The Clockwork Universe

by Edward Dolnick

  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.”

  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 Lordship’s presence by this rag of paper, is to tell your Lordship that I lie in a corner, as a clod of clay, attending what kind of vessel it shall please you to make of Your Lordship’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 gratitude from the author to his patron. The size of the blank space 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 assured his readers, “you too can use it.”

  This was a democratic idea in a world deeply mistrustful of democracies. But something had shifted, and Hobbes had spotted it. Dry-as-dust scholarship 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 (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 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.

  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 (now in its fourth century). In 1672 the 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.”

  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 competitive 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. Scie
nce was a race to a single goal. Ready, set, go! Build a clock that works even on a ship 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 God. 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 punishing 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. Passersby 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 for thief. Usually the 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.

  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 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 titled “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 carcass 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 cumin seeds.)

  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 passing 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.”

  At times the king’s interest in anatomy grew downright creepy. At a court ball in 1663, a woman miscarried. Someone brought the fetus to the king, who dissected it. To modern ears, the lighthearted tone surrounding the whole episode is almost unfathomable. “Whatever others think,” the king joked, “he [i.e., Charles himself ] hath the greatest loss . . . that hath lost a subject by the business.”

  When it came to experiments on animals, the seventeenth century was even less squeamish. Newton veered toward vegetarianism—he seldom ate rabbit and some other common dishes on the grounds that “animals should be put to as little pain as possible”—but such qualms were rare. Sages of the Royal Society happily carried out experiments on dogs that are too grim to read about without flinching. They had ample company. Descartes, as deep and introspective a thinker as ever lived, wrote blithely that humans are the only animals who think and feel. The yelp of a kicked dog no more indicated pain than did the sound of a drum when you beat it.

  Another widely admired philosopher of the day, Athanasius Kircher, described an odd invention called a cat piano. The goal was to amuse a despondent prince. A row of cats sat in side-by-side cages, arranged according to the pitch of their meows. When the pianist pressed a key, a spike stabbed into the tail of the appropriate cat. “The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.”

  In London shouting, jostling crowds flocked to bear-baitings and bull-baitings, where they could watch a chained animal fight a pack of slavering dogs. (Thus the origin of the English bulldog, whose flat face and sunken nose let it keep its hold on a flailing bull without having to open its powerful jaws to breathe.) Even children’s games routinely featured the torment of animals. “No wonder,” the historian Keith Thomas writes, “that traditional nursery rhymes portray blind mice having their tails cut off with a carving knife, blackbirds in a pie, and pussy in the well.”

  Experiments on dogs were considered entertaining as well as informative. Wren, for instance, made a specialty of splenectomies, surgical operations to remove the spleen. With a dog tied in place on a table, Wren would carefully cut into its abdomen, extract the spleen, tie off the blood vessels, sew up the wound, and then place the poor beast in a corner to recover, or not. (Boyle subjected his pet setter to the procedure and noted that the dog survived “as sportive and wanton as before.”)

  The operations provide yet another instance of how new science and ancient belief found themselves yoked together. For fourteen centuries, the Western world had endorsed Galen’s doctrine that health depended on a balance of four “humors”—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—each secreted by a different organ.16 Too little or too much phlegm, say, made a person phlegmatic, dreary and sluggish and flat. Just as the heart was the
source of blood, so the spleen was the source of black bile (which, in the wrong proportion, caused melancholy). All medical authorities had so decreed for more than a thousand years. Hence Wren’s experiment, a new test of an age-old dogma—if health depended on having all four humors in the proper balance, what would it mean if a dog could get along perfectly well with no bile-producing spleen at all?

  Countless dogs suffered through transfusions, too. Many of them survived, somehow, even though no one knew about the dangers of infection or mismatched blood types. Boyle wrote a paper calling for answers to such questions “As whether a fierce Dog, by being often quite new stocked with the blood of a cowardly Dog, may not become more tame,” or “whether a Dog, taught to fetch and carry, or to dive after Ducks, or to sett, will after frequent and full recruits of the blood of Dogs unfit for those Exercises, be as good at them, as before?”

  Sometimes the experiments had more serious rationales. How, for instance, did venom from a snakebite spread throughout the body? What about a person who swallowed poison? What would happen if someone injected him with poison instead? Tempting as it might have been to test such ideas on human “volunteers,” dogs came first. (Boyle did report a conversation with “a foreign Ambassador, a very curious person,” who had set out to inject one of his servants with poison. The servant spoiled the fun by fainting before the experiment could begin.)

  But many of the experiments were essentially stunts. At dinner one November night in 1666, Pepys listened to an excited report of the events a few days before at the Royal Society. Dr. William Croone gave a vivid account of a blood transfusion between a mastiff and a spaniel. “The first died upon the place,” Pepys reported, “and the other very well, and likely to do well.”