scientists had tried to have it both ways-they announced their discoveries, which let the world know they had solved a stubborn equation or designed a new clock mechanism or found the ideal shape for an arch, but often they concealed the details in a cipher, to be decoded only if someone else challenged the claim. The new call for full disclosure meant an about-face. was the point. Before the Royal Society proposed changing the rules, scientists had tried to have it both ways-they announced their discoveries, which let the world know they had solved a stubborn equation or designed a new clock mechanism or found the ideal shape for an arch, but often they concealed the details in a cipher, to be decoded only if someone else challenged the claim. The new call for full disclosure meant an about-face.

Hooke fought the call for openness with all his might, and he was not alone. Such resistance was practical as well as philosophical. Unlike Boyle, a man of enormous wealth, Hooke had a living to earn. He needed not simply to demonstrate his inventions but to patent them so he could turn a profit. For decades Hooke argued that the Royal Society ought to recast itself as a tiny army, like the conquistadors who had taken over Mexico. (He reserved the role of Cortez for himself.) Secrecy was vital, censors.h.i.+p of discoveries essential. "Nothing considerable in that kind can be obtained without secrecy," Hooke warned, "because else others not qualified... will share of the benefit."

Hooke lost that battle, but his doubts highlight just how radical the new approach was. In the past, scholars and intellectuals had always made a point of setting themselves apart from the common herd, and they had invoked biblical authority to justify themselves. "Do not throw your pearls before swine," they intoned endlessly, "lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you." Like other priesthoods, intellectuals had long luxuriated in arcane rites and obscure vocabulary. The new scientists could have taken the same line. That would have seemed a natural step and an endors.e.m.e.nt of a deeply entrenched and hugely powerful doctrine-true knowledge was too deep to put in ordinary words and too dangerous to trust to ordinary mortals.

Astonis.h.i.+ngly, they did just the opposite. Rather than set themselves up as the newest mystic brotherhood, the new scientists spearheaded an attack on exclusivity. This marked just as sharp a break with the past as the attack on secrecy. In the era when science was born, carrying out experiments and building instruments still looked suspiciously like manual labor. That was not a way to win admirers. In the past, the discovery of truth had always been a task reserved for philosophers. Now technicians and tinkerers wanted to horn in.12 The renown that the Royal Society eventually won makes it easy to forget just how shaky its triumph was. The very sweep of its innovations made its survival doubtful. In its early decades, the Society never managed to establish itself as a safe, permanent feature of the intellectual landscape. More than once it nearly went under, beset by financial woes or bad leaders.h.i.+p or personality clashes. For that reason, for long stretches it will nearly vanish from our story.

On this question of practicality, Hooke could scarcely have made his distaste for the old ways more clear. Universities might still believe that educating their students meant equipping them to compose odes in Greek and epigrams in Latin. Hooke favored a different mission. Even across the centuries his voice drips with scorn. The aim of science was "to improve the knowledge of natural things and all useful Arts... not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Morals, Politics, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick."

The disdain was aimed not at learning but at endless talking. (Hooke was the furthest thing from a philistine. Architect, scientist, inventor-"England's Leonardo," in one biographer's phrase-he had set out as a young man to become an artist.)13 But Hooke and his restless allies had work to do, and they were in a hurry to get started. They sought to carry out their investigations "not by a glorious pomp of words," one early manifesto declared, "but by the silent, effectual, and unanswerable arguments of real productions." But Hooke and his restless allies had work to do, and they were in a hurry to get started. They sought to carry out their investigations "not by a glorious pomp of words," one early manifesto declared, "but by the silent, effectual, and unanswerable arguments of real productions."

This was a battle cry, too, though again we might miss its significance. The rejection of "glorious" phrasemaking was a deliberate provocation. The seventeenth century was an age of tremendous formality, especially when it came to speech and writing. The Royal Society would have none of it. The Society favored "a close, naked, natural way of speaking," its first historian declared, "... bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and preferred the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits or scholars."

This was shocking. To speak in a "naked, natural way" was as unlikely as to walk outdoors naked and naturally. Elaborate rules of etiquette governed every kind of verbal exchange. A person sitting down to write a letter had to know when it was proper to sign "Your most obedient and most obliged servant" and when "Your most humble and most affectionate servant." If the letter was addressed to a social superior, eloquent groveling was mandatory. "All that I mean," John Donne wrote to the Duke of Buckingham, "in using this boldness, of putting myself into your Lords.h.i.+p's presence by this rag of paper, is to tell your Lords.h.i.+p that I lie in a corner, as a clod of clay, attending what kind of vessel it shall please you to make of Your Lords.h.i.+p's humblest and thankfullest and devotedst servant."

In books even such arcane matters as the precise appearance of the dedication page called for great concern. Such pages carried a fervent declaration of praise and grat.i.tude from the author to his patron. The size of the blank s.p.a.ce between dedication and the author's signature was key. The larger the gap in status between patron and author, the larger the gap between dedication and signature, as if to ensure that the unkempt, ink-stained writer could not besmirch his eminent sponsor.

Such rules endured all through the 1600s, but the Royal Society set out to combat them. Metaphors, similes, and all the other long-esteemed forms of verbal display were mere distractions, ornamental froufrou that only impeded the search for truth. Out with them!

Chapter Twelve.

Dogs and Rascals The changes took decades to play out, but the contours of the new landscape took shape early on. Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, had seen the new world coming even before the founding of the Royal Society. Informal though it was, the Society grew out of a series of even more haphazard gatherings of various experimentalists. In 1655, Hobbes had cast his lot with the new scientists. He invited all men to pursue truth as scientists did, by spelling out their reasoning in ordinary language and by carrying out experiments in public. The method was open to everyone. "If you would like," Hobbes a.s.sured his readers, "you too can use it."

This was a democratic idea in a world deeply mistrustful of democracies. But something had s.h.i.+fted, and Hobbes had spotted it. Dry-as-dust scholars.h.i.+p in musty archives was out, independent investigation in. Pedigree was beside the point; so were Latin quotations; so were the opinions of ancient authors. Science was a game that anyone could play, which meant that everything was up for grabs. Anyone could propose a new idea, and no idea was exempt from challenge. This is the sense in which the scientific revolution was indeed revolutionary.

Nonetheless, even many who fought on the revolutionary side harbored doubts about the program. Isaac Newton, for one, recoiled at the thought of catering to ordinary, educated readers. He never revealed his writings on alchemy, and though he did publish his greatest work, on gravity, he took enormous trouble to move it as far as humanly possible from anyone's notion of a "natural way of speaking." Newton published his masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ( (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), in the form of an enormously long mathematical argument. Theorem, proof, and corollary follow one another in stately procession as in the world's most difficult geometry textbook, the austere work unleavened by a word of guidance or explanation. The tone throughout is one of "glacial remoteness," one modern physicist observes, and "makes no concessions to the reader."

Many great mathematicians are nearly as hard to follow as Newton. Disdainful of those stumbling after them, they take as their motto Samuel Johnson's remark that "I have found you an argument, I am not obliged to find you an understanding."14 Sometimes the motive for presenting work in its finished, polished state is aesthetic, akin to an artist's careful rubbing out of the grid lines that helped him get his proportions right. But not in Newton's case. He had "designedly made his Sometimes the motive for presenting work in its finished, polished state is aesthetic, akin to an artist's careful rubbing out of the grid lines that helped him get his proportions right. But not in Newton's case. He had "designedly made his Principia Principia abstruse," he wrote, so that he would not be "baited by little Smatterers in Mathematics." What others could not grasp, they could not criticize. Those capable of following his reasoning would see its merits. abstruse," he wrote, so that he would not be "baited by little Smatterers in Mathematics." What others could not grasp, they could not criticize. Those capable of following his reasoning would see its merits.

But Newton belonged with the rebels despite his hostility to them. By temperament the least open of men, it was his ironic fate to advance science so dramatically that new recruits, inspired by his example, came flooding in. The new generation of scientists spoke in ordinary language and published their findings for all to read. They thought they were paying homage to Newton, who would have hated them.

The new approach brought a torrent of progress, but progress had a price. Science became a race run in public, and the first across the line hoisted the trophies. The Royal Society started the first-ever scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions Philosophical Transactions (now in its fourth century) (now in its fourth century). In 1672 the In 1672 the Transactions Transactions published a hugely important article, Newton's report that "pure" white light contains within itself all the colors of the spectrum. The paper, almost as much as the discovery itself, marked a breakthrough. This was, the historian I. Bernard Cohen observed, "the first time that a major scientific discovery was announced in print in a periodical." published a hugely important article, Newton's report that "pure" white light contains within itself all the colors of the spectrum. The paper, almost as much as the discovery itself, marked a breakthrough. This was, the historian I. Bernard Cohen observed, "the first time that a major scientific discovery was announced in print in a periodical."

From now on, journals and books would trumpet the news of discoveries and hail the innovators' genius. The victors won fame and honor. Everyone else was left to sulk and snipe. Many of the early scientists, as it happened, were bad-tempered, ferociously compet.i.tive men, which only raised the stakes. And in these early days, no rules of combat had yet arisen. In time, for instance, scientists would establish a system of peer review as the gold standard in their field. Before a reputable journal published a paper, a team of expert, independent, anonymous referees would have to deem it new and significant.

Even today, with such structures long established, science is a contact sport. Early on, the scrambling was far fiercer. Scientific jobs were rare, and self-promotion was an essential skill. Even great scientists had to fit their scientific work into the nooks and crannies of their day, around their "real" jobs as clergymen or doctors or diplomats, or they had to woo princes or other deep-pocketed patrons. Artists and writers had long known the dubious pleasures of patronage. Now scientists learned the same lessons. Patrons tended to be fickle and quickly bored, charmed by wit but put off by rigor.

Making matters worse, science seemed a field designed to stir up feuds. Writers and artists no doubt felt as much hostility toward one another as scientists did, but they had an easier time going different ways. Ben Jonson didn't have to write a play about a Scottish king and his scheming wife. Science was a race to a single goal. Ready, set, go! Build a clock that works even on a s.h.i.+p careening in ten-foot waves. Find a way to explain why Saturn looks so strange through a telescope. Take a few scattered observations and compute the shape of a comet's path. Science was a race to a single goal. Ready, set, go! Build a clock that works even on a s.h.i.+p careening in ten-foot waves. Find a way to explain why Saturn looks so strange through a telescope. Take a few scattered observations and compute the shape of a comet's path.

For each question, one winner, many losers. Rivals shouted insults at one another or fumed in silence. Feuds burned on for decades. Isaac Newton and John Flamsteed, the first royal astronomer, hated one another. Newton warred with Hooke, too, and Hooke despised Newton in return, as well as Christiaan Huygens, the great Dutch astronomer, and a dozen more. Hooke denounced his enemies as "dogs," "raskalls," and "spies" who had stolen ideas that rightfully belonged to him. Newton and Gottfried Leibniz abused one another with terms that made Hooke's insults sound loving.

"If I have seen farther than others," Newton once remarked, "it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." That famous declaration, usually cited as one of Newton's rare ventures into generosity, was not quite the tribute it appears. Newton's aim was evidently to praise various of his forebears but also to mock his enemy Hooke, a slight, twisted figure far closer to a hunchback than a giant.

"Nullius in Verba" may have been the Royal Society's official motto, but the Society's members were only intermittently high-minded. They would all have understood Gore Vidal's remark that "it is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

Chapter Thirteen.

A Dose of Poison This was a callous era, both in everyday life and in science. Weakness inspired scorn, not pity. Blindness, deafness, a clubfoot, or a twisted leg were rebukes from G.o.d. Entertainments were often cruel, punishments invariably brutal, scientific experiments sometimes macabre. For decades, for example, dissections had been performed in public for ticket-buying audiences, like plays in a theater. The bodies of executed criminals made ideal subjects for study and display and not simply because they were readily available. Just as important, one historian notes, cutting criminals open in front of an attentive audience demonstrated "the culture's preference for punishment by means of public humiliation and display."

That preference was on display year-round. When it comes to punis.h.i.+ng wrongdoers, modern society tends to avert its eyes. Not so the 1600s. In London prisoners locked in the pillory provided a bit of street theater, an alternative to a puppet show. Pa.s.sersby screamed insults or took the opportunity to show their children what happened to bad people. The captive stood upright as best he could, head and hands trapped in holes cut into a horizontal wooden beam. Perhaps his ears had been nailed to the beam. The pillory was built to pivot as the prisoner staggered, in order to give spectators on all sides a chance to throw a dead cat or a rock.

Since punishments were meant to frighten and demean, whippings, brandings, and hangings took place where crowds could gather. Thieves could be hanged for stealing a handkerchief, though that was rare. More often, the theft of a handkerchief or a parcel of bread and cheese brought a whipping. A bolder theft-a gold ring or a silver bracelet-might merit branding with a hot iron, with a T T for for thief thief. Usually the T T was seared into the flesh of the hand, although for a brief era that was considered too lenient, and the cheek was used instead. Any substantial theft meant death on the gallows. was seared into the flesh of the hand, although for a brief era that was considered too lenient, and the cheek was used instead. Any substantial theft meant death on the gallows.

Religious dissenters risked terrible punishments, like criminals. For the sin of "horrid blasphemy," in 1656, the Quaker James Nayler was sentenced to three hundred lashes, the branding of a B B on his forehead, and the piercing of his tongue with a red-hot iron. Then Nayler was flung into prison, where he served three years in solitary confinement. on his forehead, and the piercing of his tongue with a red-hot iron. Then Nayler was flung into prison, where he served three years in solitary confinement.

Even the most gruesome tortures served as spectacle and entertainment. (One history of seventeenth-century London includes an outing to watch a hanging in a section t.i.tled "Excursions.") The most dreadful punishment of all was hanging, drawing, and quartering. "A man sentenced to this terrible fate was strung up by the neck, but not so as to kill him," the historian Liza Picard explains. "Then his innards were taken out as if he were a carca.s.s in a butcher's shop. This certainly killed him, if he had not died of shock before. The innards were burned, and the eviscerated corpse was chopped into four bits, which with the head were nailed up here and there throughout the City." (To preserve severed heads so that they could endure years of outdoor exposure, and to keep ravens away, they were parboiled with salt and c.u.min seeds.) [image]

London Bridge in 1616, with traitors' heads on spikes above gateway (right foreground). The heads were such an everyday feature of life that the artist did not bother to call attention to them. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

London Bridge, more or less the shopping mall of its day, had been adorned for centuries with traitors' heads impaled on spikes. In Queen Elizabeth's day the bridge's southern gate bristled with some thirty heads.15 A taste for the grisly ran through the whole society, from the lowliest tradesman to the king himself. On May 11, 1663, Pepys made a pa.s.sing reference to the king in his diary. Surgeons "did dissect two bodies, a man and a woman, before the King," Pepys wrote matter-of-factly, "with which the King was highly pleased."