Authors: Bill Bryson
In fact – and here is where the two anti-Aristotelian strains are finally brought together – it is precisely because ultimate explanation is mathematical, and this mathematical structure is not immediately given up in passively observed nature, that experimentation is necessary. The explanation of the motion is to be found in uncovering the mathematical structure within it; but experience as such does not readily give up the latent mathematical structure. Experiments are necessary to tease out the implicit mathematics, whose consequences can then be mathematically drawn, leading to further mathematical conclusions that must again be tied down to experience by way of experiment.
Newton’s work on optics is as instructive as his mechanics, demonstrating both the fundamental place of mathematics and the necessity for experiment. His eagerness to reduce yet another sphere of phenomena to mathematical formulae results in a science of colours. And yet mere observation
could not have given Newton the phenomena that would yield to mathematical formulae. His famous interventions – for example, placing two prisms within the path of a light beam, one that would split white light into the spectrum, the other that would reconstruct white light out of the spectrum – were as essential to the science as the resultant mathematical equations. To paraphrase Immanuel Kant (who was three years old when Newton died in 1727): Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.
Looking back now, there seems something almost accidental about the emergence of both the new rationalism and the new empiricism as coevals, each offering a rival substitute for the disputed teleology of the old system, each appealing to different sorts of intellects, tending toward divergent opinions as regards the ultimate worth and purpose of knowledge. All these centuries later, the methodological amalgamation can still call forth our wonder – most memorably expressed by the late physicist and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, in the phrase ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences’.
It is appropriate to be amazed. Who could have hoped that both the new rationalism and the new empiricism could be joined together in the most successful experiment in human thought to date? Here is a means of exploring nature which, though embedded in the empiricism of experimentation, is also capable of challenging (by way of the theory of relativity) our psychological sense of time, or (by way of quantum mechanics) our notions of causality, two linchpins of common-sense experience.
Who could have hoped? To that question, at least, we have an answer: the men who formed a ‘Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’.
1
There were, of course, political and sociological dimensions to this process, since the grandly unifying system of thought was not only scientific (or proto-scientific) but also religious and political, making challenges to the system ipso facto religious and political challenges. I will focus on the scientific aspects of the process, but it is of course naïve to think that this constitutes the whole story. The history of ideas is hardly hermetically sealed against all but questions of validity and falsification.
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Many of these same scientifically inclined men had begun meeting earlier, in Oxford, at the end of the 1640s, during the Parliamentary Interregnum between the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, laying the foundations for what would become, with the Restoration, the Royal Society, their ranks now swelled not only by Royalists, but the King himself.
3
The Scientific Works of Galileo
(Singer, Vol. II, p. 252).
4
E.A. Burtt,
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science
(NY, Prometheus Books, 1999), p.
76.
Galileo’s rationalist attitude has been echoed by various modern physicists. Paul Dirac, for example, said: ‘It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiments,’ and Einstein, too, made such remarks, for example telling Hans Reichenbach that he had been convinced before the 1919 solar eclipse gave confirming evidence that his theory of general relativity was true because of its mathematical beauty. In our day, the hegemony of mathematics has been claimed most insistently by champions of string theory, which has as yet been unable to produce any testable predictions. ‘I don’t think it’s ever happened that a theory that has the kind of mathematical appeal that string theory has has turned out to be entirely wrong,’ Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has said. ‘There have been theories that turned out to be right in a different context than the context for which they were invented. But I would find it hard to believe that that much elegance and mathematical beauty would simply be wasted.’ (Quoted on
Nova, The Elegant Universe.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-weinberg.html.) String theory has been criticised by more empirically inclined physicists, some going so far as to claim the theory does not even qualify as scientific. Thus the schism between scientific rationalists and empiricists continues into our own day.
5
From his Letter to Pope Paul III, in the
De Revolutionibus.
6
See extract on page 119.
7
The Ethics,
I, Appendix. Some of the new rationalists, such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, argued that what was generative in mathematical reasoning need not be confined to the quantitative, but could range beyond, and thus give us a form of explanation so powerful as to obviate any need for observation at all. This belief caused them to attribute unlimited potency to a priori reason, and explains why they are now more characteristically classified as philosophers rather than scientists. But in their day there was no segregation between the two types of thinkers, philosophers all, and they all saw themselves as engaged in the same project of finding the mode of explanation to supplant teleology. A rationalist extremist like Spinoza was as engaged as any in the scientific project; indeed, he was in close communication with the Fellows of the Royal Society, through his communications with the indefatigably gregarious first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, and even offered, through Oldenburg, his critique of some of Boyle’s ideas, in several instances not finding them sufficiently scientific. So, for example, in
De Fluditate
19, Boyle wrote of animals that ‘Nature has designed them both for flying and swimming,’ which provoked from Spinoza the response, ‘He seeks the cause from purpose’
(causam a fine petit)
, which is, of course, a relapse to the old system.
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The metaphors of Francis Bacon are a feasting ground for feminist readings of the history of science.
9
Preface,
The Instauration Magna,
in Bacon, Francis,
The Works,
ed. by J. spedding, R.L. Ellis and D.D. Heath (Houghton Mifflin, 1901), volume IV, 20f.
10
Robert Boyle,
The Works of The Honourable Robert Boyle,
ed. Thomas Birch (6 vols, London, 1672), vol. I, p. 356.
11
Ironically, it was to be the whole-number arithmetical laws of chemical reactions that would provide, some centuries later, the most direct evidence for the atomic theory of matter.
Simon Schaffer is Professor of History of Science at Cambridge University and Trustee of the National Museum of Science and Industry. His books include
Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life
(with Stephen Shapin) and in 2006 he presented the BBC4 history of science series
Light Fantastic.
E
XPERIMENTS AND MATHEMATICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE WORLD SEEM FAMILIAR PARTS OF SCIENCE. A CENTURY AFTER IT GOT GOING, THE
R
OYAL
S
OCIETY WAS ALSO DEEPLY COMMITTED TO ANOTHER FAMILIAR OBLIGATION OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHERS: ADVICE TO THE GOVERNMENT
. A
ND AS
S
IMON
S
CHAFFER RELATES, IT WAS ALREADY RAISING A VERY MODERN QUESTION – WHEN THE STAKES ARE HIGH, WHOSE EVIDENCE SHOULD BE TRUSTED?
It is not without Reason, that Norwich has been called
the City of Wonders;
if we examine that great Collection of Miracles, the Transactions of the
Royal Society,
we shall find more than ten Times as many strange and wonderful Events dated from this City as from any City of the World. The strangest Things that can be devised are of all others the fittest for the Entertainment of the
Royal Society.
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In search of a key moment in the story of the last 350 years of science and of the Royal Society, I’ve chosen an eighteenth-century and East Anglian episode of
Promethean science.
I use this term to mean an experimental enterprise that mixes a vaulting ambition to safeguard humanity against a
major threat with the troubling hazards of following this science’s recipes. The episode grabs attention because we also live in an age when expert disagreement is wrongly treated as a sign of fatal ignorance and when it’s hard to make space for all the groups who care about the sciences’ direction. The problem lies in the relation between matters of fact, powerful because they seem to escape from human interests, and matters of concern, which count because people find them so interesting. That relation is the theme of this chapter. There’s local detail and lots of talk in this tale. The private life of public sciences is where we best see why we should not fear if Fellows fight. This otherwise forgotten moment of fireballs and flooded drains is at least dramatic: 12 June 1781, a dozen miles south-east of Norwich at the Heckingham House of Industry, then a recently built workhouse for the rural poor. Here’s what happened, as far as I can tell.
It was a Sunday, the Lord’s Day. After a showery Norfolk morning under a harsh south-westerly wind, the couple of hundred residents were given their usual Sunday dinner of meat, dumplings and beer. Between two and three in the afternoon a severe thunderstorm came up, with violent lightning and hail. Rain flooded the front courtyard. Just as the sky was clearing and the wind began to drop, the inmates heard a loud explosion and three of them fainted. A sheet of fire entered their rooms and, so they said, even came up to their waists. A woman at the dining-hall door saw three fireballs fall into the court, others saw them at the corner of the House and towards the east wing. Within a couple of minutes the corner of the south-east roof near the stables was burning. At least seven men worked quickly to save the building by digging a hole in the nearest part of the flooded courtyard to get water to extinguish the flames. The stroke had already smashed windows, raised the lead gutters and broken tiles and bricks. The men removed more bricks and lead to get at the smouldering roof beams. Eventually, the fire was out. Within a few days, local glaziers, carpenters and bricklayers had fixed most of the damage. An ironmonger from nearby
Bungay was paid to repair the sharply pointed iron rods rising high above each of the eight chimneys. He’d installed these lightning rods at the House just four years earlier. Three weeks later the gentry of the management committee voted cash rewards to the men whose efforts had saved its House of Industry after the dreadful lightning strike.
I know all this because of the many reports of the events at Heckingham gathered during the next eight months, including a very detailed account assembled by a couple of Fellows of the Royal Society sent to Norfolk to find out exactly what had happened. Before this inquisitive journey to the House of Industry, the Royal Society Fellowship had to rely on hearsay, with all its typical problems of trust and credibility. ‘I cannot hear of any persons seeing it at the instant it happened’, reported one of their Norwich correspondents, though he had reason to believe that ‘it would soon have destroyed the whole building’.
2
This episode illuminates the fundamental relation in the history of the sciences between what people say and who they are. Much of the best-known science relies on judging others’ stories. Three days after the publication of
The Origin of Species
Darwin wrote to Thomas Henry Huxley recalling an informative evening in a South London ‘gin-palace amongst a set of pigeon fanciers’. Darwin told Huxley that ‘the difficulty is to know what to trust’.
3
Knowing something of the storyteller helps in assessing the worth of the story. In the eighteenth century there were now stylish barometers in the houses of the gentry and some of the middling sort. But in rural society many were expert at reading the sky for signs; most still got their long-range weather forecasts from their pocket almanacs, based on planetary aspects and traditional lore. I can learn a little of the Norfolk weather almost twenty-three decades ago thanks to the work of the modern Climatic Research Unit, now based at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The unit’s long-term data show that on 17 June 1781 a threatening low-pressure region dominated the atmosphere above south-east England and had done so for a fortnight. By these modern scientific standards,
nothing meteorologically unfamiliar seems to have taken place at Heckingham that summer.
In other respects that season’s wider world seems strangely familiar. The summer was distressingly wet. An increasingly unpopular Westminster government soldiered on with a reduced majority before being thrown out the following spring. Shares were in trouble, unemployment rising and the economy in crisis. British troops overseas were enmeshed in a long-running war against radical insurgents – before surrendering to American and French forces at Yorktown in Virginia in October 1781. The following March, all the bells of Norwich, the second largest town in the country, rang out to mark the prospects of peace. The witty and learned Edward Gibbon published two more volumes of his history of a great empire’s decline and fall. The papers were full of celebrity gossip, mainly about disreputable actresses and politicians’ mistresses. Shopkeepers touted new gadgets such as fountain pens and automatic clocks. In July 1781 Norwich even hosted an auction of ‘every article curious and rare’ brought back from the late and glorious Captain James Cook’s voyages into the Pacific Ocean: ‘shells, cloaks, helmets, capes and necklaces curiously wrought with feathers’.
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