With its teeny-tiny chapters full of amazing and intricate facts, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society & the Birth of the Modern World, by Edward Dolnick, is like a cabinet of curiousities of the scientific revolution. Although it does progress eventually towards calculus, the theory of gravity, and Isaac Newton (fun fact: whenever I read Isaac Newton, I always think Isaac Newt-weight and then Isaac Newt-Tori-Spelling -- please tell me I'm not the only one) it does so in a pleasantly roundabout way that nicely encompasses the weird amalgam of discovery, science, faith, and superstition that fueled the Royal Society and seventeenth-century society at large.
The Clockwork Universe begins where the Middle Ages left off: with Satan around every corner, and the End of the World at any moment. While Newton was inventing calculus, London was enduring first a plague and then a great fire. The men (yes, they were all men, at least in the Royal Society) who invented new forms of math and discovered new laws of physics and new realms of biology also believed in unicorns and alchemy and that God was probably going to judge them unworthy. The scientific method was still in the process of being worked out, and there was a whole lot of room for error.
Dolnick reminds us that "Science today is a grand and formal enterprise, but the modern age of science began as a free-for-all." I'm pretty sure I've seen scientists at play today, and they're not always very grand and formal, but it's true that the Royal Society had them beat in sheer bugfuck crazy. I've seen a video of scientists speculating about what would happen if you stuck your hand in the Large Hadron Collider -- Robert Hooke would've just done it. Seriously! After playing what happens if I stick (a snake, a chick, a bird, a mouse, a candle, my hand) in a vacuum chamber, Hooke built a larger one and got inside (it broke before he died). Everyone (except Newton; Dolnick: "No man ever had less of the flibbertigibbet about him than Isaac Newton.") was just messing around with everything and having fun and torturing poor defenseless dogs and blowing shit up.
It's a little bit hilarious and a little bit awful, and a little amazing that they got anywhere, but Dolnick does a good job of explaining the changes in philosophy and practice that made it all possible.
Comments