Science wasn’t always science. It used to be called “natural philosophy”. The word “science” wasn’t coined until the mid-19th century.
Nor has it often been the disinterested pursuit of the truth in the way many people imagine. As Peter Dear shows in this succinct and level-headed tour of science’s modern history, there has been a raft of ulterior motives, foremost among them the human desire to show off.
To this end, the mysterious force of electricity was a gift. At dinner parties in the early 1700s, Dear tells us, there was a craze for secretly electrifying the cutlery, which must have annoyed as many guests as it entertained. Later, the English researcher Stephen Gray achieved notoriety with his “electrical boy” experiment, in which he suspended a young volunteer by silken cords, and showed how, by passing electricity through him, feathers could be made to rise as if by magic towards his trembling fingers.
In the 1740s, the Abbé Nollet amused Louis XV by electrifying 140 of his courtiers who were holding hands in a line. He later did likewise to 200 Carthusian monks, noting,“It is singular to see the multitude of different gestures, and to hear the instantaneous exclamations of those surprised by the shock.” One can only imagine what the monks thought about it.
The Royal Institution in Mayfair has overseen more discoveries than any other building in the world: an astonishing achievement arguably managed not despite, but because of the fact that the place was created for delivering talks about science, rather than doing research. The resident professors (Sir Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and the rest) made their breakthroughs at least partly so they would have something with which to wow the punters in the theatre.
Why did natural philosophers try to understand the basic building blocks of the universe? One explanation was because there was a widespread belief that all matter was made of the same stuff in different arrangements. If that was true, anything could be turned into anything, including lead into gold. Among other motives, Isaac Newton was a committed alchemist.
Like most modern historians, Dear sees nothing inevitable in science’s progress. On the contrary, his story is one of mixed motives, terrible errors, and bloody luck. It’s striking how often people have stumbled or stubbed their toes on insights, as when the 18th century Italian researcher Luigi Galvani impaled some dead frogs on brass hooks hung on iron railings and noticed their corpses twitching. This serendipitous discovery led to the creation of the first electric battery.
An English-born historian at New York’s Cornell University, Prof. Dear doesn’t always convey his complicated ideas in a simple enough form. He’s an academic. That means his book will be judged by his peers by their painful standards—some of them may note that he is more sure-footed in his familiar terrain of the 17th and 18th centuries than with later science—while running the risk of being ignored by the public for the crime of not being organised around a single catchy idea.
Nevertheless, The World as We Know It is a highly competent introduction to the currents of scientific endeavour since 1700—and one that delivers revolutionary implications in its margins. The meat of the book consists of chapters devoted to world-changing work in electromagnetism, thermodynamics, the theory of evolution, and so on. Yet the highlight, for me, is a section entitled Entr’Acte, where Dear describes the different paces at which different countries have included scientific research in the formal duties of their universities.
As a writer at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, which is not affiliated to any university, I’m a passionate believer in independent institutes where researchers can focus on research full-time. They don’t get to do that at universities, where they spend most of their time teaching. And yet universities are where 99% of British research takes place.
Dear reveals that this curious idea of the split-personality university, where scientists divide their time and temperaments between two distinct vocations, was an innovation in Germany at the start of the 19th century, driven by the surge in patriotism following the Napoleonic wars. The idea was to make German universities world-beaters by teaching students not only what was known, but also how to make their own discoveries. This was something not embraced in Britain until the 20th century.
By then, Germany had moved on—as had America, following its lead—creating sophisticated research universities and a balancing network of state-supported independent institutes, where scholars are freed from the duties of teaching. In Britain, we continue to lag behind on this front, with very rare exceptions, such as the London Institute.
A big take-home of Dear’s book is that science has never been a linear progression. It has been a messy charge, with competing theories enjoying their shelf-lives, and rival talents driving one another onward. Even now there are deep tensions, for instance, between the implications of the macro-scale theory of relativity and the micro-scale theory of quantum mechanics—notwithstanding the fact that both have achieved broad acceptance.
It’s a missed trick that, in Britain, we don’t have a comparably diverse range of research organisations, but instead continue to do all our scientific striving at universities—a curious template that, as Dear persuasively demonstrates in this enlightening book, has its roots in 19th century German nationalism.
