Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Of course, scholars throughout Asia still made important scientific advances, but those advances tended to be, in the phrase of the distinguished sociologist Robert K. Merton, ‘singleton techniques’, often discovered by chance; and while ‘singletons’ can sometimes have a significant impact, further refinements and adaptations tend to be limited and soon run into diminishing returns. By contrast, Merton argued, ‘once science has been institutionalized, and significant numbers of men are at work on scientific investigations, the same discoveries will be made more than once’. Merton called these ‘multiples’, and he noted that almost 40 multiple discoveries occurred in the seventeenth century.48

  Merton saw ‘multiples’ as a critical and unique component of European thought, and he traced them back to the research agenda established by Francis Bacon, whose Novum Organum had declared in 1620 that ‘The path of science is not, like that of philosophy, such that only one man can tread it at a time’. Six years later, Bacon's New Atlantis described a ‘college’ (called ‘Solomon's House’), with a staff divided into observers, experimenters, compilers, interpreters and ‘merchants of light’ (those who travelled afar in order to bring back knowledge), who would collaborate to extend natural knowledge and apply its practical benefits.49 By then, in several European cities, men interested in knowledge already met together in ‘academies’, and a few admitted women (thus the Accademia dei Ricovrati of Padua elected 25 women in the course of the seventeenth century – albeit all but four of them were non-Italians, unlikely to attend any meetings).50 The early academicians normally kept their activities secret. Even the noble members of the most famous Italian academy, the ‘Lincei’ (‘Lynx-eyed’) of Rome, at first used code names and wrote to each other in cypher; while in London, Wallis and his group of ‘worthy persons, inquisitive into Natural Philosophy’ significantly adopted the name ‘the Invisible College’.

  Gradually, the academies became less secretive. In 1649 some members of the ‘Invisible College’ moved from London to Oxford, where they reinforced another group, the ‘Experimental Philosophical Club’, whose members came from diverse social, religious and political backgrounds (which they agreed never to discuss). At first they met ‘in an apothecaries house, because of the convenience of inspecting drugs, and the like, as there was occasion’, and according to Wallis they made it their ‘business to examine things to the bottom; and reduce effects to their first principles and original causes; thereby the better to understand the true ground of what hath been delivered to us from the Antients, and to make further improvements of it’.51 They found a useful ‘conduit pipe’ for their discoveries in Samuel Hartlib, born in Poland of a German father and an English mother, who left home in 1628 to escape the continental wars and settled in London. Although Parliament rejected his proposal to establish an ‘Office of Publike Addresse’ to ‘put in practice the Lord Verulam's designations De augmentis scientiarum [Bacon's The Advancement of Science] amongst the learned’, they gave him some cash grants and an annual pension. Hartlib used these to employ a team of translators and scribes who copied and distributed details about rare books, inventions, scientific developments and technological innovations to members of the ‘Hartlib Circle’ – men who shared his belief that ‘useful’ knowledge could transform the world. Hartlib also received pamphlets and treatises from his correspondents, sent them to other members of his ‘circle’ for comment, revised them and finally then had them printed (often without the author's prior permission).52

  The chaos that followed the resignation of Richard Cromwell as Lord Protector in 1659 (see chapter 12 above) destroyed the ‘Hartlib Circle’ and almost extinguished the ‘Philosophical College’, whose members were ‘scattered by the miserable distractions of that fatal year’, while ‘the place of their meeting was made a quarter for soldiers’. Soon after the Restoration in 1660, Wallis, Wilkins, Boyle and nine other ‘natural philosophers’ reconvened to form ‘a Colledge for the promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’, which met every Wednesday. By the end of that year the college had grown to 30 Fellows, and nearly 100 by the time Charles II issued a charter that created the ‘The Royal Society for promoting natural knowledge’, authorized to dissect corpses, to conduct other experiments, to select a printer for books and to ‘hold a correspondence on philosophical, mathematical or mechanical subjects with all sorts of foreigners’.53 According to Thomas Sprat, the Society's first historian, from the outset the Fellows:

  Made the distribution, and deputed whom it [the Fellowship] thought fit for the prosecution of such, or such Experiments. And this they did, either by allotting the same Work to several men, separated one from another; or else by joyning them into Committees (if we may use that word in a Philosophical sence, and so in some measure purge it from the ill sound, which it formerly had). By this union of eyes and hands there do these advantages arise. Thereby there will be a full comprehension of the object in all its appearances; and so there will be a mutual communication of the light of one Science to another: whereas single labours can be but as a prospect taken upon one side.

  Sprat considered the weekly meetings crucial because, ‘in Assemblies, the Wits of most men are sharper, their Apprehensions readier, their thoughts fuller, than in their Closets’.54

  Foreign observers agreed. Samuel Sorbière, a French gentleman interested in natural philosophy who attended several meetings of the Royal Society in 1662–3, waxed lyrical about Charles's foresight in creating such a forum ‘for settling the peace, tranquility and imbellishment of his country upon a solid foundation’ by ‘perfecting the arts and useful sciences they have begun to cultivate’.55 He urged his master, Louis XIV, to emulate the English example – which he did; but whereas the Royal Society met on its own premises, the Académie des Sciences normally met in the royal palace and received periodic instructions on what to do. Thus at its first formal session, the academicians were told to restrict their activities to ‘five principal things: mathematics, astronomy, botany or the knowledge of plants, anatomy and chemistry’. Two years later, they were told to create a complete set of accurate maps of France, and although the king provided ample funds for the necessary equipment, it took them 17 years.56

  Not all productive exchanges of scientific information took place in ‘assemblies’. Henry Oldenburg, like Hartlib a refugee from Germany who settled in England, stayed in touch with his friends abroad and added new ones whenever he travelled to Europe, creating (in effect) an enormous ‘list-serve’ (Fig. 54).57 After 1665, as founding Secretary of the Royal Society, Oldenburg also solicited papers from his correspondents, which he sent to other scholars for what we would now call ‘peer review’ before publishing them in the journal he edited: Philosophical Transactions, giving some accompt of the present undertakings, studies and labours of the ingenious in many considerable parts of the world – the world's oldest continuous scientific journal. Each issue had a print run of 500 copies, with (for a while) additional volumes in Latin translation as well as a partial French edition for the convenience of Louis XIV's academicians.58

  54. Henry Oldenburg's correspondents, 1641–77.

  Over 3,000 of Oldenburg's letters are known for the years 1641–77, revealing that he had contacts all over western Europe as well as in Scandinavia, Poland and the Ottoman empire. As founding secretary of the Royal Society of Great Britain, Oldenburg corresponded with far more scholars, and with scholars in far more countries, than any previous (scientist).

  By 1700, similar scientific journals existed all across Europe: the Journal des Sçavans (Paris, from 1665, in French), the Acta eruditorum (Leipzig, from 1682, in Latin), the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (Amsterdam, from 1684, in French), the Monatsgespräche (Leipzig, from 1688, in German), the Boekzaal van Europe (Rotterdam, from 1692, in Dutch), and many more.59 All of them reviewed and discussed books and ideas, and as such played a crucial role in disseminating scholarship, despite the obstacles posed by distance. As the 1685 issue of the Journal
des Sçavans put it: whereas in the past it had proved difficult to secure copies of recent works published abroad, ‘today, by means of the learned journals’, French scientists are ‘informed of everything that happens; and we learn each month what we only used to find out after some years’.60

  Personal contacts also advanced scientific knowledge. While Samuel Sorbière attended meetings of the Royal Society, two future Fellows, Philip Skippon and his Cambridge tutor John Ray were made welcome by scholars on the continent. At Heidelberg, they found that the Elector ‘intends to erect a new college, which will be called “Collegium Illustre, or Lipsianum”, because Lipsius was excellent in all sorts of learning; this college being designed for experiments, etc. as the Royal Society is at London’. In Naples, they attended some of the weekly meeting of the ‘Academici Investigantes’, joining about sixty others to hear a paper that ‘defended the Lord Verulam's [Bacon's] opinion’ and to watch an ‘experiment’. Everyone, they found, was ‘well acquainted with writings of all the learned and ingenious men’ of Europe, whether dead (such as Bacon, Harvey, Galileo and Descartes) or alive (they named Robert Boyle, Thomas Hobbes and Robert Hooke).61

  The ‘Republic of Letters’ also included practitioners who lived east of the Elbe and south of the Pyrenees. The Danzig brewer and astronomer Johannes Hevelius, who in 1647 published the lavishly illustrated Selenographia, the first lunar atlas (see Plate 1), had studied at Leiden and met scholars in England and France; became a Fellow of the Royal Society; and welcomed Edmond Halley and other prominent scientists to his impressive observatory in Danzig. In Spain, Miguel Marcelino Boix y Moliner asserted in a book entitled Hippocrates illuminated (1716) that ‘the foreign doctors and philosophers of the last century’ had only managed to ‘make great advances’ thanks to plagiarizing their Spanish precursors. He singled out the work of ‘Gideon’ Harvey on the circulation of the blood, ‘Renato’ Descartes on philosophy, and Richard Morton on cinchona bark, all of whom (he claimed) had simply replicated the earlier research by Spanish scholars – three little-known examples of ‘contested multiples’. Jonathan Israel was surely correct to assert that

  No major cultural transformation in Europe, since the fall of the Roman Empire, displayed anything comparable to the impressive cohesion of European intellectual culture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. For it was then that western and central Europe first became, in the sphere of ideas, broadly a single arena integrated by mostly newly invented channels of communication, ranging from newspapers, magazines, and the salon to the coffee-shop and a whole array of fresh cultural devices.62

  The Limits of the Scientific Revolution

  Europe's scientists had less success when they tried to understand and explain the Little Ice Age. Galileo had impressed on his illustrious pupil Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany that instrumental observations and experiments could reveal the secrets of Nature, and members of Florence's Accademia del Cimento (Experimental Academy) invented an accurate rain-gauge (to measure precipitation), evaporimeter (to measure humidity), barometer (to measure air pressure), and thermometer (to measure atmospheric temperatures). In 1654 the Grand Duke established an international network of 11 stations, each one equipped with identical instruments and protocols, to perform synchronized measurements several times a day of temperatures (and, in one station, atmospheric pressure). Each station recorded its daily readings on a standard sheet, and dispatched copies to the Grand Duke. The network had assembled over 30,000 readings by 1667, when operations ceased under pressure from the Vatican, which feared that the results would reinforce Galileo's dangerous notion that instrumental ideas were superior to the Bible in interpretating Nature. Grand Duke Ferdinand's death three years later ended any hope of processing the data.63

  Meanwhile, in England, Robert Hooke (‘Curator of Experiments’ of the Royal Society) proposed in 1663 a ‘Method for making a history of the weather’. This would involve the measurement in numerous stations of eight variables: half by standardized instruments (wind direction, temperature, humidity and air pressure) and the rest by observation (cloud cover, thunderstorms, ‘any thing extraordinary in the tides’, ‘aches and distempers in the bodies of men’, and ‘what conveniences or inconveniences may happen in the year, in any kind, as by flouds, droughts, violent showers etc’). Hooke designed a chart divided into columns, in which a month's daily observations could be recorded at each station; and he hoped to find ‘in several parts of the world, but especially in distant parts of this kingdom, [people] that would undertake this work’ of record-keeping. But therein lay the fatal flaw: making and distributing the delicate calibrated instruments, and paying the ‘observers’ in each station, required money – and the Society had none, since its budget consisted only of the annual dues from each Fellow (many of whom failed to pay). The scheme therefore remained unrealized (Plate 28).64

  Several Englishmen nevertheless kept a ‘weather diary’, including the London schoolmaster John Goad, who made detailed observations between 1652 and 1685, when he published much of his data, juxtaposed with planetary movements, and a tentative analysis of the results. Goad also exchanged information with the antiquarian and astrologer Elias Ashmole, who like him made a daily record of observed precipitation, wind direction and so on. These men knew what they were about. ‘Casualty is inconsistent with science,’ Goad stated: since climate was not a matter of chance, scientific observation would reveal patterns, and so permit prediction. John Locke, who kept a ‘Register of the weather’ throughout the year 1692, agreed:

  If such a register as this, or one that was better contriv'd with the help of some instruments that for exactness might be added, were kept in every county in England and so constantly published, many things related to the air, winds, health, fruitfulness, etc., might by a sagacious man be collected from them and several rules and observations concerning the extent of winds and rains etc be in time established, to the great advantage of mankind.

  Robert Plot, director of experiments for the Oxford Philosophical Society, likewise hoped that the close study of the weather would empower scientists to

  Learn to be forewarned certainly of divers emergencies (such as heats, colds, dearths, plagues, and other epidemical distempers) which are now unaccountable to us; and by their causes be instructed for prevention or remedies. Thence too we may hope to be informed how far the positions of the planets, in relation to one another and to the fixt stars, are concerned in the alterations of the weather, and in bringing and preventing diseases, or other calamities.65

  Robert Plot's rationale reveals two important limitations of the ‘scientific revolution’. First, the aim was admirable but unobtainable. Even in the twenty-first century, the wealth of meteorological data harvested via terrestrial and satellite observations does not suffice to forewarn us ‘certainly of divers emergencies (such as heats [and] colds)’, so that we can ‘be instructed for prevention’. Even in August 2003 no one predicted – and, with the available technology, no one could have predicted – that the heat wave that struck many parts of Europe would last 11 days without remission and involve the highest temperatures ever recorded; yet in some areas that brief ‘calamity’ more than doubled the normal death rate for August and killed almost 70,000 people prematurely.66

  Robert Plot's hope that systematic observation would show ‘how far the positions of the planets’ were ‘concerned in the alterations of the weather, and in bringing and preventing diseases, or other calamities’, revealed the second limitation of ‘experimental philosophy’: he still believed that occult forces shaped his environment. He was not alone. The last (and most popular) work written by Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum, contained a chapter on telepathy, wart-charming and witchcraft; William Harvey carried out ‘experiments’ to see whether or not those who claimed to be witches had supernumerary nipples or ‘familiars’ who performed supernatural tricks; while Robert Boyle sponsored a treatise to prove the existence of witchcraft (like Bacon, the last book he wrote
examined the supernatural). Even Isaac Newton, knighted by the queen of England for his services to science, bought many books on magic, conducted alchemical experiments, and calculated from the Book of Daniel that the world ‘will end A.C. [AD] 2060. It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.’67 The appearance of two comets in 1664–5 spawned well over 100 publications, most of them filled with dire predictions of war, plague, famine, drought, gales, floods, the death of princes, the downfall of governments, and perhaps the end of the world. In Russia, locked in war with Poland, the tsar ordered prayer and fasting to beg God ‘to send the peace we desire and to keep away from us all the evils that so many comets presage’.68 Two other brilliant comets in 1680 and 1682 had a similar impact. Almost 100 works discussing their significance appeared in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland, over 30 in Spain, 19 in France and the Netherlands, 17 in England and its American colonies, and 6 in Italy. In Rome, ex-Queen Christina of Sweden offered a prize to anyone who could compute the comet's path (almost certainly to facilitate more accurate astrological predictions). In India, Dr John Fryer, a Cambridge graduate and physician, observed with amazement ‘the rise and fall of the most prodigious comet I was ever witness to’, and since ‘it is certainly ominous’, he prayed that ‘it may not affect our Europe’. In England, John Evelyn, a founding Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote a detailed description of the fireball in his diary, adding: ‘What this may portend (for it was very extraordinary) God only knows.’ Like Fryer, he prayed that ‘God avert his judgements: we have had of late several comets, which though I believe appear from natural causes, and of themselves operate not, yet I cannot despise them. They may be warnings from God.’69