The Clockwork Universe Read online

  Croone had been impressed by the “pretty experiment” and even suggested to Pepys that someday transfusions might prove useful “for the amending of bad blood by borrowing from a better body.” But no one at the Royal Society had dwelt much on the medical significance of the day’s entertainment. The mood had been carefree, the company devoting most of its attention to a kind of parlor game. Which natural enemies would make the most amusing partners for a blood exchange? “This did give occasion to many pretty wishes,” Pepys wrote cheerily, “as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and such like.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Of Mites and Men

  Pepys’s light tone was telltale. Science was destined to remake the world, but in its early days it inspired laughter more often than reverence. Pepys was genuinely fascinated with science—he set up a borrowed telescope on his roof and peered at the moon and Jupiter, he raced out to buy a microscope as soon as they came on the market, he struggled through Boyle’s Hydrostatical Paradoxes (“a most excellent book as ever I read, and I will take much pains to understand him through if I can”), and in the 1680s he served as president of the Royal Society—but his amusement was genuine, too.17 All these intellectuals studying spiders and tinkering with pumps. It was a bit ludicrous.

  The king certainly thought so. He, too, was an aficionado of science. He had, after all, chartered the Royal Society, and he liked to putter about in his own laboratory. But he referred to the Society’s savants as his “jesters,” and once he burst out laughing at the Royal Society “for spending time only in weighing of ayre, and doing nothing else since they sat.”

  Weighing the air—which plainly weighed nothing at all—seemed less like a groundbreaking advance than a return to such medieval pastimes as debating whether Adam had a navel. Skeptics never tired of satirizing scientists for their impracticality. One critic conceded that the members of the Royal Society were “Ingenious men and have found out A great Many Secrets in Nature.” Still, he noted, the public had gained “Little Advantage” from such discoveries. Perhaps the learned scientists could turn their attention to “the Nature of butter and cheese.”

  In fact, they had given considerable thought to cheese, and also to finding better ways to make candles, pump water, tan leather, and dye cloth. From the start, Boyle had taken the lead in speaking out against any attempts to separate science and technology. “I shall not dare to think myself a true naturalist ’til my skill can make my garden yield better herbs and flowers, or my orchard better fruit, or my field better corn, or my dairy better cheese” than the old ways produced.

  To hear the scientists and their allies tell it, unimaginable bounty lay just around the corner. Joseph Glanvill, a member of the Royal Society but not a scientist himself, shouted the loudest. “Should those Heroes go on, as they have happily begun,” Glanvill exclaimed, “they’ll fill the world with wonders.” In the future, “a voyage to Southern unknown Tracts, yea possibly the Moon, will not be more strange than one to America. To them that come after us, it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest Regions, as now a pair of Boots to ride a Journey.”18

  Such forecasts served mainly to inspire the mockers. By 1676 the Royal Society found itself the subject of a hit London comedy, the seventeenth-century counterpart of a running gag on Saturday Night Live. The play was called The Virtuoso, which could mean either “far-ranging scholar” or “dilettante.” Thomas Shadwell, the playwright, lifted much of his dialogue straight from the scientists’ own accounts of their work.

  Playgoers first encountered the evening’s hero, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, sprawled on his belly on a table in his laboratory. Sir Nicholas has one end of a string clenched in his teeth; the other end is tied to a frog in a bowl of water. The virtuoso’s plan is to learn to swim by copying the frog’s motions. A visitor asks whether he has tested the technique in water. Not necessary, says Sir Nicholas, who explains that he hates getting wet. “I content myself with the speculative part of swimming. I care not for the practical. I seldom bring anything to use. . . . Knowledge is my ultimate end.”

  Sir Nicholas’s family is not pleased. A niece complains that he has “spent £2000 in Microscopes, to find out the nature of Eels in vinegar, Mites in Cheese, and the blue of Plums.” A second niece worries that her uncle has “broken his Brains about the nature of Maggots and studied these twenty Years to find out the several sorts of Spiders.”

  All the favorite Royal Society pastimes came in for ridicule. Gimcrack studied the moon through a telescope, as Hooke had done, and his description of its “Mountainous Parts and Valleys and Seas and Lakes,” as well as “Elephants and Camels,” spoofs Hooke’s account. (Hooke went to see the play and complained that the audience, which took for granted that he was the inspiration for Gimcrack, “almost pointed” at him in derision.)

  Sir Nicholas experimented on dogs, too, and boasted about a blood transfusion in which “the Spaniel became a Bull-Dog, and the Bull-Dog a Spaniel.” He had even tried a blood transfusion between a sheep and a madman. The sheep died, but the madman survived and thrived, except that “he bleated perpetually, and chew’d the Cud, and had Wool growing on him in great Quantities.”

  Like his king, Shadwell found much to satirize in the virtuosos’ fascination with the properties of air. Sir Nicholas keeps a kind of wine cellar with bottles holding air collected from all over. His assistants have crossed the globe “bottling up Air, and weighing it in all Places, sealing the Bottles Hermetically.” Air from Tenerife is the lightest, that from the Isle of Dogs heaviest. Shadwell had great fun with the notion that air is a substance, with properties, rather than a mere absence. “Let me tell you, Gentlemen,” Sir Nicholas assures his visitors, “Air is but a thinner sort of Liquor, and drinks much the better for being bottled.”

  Shadwell had a good number of allies among the satirists of his day, many of them eminent. Samuel Butler lampooned men who spent their time staring into microscopes at fleas and drops of pond water and contemplating such mysteries as “How many different Species / Of Maggots breed in rotten Cheeses.”

  But no one brought as much talent to ridiculing science as Jonathan Swift. Even writing more than half a century after the founding of the Royal Society, in Gulliver’s Travels, Swift quivered with indignation at scientists for their pretension and impracticality. (Swift visited the Royal Society in 1710, squeezing in his visit between a trip to the insane asylum at Bedlam and a visit to a puppet show.)

  Gulliver observes one ludicrous project after another. He sees men working on “softening Marble for Pillows and Pincushions” and an inventor engaged in “an Operation to reduce human Excrement to its original Food.” In many places, the satire targets actual Royal Society experiments. Real scientists had struggled in vain, for instance, to sort out the mysterious process that would later be called photosynthesis. How do plants manage to grow by “eating” sunlight?19 Gulliver meets a man who “had been Eight Years upon a project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers, which were to be put into Vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the Air in raw inclement Summers.”

  Swift’s sages live in the expectation that soon “one Man shall do the Work of Ten and a Palace may be built in a Week,” but none of the high hopes ever pans out. “In the mean time, the whole Country lies miserably waste, the Houses in Ruins, and the People without Food or Cloaths.”

  Mathematicians, the very emblem of head-in-the-clouds uselessness, come in for extra ridicule. So absentminded are they that they need to be rapped on the mouth by their servants to remember to speak. Lost in thought, they fall down the stairs and walk into doors. They can think of nothing but mathematics and music. Even meals feature such mathematical courses as “a Shoulder of Mutton, cut into an Equilateral Triangle; a Piece of Beef into a Rhomboides; and a Pudding into a Cycloid.”

  In hardheaded England, where “practicality” and “common sense” were celebrated as among the highest virtues, Swift’s disdain for ma
thematics was widely shared by his fellow intellectuals. In that sense, Swift’s mockery of absentminded professors was standard issue. But, more than he could have known, Swift was right to direct his sharpest thrusts at mathematicians. These dreamers truly were, as Swift intuited, the most dangerous scientists of all. Microscopes and telescopes were the glamorous innovations that drew all eyes—Gulliver’s Travels testifies to Swift’s fascination with their power to reveal new worlds—but new instruments were only part of the story of the age. The insights that would soon transform the world required no tools more sophisticated than a fountain pen.

  For it was the mathematicians who invented the engine that powered the scientific revolution. Centuries later, the story would find an echo. In 1931, with great hoopla, Albert Einstein and his wife, Elsa, were toured around the observatory at California’s Mount Wilson, home to the world’s biggest telescope. Someone told Elsa that astronomers had used this magnificent telescope to determine the shape of the universe. “Well,” she said, “my husband does that on the back of an old envelope.”

  Those outsiders who did take science seriously tended to dislike what they saw. The scientists themselves viewed their work as a way of paying homage to God, but their critics were not so sure. Astronomy stirred the most fear. Who needed it, when we already know the story of the heavens and the Earth, and on the best possible authority? To probe further was to treat the Bible as just another source of information, to be tested and questioned like any other. A popular bit of seventeenth-century doggerel purportedly captured the scientists’ view: “All the books of Moses / Were nothing but supposes.”

  The devout had another objection. Science diverted its practitioners from deep questions to silly ones. “Is there anything more Absurd and Impertinent,” one minister snapped, “than to find a Man, who has so great a Concern upon his Hands as the preparing for Eternity, all busy and taken up with Quadrants, and Telescopes, Furnaces, Syphons, and Air Pumps?”

  So science irritated those who found it pompous and ridiculous. It offended those who found it subversive. Just as important, it bewildered almost everyone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Play Without an Audience

  The new science inspired ridicule and hostility partly for the simple reason that it was new. But the resentment had a deeper source—the new thinkers proposed replacing a time-honored, understandable, commonsense picture of the world with one that contradicted the plainest facts of everyday life. What could be less disputable than that we live on a fixed and solid Earth? But here came a new theory that began by flinging the Earth out into space and sending it hurtling, undetectably, through the cosmos. If the world is careening through space like a rock shot from a catapult, why don’t we feel it? Why don’t we fall off?

  The goal of the new scientists—to find ironclad, mathematical laws that described the physical world in all its changing aspects—had not been part of the traditional scientific mission. The Greeks and their successors had confined their quest for perfect order to the heavens. On Earth, nothing so harmonious could be expected. When the Greeks looked to the sky, they saw the sun, the moon, and the planets moving imperturbably on their eternal rounds.20 The planets traced complicated paths (planet is Greek for “wanderer”), but they continued on their way, endlessly. On the corrupt Earth, on the other hand, all motions were short-lived. Drop a ball and it bounces, then rolls, then stops. Throw a rock and seconds later it falls to the ground. Then it sits there.

  Ordinary objects could certainly be set moving—an archer tensed his muscles, drew his bow, and shot an arrow; a horse strained against its harness and pulled a plow—but here on Earth an inanimate body on its own would not keep moving. The archer or the horse evidently imparted a force of some kind, but whatever that force was it soon dissipated, as heat dissipates from a poker pulled from a fire.

  Greek physics, then, began by dividing its subject matter into two distinct pieces. In the cosmos above, motion represents the natural state of things and goes on forever. On the Earth below, rest is natural and motion calls for an explanation. No one saw this as a problem, any more than anyone saw a problem in different nations following different laws. Heaven and Earth completely differ from one another. The stars are gleaming dots of light moving across the sky, the Earth a colossal rock solid and immobile at the center of the universe. The heavens are predictable, the Earth anything but. On June 1, to pick a date at random, we know what the stars in the night sky will look like, and we know that they will look virtually the same again on June 1 next year, and next century, and next millennium.21 What June 1 will bring on Earth this year, or any year, no one knows.

  Aristotle had explained how it all works, both in the heavens and on Earth, about three hundred years before the birth of Christ. For nearly two thousand years everyone found his scheme satisfactory. All earthly objects were formed from earth, air, fire, and water. The heavens were composed of a fifth element or essence, the quintessence, a pure, eternal substance, and it was only in that perfect, heavenly domain that mathematical law prevailed. Why do everyday, earthly objects move? Because everything has a home where it belongs and where it returns at the first opportunity. Rocks and other heavy objects belong down on the ground, flames up in the air, and so on. A “violent” motion—flinging a javelin into the air—might temporarily overcome a “natural” one—the javelin’s impulse to fall to the ground—but matters quickly sort themselves out.

  The picture made sense of countless everyday observations: Hold a candle upright or turn it downward, and the flame rises regardless. Hoist a rock overhead in one hand and a pebble in the other, and the rock is harder to hold aloft. Why? Because it is bigger and therefore more earth-y, more eager to return to its natural home.

  All such explanations smacked of biology, and to modern ears the classical world sounds strangely permeated with will and desire. Why do falling objects accelerate? “The falling body moved more jubilantly every moment because it found itself nearer home,” writes one historian of science, as if a rock were a horse returning to the barn at the end of the day.

  The new scientists would strip away all talk of “purpose.” In the new way of thinking, rocks don’t want to go anywhere; they just fall. The universe has no goals. But even today, though we have had centuries to adapt to the new ideas, the old views still exert a hold. We cannot help attributing goals and purposes to lifeless nature, and we endlessly anthropomorphize. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” we say, and “water seeks its own level.” On a cold morning we talk about the car starting “reluctantly” and then “dying,” and if it just won’t start we pound the dashboard in frustration and mutter, “Don’t do this to me.”

  It was Galileo more than any other single figure who finally did away with Aristotle. Galileo’s great coup was to show that for once the Greeks had been too cautious. Not only were the heavens built according to a mathematical plan, but so was the ordinary, earthly realm. The path of an arrow shot from a bow could be predicted as accurately as the timing of an eclipse of the sun.

  This was a twofold revolution. First, the kingdom of mathematics suddenly claimed a vast new territory for itself. Second, all those parts of the world that could not be described mathematically were pushed aside as not quite worthy of study. Galileo made sure that no one missed the news. Nature is “a book written in mathematical characters,” he insisted, and anything that could not be framed in the language of equations was “nothing but a name.”22

  Aristotle had discussed motion, too, but not in a mathematical way. Motion referred not only to change in position, which can easily be reduced to number, but to every sort of change—a ship sailing, a piece of iron rusting, a man growing old, a fallen tree decaying. Motion, Aristotle decreed in his Physics, was “the actuality of a potentiality.” Galileo sneered. Far from investigating the heart of nature, Aristotle had simply been playing word games, and obscure ones at that.

  In the new view, which Galileo hurried to proclaim, the scientist’s tas
k was to describe the world objectively, as it really is, not subjectively, as it appears to be. What was objective—tangible, countable, measurable—was real and primary. What was subjective—the tastes and textures of the world—was dubious and secondary. “If the ears, the tongue, and the nostrils were taken away,” wrote Galileo, “the figures, the numbers, and the motions would indeed remain, but not the odors nor the tastes nor the sounds.”

  This was an enormous change. Peel away the world of appearances, said Galileo, and you find the real world beneath. The world consists exclusively of particles in motion, pool balls colliding on a vast table. All the complexity around us rises out of that simplicity.

  After Galileo and Newton, the historian of science Charles C. Gillispie has written, science would “communicate in the language of mathematics, the measure of quantity,” a language “in which no terms exist for good or bad, kind or cruel . . . or will and purpose and hope.” The word force, for example, Gillispie noted, “would no longer mean ‘personal power’ but ‘mass-times-acceleration.’ ”

  That austere, geometric world has a beauty of its own, Galileo and all his intellectual descendants maintained. The problem is that most people cannot grasp it. Mathematicians believe fervently that their work is as elegant, subtle, and rich as any work of music. But everyone can appreciate music, even if they lack the slightest knowledge of how to read a musical score. For outsiders to mathematics—which is to say, for almost everyone—advanced mathematics is a symphony played out in silence, and all they can do is look befuddled at a stage full of musicians sawing away to no apparent effect.