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