EWP Book Club – Page 4 – Ether Wave Propaganda

The Dart of Harkness

Having finished up Deborah Harkness’ The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution, I must say that I am wowed—it’s really a superb book that should be read by anyone working in the history of science, any period or location.

The thing that really makes this book work so well is its economical pacing and the presence of the author throughout. The subject matter—the knowledge economy of Elizabethan London as it pertains to the natural sciences—is necessarily diffuse. There are a few big names who enter and leave the story, but for the most part one is dealing with a wide pastiche of authors, medical practitioners, and so forth. The object is to characterize what these people did, how their communities worked, and how these communities intertwined. This is what Harkness accomplishes very nicely. Her expertise is constantly on hand to guide readers through the ins and outs of Elizabethan regulatory systems, investment schemes, and, of course, the London market place, and to leave readers with not only an argument, but a usefully organized knowledge about the subject matter. She conveys her point, produces the pertinent information, and moves on, dwelling on details only so long as to demonstrate how they relate to the larger picture.

Harkness’ economical style allows her to cover a lot of ground. She starts off with a discussion of the community of naturalists on Lime Street, but then goes on to chart the anatomy of London’s diverse medical market, the instrumentation market and the market for practical and theoretical mathematical education, the development of large-scale projects (mining, exploration, water works, etc., fueled by often suspect knowledge), and the compilation of practical knowledge in manuscript notebooks and printed books.

It’s all very well done, but my favorite bit has to be the discussion of one of Queen Elizabeth’s top administrators, William Cecil, and his efforts to come to grips with various issues relating to maintaining the value of currency, granting

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What was the Scientific Revolution?

So, I got Deborah Harkness’ The Jewel House in the mail yesterday. The book is about “the sciences” in London circa 1600, and won last year’s Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society. So far I like it a lot. Essentially, it’s kind of up the same alley as Cook’s Matters of Exchange with some key stylistic differences that I want to discuss later.

What I’d like to discuss now is a sort of uncomfortable relationship writers on early modern natural history seem to have with the idea of the Scientific Revolution. I keep getting this Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect!” vibe from the literature, which seems to be born out of this idea that the Sci Rev (as we in the biz call it) was this physics-driven shift in “the way people thought” and a rejection of Ancient authority concerning natural knowledge, or something like that.

Thus we seem to have this burgeoning literature of the “big science” of the 1500s and 1600s (again, a sort of “us too!”, this time against 20th-century

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Physicists in Industry

In light of my recent discussion of Steven Shapin’s Scientific Life (Part 1 and Part 2), I thought it might be useful to promote something rather different on pretty much the same topic: the project report just released by my employers at the AIP History Center on their multi-year “History of Physicists in Industry” project, assembled through the efforts of Joe Anderson, who runs the Niels Bohr Library and Archives, and Orville Butler, who has the office next door to mine. Some early work on the project was done by Tom Lassman, who is now at the Air and Space Museum downtown in DC. Click on the image to access the report in .pdf form.

The project’s aim was to survey industrial researchers and research administrators with the goal of finding out what historical records industries preserve, and how; as well as to undertake a preliminary survey of industrial research activities and attitudes since World War II.

I would describe the report as an empirical extraction of “trends” from interview data. Insofar as it analyzes commentary, it is actually quite similar to Shapin’s work,

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Essay: Shapin and the Historiographic Life

Today I would like to use Steven Shapin’s account of the history of ideas relating to the moral qualities of scientists—Chapters 2 and 3, “From Calling to Job: Nature, Truth, Method, and Vocation from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries” and “The Moral Equivalence of the Scientist: A History of the Very Idea”, from The Scientific Life—to consider the difficulties committed historians may experience in using the insights of essayists in historiographically beneficial ways. I have previously suggested that Shapin is best understood as an essayist, someone who explores the consequences of possible interpretations of a topic.

To call Shapin an essayist rather than a committed historian is not an accusation or a radical suggestion, but simply an exploration of the consequences of my own interpretation of Shapin’s stated comments concerning what he is doing (hence the title of this “essay”). Shapin begins the preface of The Scientific Life by observing that his earlier application of his studies of seventeenth-century natural philosophy to the present was taken by “some of my historian-friends” as “further proof that my commitment to the purity and particularity of history was wanting” (my emphasis). He responds: “They were right.” Here the committed historian might suppose Shapin intends to rectify past wrongs, but I believe this is a mistaken reading, which presumes that he recognizes historiographically virtuous readings to be the most valuable. The observant reader will note

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Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform

Worlds Before Adam (Chicago, 2008) by Martin J.S. Rudwick is the cumulative synthesis of a distinguished career and a prolegomena for the future efforts of historians. Worlds Before Adam (WBA) is a narrative of the “reconstruction…of an eventful geohistory, which is in fact congruent with what geologists in the twenty-first century accept as valid.” Rudwick’s account begins with Baron Cuvier and “culminates” in the formulation of glacial theory, which included the “utterly unexpected inference of an exceptional and drastic Ice Age in the geologically recent past.” This inference, more than any other, Rudwick argues, “forced geologists to recognize the contingent character of geohistory as a whole” (7.) (Page numbers throughout are to WBA.) Rudwick notes that the narrative framework “will convey the strong sense of unity of purpose and scientific progress that participants experienced” (8.)

The narrative presented in WBA is a continuation of Rudwick’s Bursting the Limits of Time, which traced the “gradual development of the practice of geohistory within the sciences of the earth.” In the eighteenth century, Rudwick argued in Bursting the Limits of Time, geohistory was “an infrequent and marginal feature of scientific research.” Within a few decades, geohistory became the “defining element” of the new science of “geology.” Geology “became the first truly historical natural science” by “deliberately transposing methods and concepts from the human sciences of history itself.” The hereto obscure, mysterious, and unfathomably deep prehistory of the earth in the late eighteenth century began to be conceived as “reliably knowable” (2.) The scientific research described in Bursting the Limits of Time demonstrated that it was “feasible in principle to gain reliable knowledge of the earth’s history long before the earliest human records” (6.) In the early nineteenth century, the concern of WBA, geologists took the historical approach “for granted” and were thus able to “reconstruct systematically and in detail what course geohistory had in fact taken….” (6.) WBA takes as its “starting point” the sense among practitioners that the “earth’s deep or prehuman geohistory could in principle be reconstructed almost as reliably as…the history of the ancient Greeks and Romans.” While Bursting the Limits of Time was given to the inquiry of the “sheer historical reality of the deep past, WBA has as its focus both the geohistorical and the causal” (3.) Geologists addressed the causal once they could take the historical reality of geohistory for granted.

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Steven Shapin’s Scientific Life

One of Steven Shapin’s longstanding concerns has been to observe the virtues governing the conduct of inquiry and the laying of claims to knowledge. His early studies focused on the behavior and status of gentlemen as an assurance that observations of matters of fact were being reported honestly and without ulterior motive. His new work, The Scientific Life, inspects the moral life of industrial research.

Shapin’s project can profitably be regarded as a reaction to Robert Merton’s sociology of science, which held that scientific inquiry can be distinguished from non-scientific inquiry by its “norms” (communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, originality, and skepticism). According to Shapin, we generate a more coherent and satisfying historical picture if we regard scientific work as a part of the culture surrounding it, and the rules of inquiry as an extension of that

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Research, Design, Innovation, Knowledge

A little while ago, the University of Chicago Press kindly sent us a review copy of Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Life. It seemed to me like a good idea, given the possibilities of the blog format, to integrate a discussion of it into the overall trend of posts we’ve got going here, and to extend the discussion over several posts in our “book club” series.

The book looks primarily at how academic commentators and insiders regard industrial scientific research. Shapin frames his analysis as a “moral history of a late modern vocation,” which extends the themes from his prior work. Leviathan and the Air-Pump and The Social History of Truth looked at the social structure of “knowledge” production in the “early modern” Royal Society. Shapin begins this book by acknowledging that his previous speculations—that examining that milieu could tell us about the “way we live now”—are very speculative indeed. To make any really firm statements about the “Way We Live Now” (a phrase Shapin repeats throughout the book), we will require a much more substantial analysis, “so here I start with a sketch of some issues involved in describing aspects of how we live now, specifically how we think about the most powerful forms of knowledge and about those who make and manipulate that knowledge.”

In our next post on this book I’ll get into the details of the book, but crucial to Shapin’s approach is his extension of his prior interest in

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Origin and Descents by John Mathew

This post is not actually mine but belongs to a colleague here in Paris and one of Will’s former classmates, John Mathew, who is a candidate in the history of science at Harvard University. He has written a fictional novel about to be published based on Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth, and their encounter with India. Most of his material is based on historical archives. I thought this selection of his work reminds us of the quandary that many historians and indeed, many writers of historical fiction inevitably face — can historical novels be capable of good historical study, and can they do justice to their protagonists who are based on real-life scientists? Charles Gillispie in a recent issue of Isis advocated for true faithfulness to historical sources, a lively narrative, and a push for less apparatus, more readibility.

This selection is copyrighted by John Mathew through Apeejay House, Calcutta (Kolkata). Please do not quote or reproduce without permission of the author.

Chapter 1
1.1
They tell you there are stars when it happens. Never mind the intervening elements, like branches and leaves, and yes, headstones looming lofty on the hill alongside if you’re lying supine in context. But I don’t remember the stars from the outset. I do remember the leprechaun, however, pirouetting and whirling like a grinning dervish on the grave of Asa Gray, which, my mind informed me, afforded me a current locus in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Then the clouds parted and the stars appeared, braided into a necklace that

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Canonical: Matters of Exchange

Building off of my preliminary reaction to Harold Cook’s Matters of Exchange, the key to understanding how the book works is to take notice of its lack of authorial voice. Evidence of intense and skilled scholarship is to be found everywhere in the numerous detailed and intertwined narratives that Cook presents (what I referred to as an “elegant” style). But commentary to help readers understand what the scholarship has revealed is generally not to be found. Thus, the book is not very argument-intensive. When Cook does show up to offer commentary, it is usually pretty unadventurous. Some variation on “a lot of different people had to come together to make this work happen” pops up for a couple of paragraphs at the end of most chapters. Until the end, anyway….

“Just the simple, curious, unexpected facts” ma’am

As I pointed out, the book does put forward what we can call the “commerce thesis” about facts being produced by the agreements necessary in a culture of commerce and connoisseurship. Straightforward enough. However, commenter Loïc (of the History of Economics Playground) expressed serious reservations about the elegant style allowing for an unannounced stacking of the deck in favor of the argument. I felt the book was responsible enough, but am now thinking that Loïc has a point that applies here, too. In the last chapter and conclusion of the book, Cook unfurls an aggressively old-fashioned argument about the rise of science—what he calls a “new science” or a “new philosophy” in contrast to “old ways of knowing”.

Cook is very explicit in the importance he attaches to the rise of empirical knowledge obtained via the senses and communicated through networks of trusted sources and its overtaking of a natural philosophy based upon authority and theorization that was closely connected to moral philosophy and theology. This “new science could lay claim to being a universal method of investigation, even when those participating in it hesitated or disagreed about its conceptual

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The “Elegant” History

Back in March, I suggested that some evaluation of the significance of a scientific or learned activity in society, say, in economic terms, would be very useful. That is, an analysis of “science and technology in history” as opposed to “the history of science and technology”. Commenter Daniel suggested I was being a little unfair—the connections between science and economic activities has been a frequent theme in the historiography for some time. I, in turn, explained that I wasn’t talking about connections, I was talking about science as an actual part of an economy. Nevertheless, Daniel had a good point, and had recommended a number of works, which I promised to check out. I was especially interested in Harold Cook’s Matters of Exchange, about commerce and science in the early modern Netherlands. So, I’ve finally picked up this volume and have started in.

I was excited to read this book, because I’ve long had the feeling the early modernists are more advanced than the rest of us in terms of understanding the scope and dynamics of their subject matter; because I know virtually nothing about Dutch science (except for a bit about Huygens and the fact that Descartes was there for a while); and because I think there are good insights yet to be derived about science as a formalization of practical activities. Right now I’m about 170 pages in, and I have mixed feelings. I’m inclined to really like this book,

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