Seeing Further (33 page)

F
RANCIS
B
ACON’S VISION OF A SCIENCE DRIVEN BY THE URGE FOR ‘THE EFFECTING OF ALL THINGS POSSIBLE’ HAS BEEN ASTONISHINGLY PRODUCTIVE FOR NEARLY FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. ARE WE GRATEFUL? ASKS PHILIP BALL. ANSWER: YES AND NO. THE REASONS FOR THIS TAKE A BIT OF TEASING OUT.

C.P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture is remembered as a critique of the cultural divide then perceived between the scientific and the literary worlds. But there were more than two cultures identified in his discussion. ‘I think it is fair to say’, he wrote, ‘that most pure scientists have themselves been devastatingly ignorant of productive industry, and many still are.’

Snow wasn’t alone in this perception. Writing at much the same time, the English biologist Peter Medawar spoke of Francis Bacon’s division of experimental science in the seventeenth century into ‘Experiments of Use’ and ‘Experiments of Light and Discovery’. Bacon’s distinction, said Medawar, ‘is between research that increases our power over nature and research that increases our understanding of nature, and he is telling us that the power comes from the understanding’ – Bacon’s famous maxim that ‘knowledge is power’. But, Medawar went on:

‘All this’, he added, ‘is terribly, terribly English.’

I believe that this situation can’t be ignored when looking at the development of the applied sciences over the past several centuries. When several rather austere-sounding books from the post-war years, with titles such as
Metals
[or
Plastics] in the Service of Man,
served up to lay audiences a triumphalist celebration of materials technologies, they rather took it for granted that the general public felt indebted to these wondrous advances. But as Snow and Medawar intimated, not even scientists themselves had yet found an accommodation between scientific discovery and its applications. This is scarcely surprising, however, since such ambivalence towards what the Greeks called
techne
– the art of making things – can be discerned throughout history,
and pervades not just science and technology but culture in the broad sense.

Many scientists, for instance, will agree with biologist Lewis Wolpert that ‘technology is not science’. Science, says Wolpert, ‘originated only once in history, in Greece’ – although he acknowledges that ‘those who equate science with technology would argue differently’. Indeed they do.

The notion that science is distinct from technology would have sat comfortably with the ancient Greek philosophers, most of whom displayed a reluctance to get their hands dirty. Both Plato and Aristotle elected for a top-down approach to understanding the world, launched from the kind of a priori axioms that Medawar mentions. Aristotle, it is true, advocated close observation of nature, and in the Middle Ages Aristotelian natural philosophers such as Roger Bacon and his mentor Robert Grosseteste instigated a methodology in which experiment played a central role. But one must be careful when speaking of ‘experimental science’ before the Enlightenment, for it often meant demonstrating what one already knew to be the case – and if experiment seemed to contradict axiomatic reason, so much the worse for experiment. In any event, Aristotelianism became rigid dogma in the medieval universities, and Bacon’s advocacy of a new, ‘experimental philosophy’ was a reaction to it: a call for a reformation in how science was conducted.

Meanwhile, what we might now call applied sciences and technologies were commonly conducted by artisans who had no formal university training: metallurgists and alchemists, miners, dye-makers, brewers and bakers, textile makers, barber-surgeons. Their trades were systematically excluded from the academies, where they were often derided as ignorant labourers and recipe-followers (sometimes, it must be said, with good reason).

So it is interesting that, for Wolpert, one of the people confused about the relation between science and technology was Francis Bacon himself. That claim warrants a little examination – for isn’t Bacon often credited with the germinal vision of a body of scientific savants like the Royal Society? What was it, exactly, that Bacon would have such an organisation do – science, or something else?

The blueprint for this new philosophy was laid out in Bacon’s
Instauratio Magna (The Great Instauration)
of 1620. This was a mere fragment, the introductory episode of an unrealised dream to summarise all of human knowledge and to explain how it should be extended and applied. The Latin noun
instauratio
means a renewal or restoration. It has a Biblical connotation, referring to a rebuilding of the House of the Lord like that accomplished in the renovation of Solomon’s Temple.

As an addendum to the same volume, Bacon published
Novum Organum (The New Organon),
which explains the shortcomings of earlier natural philosophy. Bacon decries both the sterility of academic Aristotelianism, which he compares with spiders weaving tenuous philosophical webs, and the blind fumblings of uninformed practical technologies, which are like the mindless tasks of ants. True scientists, he said, should be like bees, which extract the goodness from nature and use it to make useful things.

Seven years later, Bacon offered a vision of how this new experimental philosophy might unfold. In
The New Atlantis
he presented a utopian fable in which a group of travellers in the Pacific Ocean encounters a land called Bensalem, run by a sect of scholar-priests in an institution called Salomon’s House. Here were Bacon’s scientist-bees, engaged in ‘the production of wonderful operations’. This is evidently not a scientific body that is content to sit and ponder. It creates marvellous devices and structures: artificial lakes, furnaces, engines, caves where alchemy mimics the natural production of metals. Nature is not merely observed, classified and understood in the manner of some Aristotelian taxonomist – it is dominated, modified, ‘improved’. According to the scholars of Salomon’s House:

Bacon’s programme was championed in England during the stormy 1640s by the Prussian exile Samuel Hartlib, one of a clutch of progressive thinkers that included the mathematician William Petty, the chymist Robert Boyle
and the Bermudan alchemist George Starkey. During the English Civil War and its aftermath, such ambitions were politically charged: the ‘new philosophy’ had a distinctly Puritan slant that challenged the traditionalism of the Royalists. But Cromwell’s Protectorate was wary of anything that smelled of the utopian, and it was not until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 that permission was granted for Boyle, Petty and colleagues to found what became, by royal charter two years later, the Royal Society.

Bacon’s thinking infused this project. The poet Abraham Cowley, whose pamphlet
The Advancement of Experimental Philosophy in
1661 was of a distinctly Baconian flavour, wrote an ode to the Royal Society in 1667 in which he hailed Bacon as the liberator who, like Moses, ‘led us forth at last’ to a ‘Promis’d Land’. In fact, in its early days the members of the Royal Society seemed to take so closely to heart Bacon’s advocacy of Experiments of Use that its early historian Thomas Sprat complained in 1667 that ‘we are not able to inculcate into the minds of many men, the necessity of that distinction of my Lord Bacon’s, that there ought to be Experiments of Light, as well as of Fruit’. It was as though they were all intent on creating without delay the technological miracles of a New Atlantis.

The aims of the scholars of Salomon’s House, Bacon wrote, are ‘the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’. We are now rather familiar with the former as goals of scientific inquiry. What caused the universe, and what now is causing the ‘secret motion’ of its accelerating expansion? What are the fundamental forces, and how are they related? How did life begin, and what agencies have governed its trajectory? What are the secret motions of the human mind?

But ‘the effecting of all things possible’? You do not have to be one of Snow’s anti-scientific snobs to feel a shiver of apprehension at the ‘wonders’
of Salomon’s House, or at the prospect of such subjugation of nature. Today is it painfully evident that we lack much ability to ‘control’ nature, but possess in abundance a capacity to foul it up. Yes, like Bensalem’s scientists we can make ‘instruments of war’ and ‘new mixtures and compositions of gun-powder, wild-fires burning in water, and unquenchable’. We ‘make divers imitations of taste, so that they will deceive any man’s taste’. We have ‘houses of deceits of the senses’, ‘false apparitions, impostures and illusions’. We do not seem to be any the better off for it.

The debate about where one locates the blame for the excesses and destructiveness of a technological age is an important one, but is certainly not going to be resolved here. I want instead to look at just a few areas of Baconian applied science, to examine where Bacon’s vision has in fact taken us and why and how it has acquired the tarnish that Medawar and Snow discerned, whereby engineering becomes simultaneously drab and dangerous to the public view while tolerated by scientists as a somewhat dim and vulgar relation.

Mining and metallurgy are the first things that the scholars of Salomon’s House mention; imagine that! Here is a list, not unlike that attempted in this book, of the great things that science has achieved, and what comes at the top? Cosmology? Genetics? Evolutionary theory? No – metals. That’s because Bacon understood the foundations on which his world was built. Political power in the age of the Stuarts depended on metals: on the ability to equip an army and to produce muskets and cannons, and on the control of coinage and bullion. Wealth was measured out in silver, as the Fugger family of Augsburg discovered when it supplied kings and emperors with
canny loans from its banking empire in order to gain control of the German silver mines. The foremost technological treatise of the Renaissance was Georgius Agricola’s
De Re Metallica
(1556), a summary of mining techniques that remained the standard text for two centuries. It contained woodcuts in which massive machines wrest nature’s bounty from the Earth, a truly Baconian picture that foreshadowed the ruthless manufacturing and despoliation of the Industrial Revolution.

But Agricola’s book included a staunch defence of mining which reveals a lot about the ambivalent views of his contemporaries. Mining has always been a dirty business – the mines of Rio Tinto in Spain have degraded the environment since the times of Roman occupation. Agricola tells us that people were not blind to this in the late Middle Ages. ‘The strongest argument of the detractors’, he says, ‘is that the fields are devastated by mining operations … Also they argue that the woods and groves are cut down … then are exterminated the beasts and birds … Further, when the ores are washed, the water which has been used poisons the brooks and streams, and either destroys the fish or drives them away.’ And he notes that mining is considered to be a profession unsuited to respectable people, a ‘degrading and dishonourable’ affair once fit only for slaves. In the first century BC the Roman writer Diodorus Siculus wrote that the Egyptian gold mines in the Nubian deserts were manned by ‘notorious criminals, captives taken in war, persons against whom the King is incensed’, who were worked until ‘they drop down dead in the midst of their insufferable labours’. Metals were much prized, but extracting and refining them was a lowly, even despicable task.