Virtuosos and Oddballs

Even eminent 17th-century scientists pursued dead-end enthusiasms, like four-legged chickens and spring-loaded shoes for leaping.

By TIMOTHY FERRIS

The 1600s were science's sunrise century. It was then that Galileo first trained a telescope on the night sky, Kepler discerned the shape of planetary orbits and Newton showed how gravitation dictated them. Descartes's geometry and Leibniz's calculus date from the 17th century, as do the first proper microscopes, telescopes, slide rules, wind-speed gauges, pendulum clocks and vacuum pumps, plus the discovery of Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings. Such developments indelibly altered sensibilities, revealing that human inquiry, if aided by advancing technology, is potentially limitless. As Philip Ball writes in "Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything," the 1600s "began with an essentially medieval outlook and ended looking like the first draft of the modern age."

Given its richness and importance, you might expect there would be a wealth of splendid popular books on 17th-century science. Yet they are few. The problem isn't that there aren't good stories to tell—there are plenty—but that the stories are too diverse to fit readily into an overall theme. Aside from a few unifying figures like Galileo and Newton, 17th-century science emerged less through great thinkers thinking great thoughts than though the idiosyncratic experiments of thousands of independent tinkerers, inventors, collectors and flat-out oddballs. These "virtuosos," as they were called, experimented with lenses, pumps and biological specimens as much to satisfy their own inquisitiveness as to answer big questions.

Rather than oversimplify these jumbled themes, Mr. Ball fashions them into a tale of "the emancipation of curiosity." Before the 17th century, he writes, "wonder was esteemed while curiosity was reviled." To exhibit curiosity smacked of prideful overreaching: "It is curiosity to enquire into that which God hath concealed," the Puritan divine Samuel Hieron declared. This theme is loudly trumpeted in the book's opening pages, where Mr. Ball chides historians (none of them named) who are content to tell "cozy" stories of a linear process toward scientific enlightenment rather than wrestle with the messy details. From his perspective, Robert Boyle, by experimenting with air pumps, wasn't "tolling the death knell of alchemy"; he was curious about the behavior of what we today call air pressure.

Such squabbling over foresight and hindsight aside, "Curiosity" emerges as a first-rate popular account of how science in Europe began. Accurate, witty and reliable, the book ably shows modern readers how we got to be modern. Mr. Ball adeptly sketches the virtuoso sensibility: a combination of intellectual nosiness and experimental dexterity plus the belief that, as he writes, "to understand everything, you could start from anywhere."

Certainly the virtuosos did more starting than finishing. Lacking the corpus of scientific knowledge that researchers draw on today, many spent their time collecting oddities that call to mind "Ripley's Believe It or Not." London's Royal Society published reports of a liquid that expands when the moon is full, a four-legged chicken, and a woman said to have been pregnant for 18 years. Even so eminent a researcher as Robert Hooke—the "strange man, at once crabby and clubbable," as Mr. Ball portrays him, who coined the biological term "cell"—dissipated much of his efforts working on dead-end enthusiasms like a pair of spring-loaded shoes for leaping. Nobody could know, at the dawn of science, which lines of inquiry were pointless and which would strike pay dirt.

The virtuosos' mix of magpie enthusiasm for particulars with sweeping expectations for a better future made them ready targets for satire. The poet Samuel Butler thought them misguided: "Those who greedily pursue / Things wonderful instead of true." The essayist Joseph Addison regarded them as lacking dignity. "The mind of man," he declared, "capable of so much higher contemplations . . . should not be altogether fixed upon such mean and disproportionate objects" as the fleas and mollusks. Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle, found the virtuosos impractical, predicting that they "will never be able to spin silk . . . from loose atoms; neither will weavers weave a web of light from the sun's rays, nor an architect build an house of the bubbles of water and air." Alexander Pope, portraying scientific curiosity as vanity in disguise, assured his readers that "Man's as perfect as he ought: / His knowledge measur'd to his state and place, / His time a moment, and a point his space."

Many modern-day science writers are confused, and some are even offended, by the spectacle of Pope and so many other excellent writers getting science so wrong. Not Mr. Ball, who illuminates how socially conservative critics might well take exception to the astounding reports of the first great investigators of natural science. "The problem is that, because science produces knowledge that is, for the most part, dependable and precise, we tend to believe there must be a dependable, precise method for obtaining it," he writes. "But the truth is that science works only because it can break its own rules, make mistakes, follow blind alleys, attempt too much—and because it draws upon the resources of the human mind, with its passions and foibles as well as its reason and invention."

Even today, when science and technology generate most of the developed world's wealth, many people remain ignorant of what science is and how it works. We have scholars who argue that scientific theories are just pretty stories, politicians who seek discoveries on demand and millions of citizens sufficiently suspicious to imagine that anthropogenic global warming is a scientific hoax. In that sense, Mr. Ball's curious subject is contemporary.

Mr. Ferris is the author, most recently, of "The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature."

A version of this article appeared July 1, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Virtuosos And Oddballs.

The book is Curiosity By Philip Ball