Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution - Hardcover

Jardine, Lisa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385493258 ISBN 13: 9780385493253

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 1999

Synopsis

Today the two cultures of "art" and "science" have come to be treated as fundamentally opposed, their aims incompatible. In this remarkable book, Lisa Jardine makes clear that this distinction is both artificial and historically inaccurate.

The intellectual revolution of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was the single most formative event in Western history, bringing together the humanities and natural sciences in an unprecedented ferment of conceptual and practical inventiveness. Isaac Newton was as fascinated with the chemical processes involved in the transmutation of metals as he was with the movements of the planets. John Locke was as keen a physician and botanist as he was a philosopher. Christopher Wren pursued anatomical dissections and early blood transfusion with the same vigor as he did architecture.

These men--among others--opened their minds to the widest possible influences, allowing for huge and brilliant leaps of imagination, for the ingenuity, quick-wittedness, lateral thinking, and inspired guesswork that we now associate with the humanities, not the sciences. But what unified their activities was a genius for technological innovation, for combining the workings of the hand and the brain in one continuous creative process. And it is this that marks the emergence of a distinctive, modern Western Intellectual Tradition.

Ingenious Pursuits focuses on a series of virtuoso advancements--among them the discovery of the circulation of blood, the perfection of the mechanical clock, enhanced astronomical observation, fundamental developments in mathematics, selective animal and plant breeding, and the development of chemical substance analysis--that transformed the thinking of the early modern world and inaugurated forces for change that laid the very foundations for modern thought.

Revisiting the largely unsung heroes of the Scientific Revolution and their crowded, motley lives, Jardine brilliantly illuminates the practice of science, showing how the discoveries they made grew out of the preoccupations and pressures of an active and engaged everyday life. Ingenious Pursuits is a broad-ranging and highly readable look at the very nature of creativity, at the impact of science on the emerging modern world, and the intellectual revolutions that still shape lives.

About this title

About the Author

Lisa Jardine is author of the highly acclaimed Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. She is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.

From the Inside Flap

o cultures of "art" and "science" have come to be treated as fundamentally opposed, their aims incompatible. In this remarkable book, Lisa Jardine makes clear that this distinction is both artificial and historically inaccurate.

The intellectual revolution of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was the single most formative event in Western history, bringing together the humanities and natural sciences in an unprecedented ferment of conceptual and practical inventiveness. Isaac Newton was as fascinated with the chemical processes involved in the transmutation of metals as he was with the movements of the planets. John Locke was as keen a physician and botanist as he was a philosopher. Christopher Wren pursued anatomical dissections and early blood transfusion with the same vigor as he did architecture.

These men--among others--opened their minds to the widest possible influences, allowing for huge and brilliant leaps of imagination, for the inge

Reviews

Jardine's engrossing book consists mainly of well-told stories of scientific work during the intellectual revolution of the 17th and early 18th centuries. She has three objectives in telling the stories: to give a sense of the "exuberant intellectual exchanges that provide the foundation for each ... advance in knowledge"; to show that "imaginative problem-solving is at the root of all human inventiveness, both in the sciences and the humanities"; and to demonstrate that "the scientist is not a malevolent Dr. Frankenstein, creating monsters beyond his control."

And so she takes the reader intimately into the personalities and achievements of prominent scientists of those centuries, enriching her account with illustrations of the people and the work. Among her topics are what Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek saw under their primitive microscopes, what Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton discovered about the orbits of comets, and what Gian Domenico Cassini and Christian Huygens contributed to determining longitude and to cartography. Jardine, professor of Renaissance studies at the University of London, says of her stories: "When the tales are told in this way, we put back the people into the laboratory, and the laboratory into its wider community."

The 17th and 18th centuries saw a scientific revolution unlike any in history; here's a look at the remarkable men (and a few women) who brought it about. While her subject is international in scope, and in its broadest outlines spans three centuries, Jardine (Worldly Goods, 1996) keeps her primary focus on London in the last few decades of the 17th century, when the Royal Society was in its glory. An exclusive club for the investigation of nature, it drew an incredible array of talents: Newton and Halley, Boyle and Wren, along with dozens of lesser-known scientists and curious amateurs like Pepys. Its meetings ran the gamut from science to showmanship, usually under the direction of Robert Hooke, who responded to scientific questions by building instruments to investigate them. And, as Jardine shows, there were plenty of oversized egos in the mix: After Hooke criticized his paper on optics, Newton stayed aloof from the Royal Society until after Hooke's death in 1704. John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, refused to publish his observationsand when Newton tricked him into letting some loose, won authorization to destroy the unsold portion of the print run. Here too are wonderful unknowns, from Hans Sloane, who introduced milk chocolate to Europe, to John Tradescant, who assembled a botanical garden so various that contemporaries dubbed it the ``Ark.'' The author gives due emphasis to the work of continental investigators such as Huygens, Leeuwenhoek, and Cassini, and to the importance of voyages to exotic locales like St. Helena, South Africa, and the Americas in bringing new specimens back for Europe to study. She provides ample citations from contemporary sources and many contemporary illustrations to convey the flavor of the times, and has a good sense of when to give the reader a taste of the scandals, feuds, and scientific donnybrooks of the era. Well-written, unfailingly lively, and packed with fascinating charactersone of the best scientific histories in years. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

How do periods of great intellectual energy come about? Why are major discoveries made at certain historical moments? To answer such questions, Jardine (Worldly Goods; coauthor of Hostage to Fortune, a biography of Francis Bacon, Forecasts, Apr. 26) studies the intellectual community of late-17th-century London, beautifully evoking the excitement accompanying that period's major inventions and discoveries. Jardine traces relationships among the most famous figures of the period (e.g., Sir Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, John Locke) and links their work to a network of scientists and philosophers generated by the founding of the Royal Society in London. A portrait emerges of a community of adventurous and imaginative people interested in science for its contribution to human understanding. Jardine's central contention is that the period was characterized by so much cross-pollination between what we now call the sciences and the humanities that the distinction between the two realms we now take for granted didn't yet exist. The chapters range across a huge body of ideas, discoveries and processes, which turn out to be closely connected: mapping the elliptical orbits of comets; tracing blood circulation; importing rare and remote plants to England; founding Britain's famous museums; inventing air pumps, diving bells, spring watches. The volume's comprehensive catalogue of gizmos and brainstorms comes at the expense of historical analysis, but Jardine gives a memorable account of cultural ferment and individual genius during the scientific revolution. Illustrations. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Jardine, a Renaissance scholar at the University of London, exposits on the inventors and polymaths that drove the scientific revolution. She seeks to show that the convergence of the humanities and natural sciences drove technological innovation in order to solve very real problems of the age, such as maritime travel for wars and trade, and the need for accurate timepieces. In the prolog and epilog, Jardine attempts to show contemporary examples of this symbiosis between arts and sciences. Though certain continental scientists are mentioned, the focus is really on the British, particularly the Royal Society in London. A "cast of characters" is appended to give thumbnail biographies of natural scientists, both major and minor. One small problem: her vignette approach is sometimes confusing, as the loose narrative loops back to the same events (e.g., the Great Fire in London in 1666) in different chapters. Appropriate for both academic and large public libraries.AWade Lee, Univ. of Toledo Libs., OH
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were remarkable for many reasons. In terms of scientific discovery, this time period was noted, ironically, not only for what was learned but also for how much was left to learn. Amazing expansion and growth were taking placing in such areas as physics, astronomy, and medicine. Unlike today, the great minds of that period worked across many disciplines. Science and the arts were complements of each other, rather than exclusive areas for mental exploration. And intellects such as Newton, Halley, Wren, Descartes, Pepys, and Locke worked as colleagues in a way, playing off each other's thoughts to answer the questions of the time. They were not bound by specializations but instead let their brilliant minds play with all areas of interest. Jardine has given the reader a lively, entertaining, and well-researched account of this extraordinarily fertile period of scientific expansion and of the people who caused it to happen. Highlighting what can be called the science of creativity and the creativity of science, this book is an asset to a reader and to a library's collection. Danise Hoover

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In 1997, scientists working at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh announced a remarkable breakthrough in biological research, in the journal Nature. Ian Wilmot and his team had successfully cloned a living sheep using genetic material from cells in an adult sheep's udder.1 The impetus for this piece of research had come from the rapidly developing field of biotechnology: genetic engineering had already been used to breed sheep whose milk contained vital human proteins used in the medical treatment of cystic fibrosis. Cloning would allow the commercial company, with some of whose funding the research was associated, to produce entire flocks of such sheep, facilitating the production of these new-type medical materials. Ultimately, according to the company's spokesman, Wilmot's cloning technique might be used to 'farm' the human blood clotting factors needed to treat haemophiliacs.

But Dolly the cloned sheep was not heralded as a glorious piece of innovative science. Aghast, the newspapers of the world responded to this sensational scientific advance with a clamour of moral outrage. Driven blindly by the search for the new, we were told, the Scottish scientists were careering towards disaster along that sinister path to damnation notoriously embarked upon by the demonic hero of Mary Shelley's famous novel, Dr Frankenstein. In no time at all we would face the nightmare scenario of genetically engineered armies of identical soldiers, bred to exterminate with ruthless efficiency. Parents would shortly decide exactly what mental and physical characteristics they wanted for their offspring and order them tailor-made, off the shelf. Worst of all, with no further need for sperm in order to beget children, men would be sidelined or cut out of the reproductive cycle altogether, consigned to the scrap heap of history.

For many ordinary people nowadays, it seems, the scientist is the enemy: a detached, remote, forbidding figure, bent uncompromisingly on seeking solutions to complex general problems, without regard for the damaging implications of his 'tampering with nature' for moral probity and human values. The legacy of this inhumane, alien scientific practice is, it is claimed, all around us, beyond the possibility of ordinary people's control. Its malign influence is perceived to lie behind the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the proliferation of biological weapons in the Middle East, and the experiments routinely performed on animals by cosmetics and other consumer-product manufacturers.

Art and literature, according to this view, stand in humane opposition to science. Artists are the trusted guardians of morality: a small, committed band of civilised and sensitive dreamers who nurture our society's conscience and sustain its values and beliefs. However, in the same year in which Dolly the sheep was cloned, the artist Damien Hirst's Away from the Flock-- whole sheep preserved in formaldehyde--was included in the Sensation art exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. That exhibition, too, caused outrage with some sectors of the public and censorious remarks from the tabloid press because artists like Hirst refused to give the public pat answers to moral questions. What the critics found disturbing about the exhibition was the perceived cynicism of the art objects displayed, the way Hirst's pickled sheep and the adjacent sliced cow apparently set out with the sole object of shocking their audience. Each unsettled onlooker had to make up their own mind and contribute their own evaluation to the experience of visiting the exhibition.

In the case of art--even avant-garde art--the public and the press expected the artists to be deeply engaged with society and its burning issues, and to offer us telling evaluative insights. Hirst's pickled sheep and segmented cows seemed to refer to animal experimentation and genetic engineering, but refused to offer a moral position. Yet still the very act of provoking us was assumed to make some contribution to a shared understanding of humanity at the end of the twentieth century. Whether they were for or against Sensation, those who wrote or talked about it assumed that those who made art were deeply immersed in the world we inhabit, that the ideas and processes of art were tightly interwoven with the fabric of our society's informing ideas and practices. When the hoo-ha was over, public discussion of the works of art in the Sensation exhibition turned out to have produced insights into the state of our contemporary society as profound as any stimulated by the more familiarly 'aesthetic' work of early twentieth-century artists such as Cezanne or Renoir.2

Personally, in my own intellectual pursuits, I have never felt the need to choose between the arts and sciences. I grew up in a harmonious household in which these 'two cultures' coexisted peacefully. My mother's hands shaped figures out of clay, my father's hands described for us the primitive movements of flint on stone by which 'man the tool-maker' struck fire. At mealtimes, Newton's theory of gravitational pull and the poetry of William Blake were discussed in the same breath; Einstein's and Picasso's enduring contributions to our cultural landscapes were treated as part of a single ferment of intellectual creativity. In that family environment I gained the conviction that imaginative problem-solving is at the root of all human inventiveness, both in the sciences and the humanities. I also learned to believe that intellectually and aesthetically creative people--scientists and artists--were together part of that global community which provides a constantly updated version of those 'human values' on which the well-being of humankind depends.3

The scientist is not a malevolent Dr Frankenstein, creating monsters beyond his control. The scientist, like the artist, is one of us. He or she pursues scientific research along directions set by the interests and preoccupations of the community he or she belongs to. What keeps the scientist alert to the moral implications of his or her investigations is that sense of belonging, together with the fundamentally collaborative nature of the scientific project itself. Anyone who has watched a team of scientists at work in a modern laboratory will know that there is more to scientific inquiry than the lonely, rational pursuit of truth. From the designing of experiments to the writing up of results, science is conducted by vigorous group discussion and debate, marked by those moments of dazzling illumination and shared recognition that characterise insight in all domains of human endeavour. Advance in any field has always been preceded by a sudden leap of the imagination, which is recognised for its brilliance by the participating group, and galvanises them in their turn into further activity. Here is a kind of intellectual anthropology that can be further explored. Our Western intellectual heritage has been shaped by ingenuity, quick-wittedness, lateral thinking and inspired guesswork, but not haphazardly. In its detail it is guided and given its informing values by a common code of practice, which is simply an extension of the rules that govern our everyday life.4

As ever, those who insist on the separate spheres of art and science claim that the division of arts and sciences is a recent one. Leonardo da Vinci could master the fundamental tenets of ballistics and design a siege-engine for his noble employer as readily as he could handle the colours on his palette to create the enduringly beautiful portrait known as the Mona Lisa. Today no single mind has the range and flexibility to cope with both the cerebral rigours of 'hard' science and the mental agility of the contemporary creative arts. This is, I think, to miss the point. I do not believe that science and art are, or ever have been, two distinct practices; rather, they comprise a range of perennially familiar practices in two largely distinct, but occasionally overlapping spheres.5

The meeting point--the domain of overlap between styles of ingenuity--is technological inventiveness. It is no accident that the words 'ingenious' and 'engineer' derive from the same root (ingenium: mental ability, cleverness, a naturally clever temperament). Within fifty years of Galileo's construction of a working telescope, expert microscopists like Robert Hooke and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek had discovered protozoa and human sperm, using the same lens technology, and were developing the biological theories to explain what they saw. Using the same technology, Dutch artists were producing still-life painting of unparalleled and lasting beauty. Technology continues today to provide the vital trigger for pure science--it was Maurice Wilkins' X-ray diffraction photographs that set Crick and Watson off on the right path towards discovering the fundamental structure of DNA, and Rosalind Franklin's even more technically exceptional photographs that clinched their argument.

These are the issues I explore in the present book. By temperament I am a historian, who believes that the clearest answers to our present dilemmas are to be found in the past, I look at the emerging process of science at the key moment of European 'progress'. The changes in intellectual outlook of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries formed the basis for what many consider to be the most important 'event' in Western history--the so-called 'scientific revolution'.6 Its breakthroughs in thought and its advances in science still stand today at the centre of every area of modern life. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, international trade and an increasing demand for consumer 'worldly goods' on the part of the wealthy triggered the European Renaissance in art and learning.7 The intellectual advances of the scientific revolution took place in the context of the broadened horizons of that consumer revolution. Emerging seventeenth-century science matched and furthered the globalising interests that the Renaissance had stimulated.

The early modern world was in a kaleidos...

Edition details

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385493258
• ISBN 13: 9780385493253
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464