Dreams of Earth and Sky (8 page)

The story begins a hundred years earlier with William Gilbert, a medical doctor who practiced in Colchester and London and became president of the Royal College of Physicians in 1600. He was one of the royal physicians responsible for keeping Queen Elizabeth in good health. In his spare time he did experiments on magnetism and published his conclusions in a book with the Latin title
De Magnete.
The full title in English is
On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet the Earth: A New Physiology Demonstrated by Arguments and Experiments.
The book is written in a remarkably modern style, putting the science of magnetism on a firm experimental foundation. Gilbert did careful measurements, mostly using as his experimental material little spheres of natural lodestone (magnetic oxide of iron), which he called
terrellae
, or in English “little earths.” He was aware from the beginning that these little magnets were models for the earth. He suspended them in water and measured
their attractions and repulsions in detail. He cleared up a great deal of confusion by demonstrating that the use of the words “North Pole,” to mean the end of a magnet that pointed north, was wrong. He demonstrated that north and south poles attract each other, and therefore, if the magnet were taken to be a model of the earth, the end of the magnet that pointed north would correspond to the south pole of the earth. He says in his book:

Roughly speaking, Gilbert did for the science of magnetism the same job that Benjamin Franklin did for the science of electricity two hundred years later, establishing the basic facts by means of experiments that anyone who doubted his conclusions could repeat. But Gilbert, since he lived two hundred years earlier, was in some ways the greater pioneer. In the course of his study of magnets, he also did a number of experiments on electricity, demonstrating that electric and magnetic materials were different and should be studied separately. Gilbert was aware that he was pioneering a new style of experimental philosophy that could be extended to many other subjects besides magnetism. He writes in the preface to
De Magnete
:

One of the people who read
De Magnete
, probably soon after it appeared in 1600, was Galileo. Galileo was twenty years younger than Gilbert, but already well started in his studies of dynamics, using pendulums and balls rolling down inclined planes as his experimental tools. Galileo in his correspondence with friends wrote warmly of Gilbert: “I greatly praise, admire and envy this author, that a conception so stupendous should have come to his mind.” Galileo later did experiments himself with magnets and confirmed Gilbert’s results. Fortunately, the friendly relations between Galileo and his English admirers were not disturbed by disputes over priority of the kind that arose between Newton and Leibniz a century later. Gilbert was given some share of the glory that Galileo earned as the father of modern experimental science.

After Gilbert and Galileo comes Francis Bacon, who, unlike the other characters in the story, seldom did an experiment. He was a man of many talents, so gifted that he was seriously proposed in later centuries as the author of Shakespeare’s plays. At the age of fifteen he was helping the English ambassador in Paris with diplomatic correspondence, and developed a serious interest in codes and cryptography. He later became a successful writer, lawyer, and politician. He was lord chancellor in 1618 and was disgraced for taking bribes in 1621. After his disgrace, he spent five years in retirement writing fragments of a great work that remained unfinished,
The Great Instauration.
By “instauration” he meant an organization for acquiring knowledge from all over the world and putting it to practical use.

The essential feature of his vision was that the increase of knowledge should be a collective activity, with organized groups of people observing in detail how nature works. After the observations were collected, another group of people, scholars and philosophers, would interpret the results and deduce the laws that nature follows. Finally,
a third group of people, inventors and manufacturers, would use their knowledge of nature’s laws for the advancement of human wealth and welfare. This blueprint for the building of a knowledge-based society was very far ahead of its time. In many ways, Bacon’s scheme resembles the institutions of science and technology in the twenty-first century more than it resembles the Royal Society in the seventeenth. Nevertheless, the founders of the Royal Society were strongly influenced by Bacon’s writings and believed that they were helping to make his dreams come true. And now, 350 years later, it turns out that they were right.

Bacon was a master of a literary form that he called the essay. His essays are brief, usually a couple of pages summarizing his views about a big subject. Many of his essays have become classics, distilling much wisdom into a few words. Here are a few of his memorable statements about the pursuit of knowledge:

After his death in 1626, his most imaginative work was published, a novel with the title
New Atlantis
, describing a utopian society living
on an island in the South Pacific and directed by an organization called the Foundation. The Foundation is a group of philosophers dedicated to scientific research and human improvement:

Bacon died amid a chaos of unpaid debts and unfinished manuscripts. He never knew which of the many seeds that he planted would bear fruit. The New Atlantis turned out to be one of the most fertile. Thirty years after his death, the name “Fellows,” which he gave to the members of his Foundation, was borrowed by the founders of the Royal Society for the members of theirs. And three hundred years later, the writer Isaac Asimov borrowed the name “Foundation” for one of the most popular series of science-fiction stories ever written.

The next of the English pioneers was William Harvey, the physician who revolutionized the practice of medicine by discovering the circulation of the blood. The title of his great work published in 1628 was
Anatomical Exercises on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals.
He was trained in Padua, where he was a student of Fabricius, a famous anatomist who made careful dissections of animals and identified the valves in veins. Fabricius did not understand the function of the valves, since he believed the prevailing dogma that veins and arteries both carried blood away from the heart. After Harvey returned to England he did careful experiments, tying bandages around the arms of his patients and observing how the flow of the blood in the veins responded. He found that the function of the valves was to block flow away from the heart and allow flow toward the heart. These simple observations proved that the blood circulates
through the body, away from the heart through the arteries and back to the heart through the veins. Harvey also showed that a separate circulation takes blood from the heart to the lungs and back again.

After Harvey came the “great generation,” the group of about twenty people who came together in 1660 to launch the Royal Society. The main purpose of Gribbin’s book is to explain how and why this happened. How did it happen that so many people with wealth and education became seriously interested in science? And why did they concentrate their attention on experiments and observations of nature rather than on philosophical theorizing? Gribbin answers these questions by examining the historical circumstances out of which this group of people arose.

The central fact about the founding of the Royal Society is that it coincided with the restoration of the English monarchy under King Charles II. England had been torn apart by civil war for nine years, from 1642 to 1651. Parliamentary forces led by Oliver Cromwell defeated royal forces led by Charles I. Charles I was beheaded in 1649 and England became a republic, governed by Cromwell as lord protector. Charles II spent nine years in humiliating exile, wandering between France and Holland and Spain. When Cromwell died in 1658, his second-in-command, General George Monck, started to talk with the defeated Royalist leaders and quickly negotiated a deal. Charles II would be invited back as king, and only a few ringleaders of the gang that had killed his father would be punished. Most English people were tired of religious squabbles. They had no wish to fight the civil war over again. So Charles II came back and successfully reunited the country, governing with a light hand and making whatever compromises were needed to stay on his throne. He reigned for twenty-five years, more or less peacefully, and before he died somebody composed a poem for his tombstone:

Charles II had learned from his father’s mistakes not to take himself or his job too seriously. That was the background against which the Royal Society came into being.

During the nine years of civil war and the years of Cromwell’s rule that followed, upper-class Englishmen found themselves divided, isolated, and insecure. These were the landowners and merchants and men-about-town who were accustomed to running their estates and businesses and also to running the country. Many of them had been friends of the king, others were friends of Cromwell. Gribbin gives us a vignette of Harvey, who was a friend of Charles I in 1642 when the war began. Charles was busy leading his troops in the first serious battle of the war at Edgehill, which ended in a draw. He left his two sons in the care of Harvey. So Harvey sat under a hedge on the battlefield with the two future kings, Charles, then aged twelve, and James, aged nine. All of them survived the battle, and it is possible that young Charles acquired from Harvey some of the interest in science that he put to good use when he became king eighteen years later. But Harvey had to pay dearly for his service to the royals. When Charles I was defeated and imprisoned, the parliamentary government stripped Harvey of all his honors and privileges.

For others besides Harvey, science provided an escape from turmoil and insecurity. It provided a way for men possessing property and wealth to put their leisure to good use. It also provided a way for them to forget their differences, to come together and talk about questions having nothing to do with politics and theology. The group that eventually gave birth to the Royal Society started in Oxford in
1648 under the leadership of John Wilkins. Wilkins was an amateur astronomer and engineer with a secure base of operations as the warden of Wadham College in Oxford. He was a personal friend of Cromwell and afterward married Cromwell’s sister.

He had published in 1641 a book with the title
Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger: Shewing, how a Man may with Privacy and Speed communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at any Distance.
This book described a system of rapid long-range communication based on bells. Using a series of relay stations, each station containing a human bell ringer with two bells of different pitch, messages could be coded and encrypted and transmitted over long distances at the speed of sound. In Oxford he started an “experimental philosophical club,” with emphasis on actually doing experiments rather than merely talking and writing. His own experiments were done with transparent beehives that he constructed so that he could observe in detail how the bees organized their activities. The two most important members of the club were Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. Boyle built a chemical laboratory in Oxford, and worked hard to separate the kernel of truth from the encrustations of myth in the processes studied by alchemists. He described his experiments in
The Sceptical Chymist
, the first account of chemistry written from a modern point of view. Hooke came to Oxford as Boyle’s paid assistant and was enormously helpful to the group, as he had a genius for building experimental apparatus that worked. He improved the performance and reliability of air pumps, pendulum clocks, and microscopes, the tools that made experimental science possible.

While the members of Wilkins’s club were actively engaged in doing science in Oxford, another group of gentlemen were talking about science at Gresham College in London. The Oxford group were mostly Parliamentarians, the London group mostly Royalists. The
London group did not contain scientists of the caliber of Boyle and Hooke, but it contained serious amateurs who had good personal contact with Charles II. One of them was Sir Robert Moray, an expert in chemistry who had spent some time with the king during his exile. After the king returned, Moray helped him to build a chemical laboratory at his palace in Whitehall, where the two of them worked together doing experiments. The diarist Samuel Pepys records that he once went with Moray “into the king’s laboratory under his closet; a pretty place; and there saw a great many chymical glasses and things but understood none of them.” Unfortunately, history does not record which of his chemical toys the king liked to play with.