Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society. Bill Bryson
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– came back from the dead a hundred years ago to exert remarkable influence over the course of modern science. Secondly, that Leibniz’s most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science. In 1960, Eugene Wigner wrote a paper, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences, in which he addressed the nearly miraculous way in which pure mathematics – seemingly a product of human cognition, and nothing else – predicts the behaviour of the physical world. The examples cited by Wigner would have made sense to Leibniz. Leibniz, however, would have been baffled by Wigner’s use of the adjective ‘unreasonable’ in the title of his paper. Wigner was a modern: a product of a sceptical age. He was uneasy (or felt obliged to pretend to be uneasy) with the philosophical implications of the way in which the physical world answered to mathematics. This unease could not have been more alien to Leibni z, who, during his long philosophical career, questioned many things that would have been easier to leave alone, but believed, with a kind of medieval serenity, in the reasonableness of Creation.
Notes
* This perennial theological chestnut seems to have occasioned some soul-searching for Newton as well, since he risked serious trouble by semi-openly espousing the Arian heresy, which denies the Trinity.
WHAT’S IN A NAME? RIVALRIES AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN SCIENCE
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and a novelist. Her work, both literary and scholarly, has received numerous prizes, including a MacArthur ‘genius’ award. Her non-fiction works are Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. Her fiction includes the novels Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics, Mazel, The Dark Sister and The Mind-Body Problem, as well as a volume of stories, Strange Attractors. Her latest book is 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.
A MID THE DIVISIONS IN THOUGHT WHICH MARKED THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION, THE FOUNDERS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INSISTED ON BINDING TOGETHER TWO CONTENDERS FOR THE BASIS OF NATURAL EXPLANATION. AS REBECCA GOLDSTEIN EXPLAINS, THERE WERE DEEP COMMITMENTS TO THE PRIMACY OF EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS, AND TO RECOGNISING UNDERLYING MATHEMATICAL PATTERNS. BUT THE REALLY POWERFUL TRICK, THEN AS NOW, LAY IN FINDING HOW TO BRING THEM TOGETHER.
After a lecture given by Christopher Wren, then the Gresham College Professor of Astronomy, twelve prominent gentlemen, deciding that they would meet weekly to discuss science and perform experiments, recorded their intention to form a ‘Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’.
It might not have been the most elegant of designations, but it did, in its very wordiness, portend great things. It gave notice to the hope – because it was still, in 1660, only a hope – that two distinct orientations, one mathematical, the other experimental, would be pounded together into one coherent scientific method. The hope paid off, and it was from
A colour engraving of Gresham College, home of the Royal Society from 1660 to 1710.
within the ranks of the Royal Society that the new compound emerged. Two cognitive stances that had seemed to have little to do with one another, except in their opposition to the system of natural philosophy dominant for centuries, were rendered equally necessary in the explanation of physical phenomena.
It was a time of epistemological urgency. A grandly unifying cathedral of thought was crumbling. 1 The all-inclusive view of the cosmos, laid down by Aristotle and buttressed by the medical theories of Galen, the astronomy of Ptolemy, and the theology of Christianity, had offered a way of explaining…absolutely everything. From the falling of objects to the rising of smoke; from generation and decay to the four basic personality types; from the relation between body and soul to the pathways of the planets; the supposed nature and reason for every aspect of the world could be extracted from an interlocking system that employed a homogeneous form of explanation throughout.
The form of explanation had been purpose-driven, or teleological, and its scaffolding was the metaphor of human action. We explain human actions by citing the end state that the agent has in mind in undertaking it. The old system took this familiar model of explanation and expanded it to apply to the world at large. ‘To be ignorant of motion is to be ignorant of nature,’ Aristotle had written, but by motions he meant not just displacements of bodies but such processes as becoming a parent, gaining knowledge, growing older. All were subsumed under the same conception: a striving to actualise an end state that was implicit in the motion and provided the explanation, the final cause, for the course that the motion took. The explanatory logic of human actions – based on intentions – was one with the explanatory logic of the cosmos.
The working hypothesis behind teleology was, of course, that all natural phenomena and processes do in fact have goals, allowing them to be viewed as potentialities on the way to being actualised. But every form of explanation makes use of some working hypothesis or other, ascribing to nature the features that allow such explanation to work. The mode of physical explanation that was to supplant teleology, making essential use of mathematics, also staked its claim on the world’s being a certain way.
We are today understandably prepared to believe that the only reasons anyone might have had to cling to the old crumbling teleological cathedral, in light of the superior science battering it, were speciously theological; and, in fact, such reasons probably did motivate most of those who clung to the old system. Still, there was nothing a priori fallacious about the old system’s assumptions about reality, just as there was nothing a priori true about the assumptions that would replace them.
The grand old system was crumbling, and it made for a capacious space into which genius could expand. When foundations fall, everything can and must be rethought. The exhilaration on display in the writings of the new scientists bears witness to how bracingly liberating such possibilities can be, at least for those with the intellectual imagination and bravado to take advantage of them. ‘You cannot help it, Signor Sarsi,’ Galileo exults in The Assayer, written in the form of a letter to a friend, ‘that it was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else.’
EXPLANATION RE-EXPLAINED
And what question is more foundational than the question of what counts as a good explanation? All the great men whom we now associate with the formation of modern science – Copernicus (1473–1543), William Gilbert (1544–1603), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), William Harvey (1578–1657), René Descartes (1596–1650), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), John Locke (1632–1704) and Isaac Newton (1643–1727) – were intensely involved with the question of what form explanation ought to take, if teleology was truly to be abandoned, and there was by no means a consensus among them. Two different orientations emerged: one rationalist, stressing abstract reason, the other empiricist, stressing experience.
In some sense, this cognitive split was nothing new. It had made itself felt in the ancient world, in the distinction between the Platonists and the Aristotelians. It is probably as old as thought itself, shadowing two distinct intellectual temperaments. But the new rationalist and empiricist orientations were not like the old. The rationalist orientation looked to mathematics to provide the new mode of explanation. The empiricists saw the new scientific method as emerging out of experimentation. In responding to the need for a new mode of explanation to take the place of teleology, they became epistemological rivals, offering competing models to take the place of the old system’s