William Gilbert’s De Magnete is a book that covers a wide range of information on all aspects of magnetism, loadstones, magnets, and the magnetic compasses. He was a high ranking physician living in London and doesn’t appear to have travelled anywhere else let along sailed anywhere on a ship. This raises the justified question; how did he acquire much of the knowledge that he presents to his readers? Did he write the book alone, or were there others involved in its production?
We know that he borrowed liberally from the works of Petrus Peregrinus de Maricourt (fl. 1269), Robert Norman (dates unknown), and William Barlow (1544–1625) without really acknowledging those borrowings. We would say he plagiarised them, but what he did was common practice amongst scientific authors during the Renaissance. There were, however, other parts of the book that relied on mariner’s knowledge to which Gilbert almost certainly did not have access. He boasts of having acquired knowledge of the behaviour of the mariner’s compass over all on the globe from conversations with the circumnavigators, Francis Drake (c. 1540–1596) and Thomas Cavendish (1560–1592) but were there others?
We know according to the reports that at least one and possibly two others actually contributed text to De Magnete. Following Gilberts death, two other magnetists claimed the right to be considered his true disciple, William Barlow (1544–1625), who I dealt with in an earlier episode, and Mark Ridley (1560–c. 1624), who as I noted in an earlier episode lived in Wingfield House with Gilbert and whom I will deal with in the next post. Their rivalry developed into a mudslinging match in various publications, which I will also deal with in the next post. In one of his ripostes to Barlow, Mark Ridley wrote:
[Edward Wright] was a verie skilful and painefull man in the Mathematickes, a worthy reader of that Lecture of Navigation for the East-India Company … [T]his man took great paines in the correcting the printing of Doctor Gilberts booke, and was very conversant with him, and considering of that sixt booke [of De Magnete] which you [Barlow] no way beleeve, I asked him whether it was any way of his making or assistance, for that I knew him to be most perfect in Copernicus from his youth, and he denied that he gave any aide thereunto, I replied that the 12 chapter of the 4 Booke must needs be his, because of the table of the fixed Starres, so he confessed that he was the author of that chapter, and inquiring further whether he observed the Author [Gilbert] skillfull in Copernicus, he answered that he did not, then it was found that one Doctor Gissope [Joseph Jessop] was much esteemed by him, and lodged in his house whom he knew alwaies to be a great Scholler in the Mathematick, who was a long time entertained by Sir Charles Chandish, he was a great assistance in that matter as we judged, and I have seen whole sheetes of this mans own hand writing of Demonstrations to this purpose out of Copernicus, in a book of Philosophie copied out in another hand[.]
All that I can find about Joseph Jessop, who, according to Ridley, instructed Gilbert in Copernican cosmology is that he was apparently a fellow London physician and an erstwhile fellow of King’s.
In contrast to the elusive Dr Jessop, Edward Wright (1561–1615) is one of the most prominent figures in relevant circles in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth. A leading mathematical practitioner, not just in England but in the whole of Europe, particularly in the areas of cartography and navigation. He had solved the mathematical problem of how to construct the Mercator projection and published it in one of the most important English books on navigation, his Certaine Errors in Navigation in 1599. He had made Simon Stevin’s equally important De Havenvinding (1599) available to English mariners by translating it into English and publishing it as The Hauen-finding Art, or The VVay to Find any Hauen or Place at Sea, by the Latitude and Variation also in 1599. He was the designer of important mathematical instruments, an advisor on and teacher of navigation and cartography.
Cover of Wright’s Certaine Errors Source: Wikimedia CommonsSource
As well as this supposed anonymous contribution to Gilbert’s masterpiece he is also a named contributor as the author of a so-called laudatory address at the beginning of the book or to give it its full title:
To the most learned Mr. William Gilbert, the distinguished London physician and father of the magnetic philosophy : a laudatory address concerning these books on magnetism, by Edward Wright.
Wright lays it on thick in his opening paragraph:
Should there be any one, most worthy sir, who shall disparage these books and researchers of yours, and who shall deem these studies trifling and in no wise sufficiently worthy of a man consecrated to the graver study of medicine, of a surety he will be esteemed no common simpleton. For that the uses of the loadstone are very considerable, yea admirable, is too well known even among men of the lowest class to call for many words from me at this time or for any commendation. In truth in my opinion, there is no subject-matter of higher importance or of greater utility to the human race upon which you could have brought your philosophical talents to bear.
Having in a long passage of purple prose emphasised the importance of the invention of the compass for mariners, Wright initially concentrates on the topic of magnetic variation, seeming to believe in opposition to Gilbert that the use of variation to determine longitude is a real possibility. He then moves on to the topic of magnetic dip and the possibility that this seems to offer to determine latitude by inclement and overcast weather. Here his praise goes into overdrive:
Thus then, to bring our discourse back again to you, most worthy and learned Mr. Gilbert (whom I gladly acknowledge as my master in this magnetic philosophy[my emphasis]), if these books of yours on the Loadstone contained nought save this one method of finding latitude from the magnetic dip, now first published by you, even so our British mariners as well as the French, the Dutch, the Dames, whenever they have to enter the British sea or the strait of Gibraltar from the Atlantic Ocean, will justly hold them worth no small sum of gold.
With reference to the sentence in brackets that I have emphasised, it should be remembered that Wright is no humble mariner but a graduate of Cambridge University, who is a leading authority on all aspects of navigation and the magnetic compass, as well as a published author and translator, so high praise indeed. It should however be noted that the plan to determine latitude by magnetic dip propagated by Gilbert in his book and so highly praised here, by Wright, was never actually realised.
Wright goes on to address Gilbert’s theory of diurnal rotation and rehashes the standard physical argument in its favour, that it is more plausible to believe that the comparatively small sphere of the Earth rotates once every twenty-four hours than that the vastly larger sphere of the fixed stars does so. He considers the religious objection but finally comes down in favour of a geocentric model with diurnal rotation.
Towards the end of his laudatory address Wright references two other European experts:
Nor is there any doubt that those most learned men, Petrus Plantius (a most diligent student not so much of geography as of magnetic observations) and Simon Stevinius, a most eminent mathematician will be not a little rejoiced when first they set eyes on these your books and therein see their own 𝜆𝜄𝜇𝜈𝜀𝜐-𝜌𝜀𝜏𝜄𝜅ή𝜈 or method of finding ports so greatly and unexpectedly enlarged and developed; and of course they will, as far as the may be able, induce all navigators among their own countrymen to note the dip no less than the variation of the needle.
Petrus Plancius (1552–1622) was a Flemish astronomer, cartographer, and clergyman, who was an expert on safe maritime routes to India and the Spice Islands. He would go on to become one of the founders of the Dutch East India Company in 1602. He is famous for his celestial globes and in particular for training the navigator Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser (c. 1540–1596)to be one of the first to map the stars in the southern hemisphere. Simon Stevin is already known to us and Gilbert endorsed the scheme of Simon Stevin (1548–1620), put forward in his The Hauen-finding Artto provide tables of the correctly measured variation to compare with measured observations as an aid to navigation. It can be assumed that Wright as the translator of The Hauen-finding Art introduced Gilbert to Stevin’s work.
Of interest is the following allusion:
Let your magnetic Philosophy, most learned Mr. Gilbert, go forth then under the best auspices–that work held back not for nine years only, according to Horace’s Council, but for almost another nine…
Copernicus alludes to the same advice from Horace’s The Art of Poetry on the opening page of the preface to De Revolutionibus:
For he [Tiedemann Giese] repeatedly encouraged me and, sometimes adding reproaches, urgently requested me to publish this volume and finally permit it to appear after being buried among my papers and lying concealed not merely until the ninth year but by now the fourth period of nine years.
Turning now to Book 4 Chapter 12 of De Magnete, which Ridley relates was authored by Wright we find a detailed technical section on the best way to determine magnetic variation, which I described in my post in this series on De Magnete so, The twelfth chapter of book four provides the best and most detailed description of how to determine variation published up till that time.
The chapter describes in great technical details the various ways of determining magnetic variation at sea and on land. It includes detailed instruction for the design and construction of special instruments for this task and outlines the mathematics necessary to carry out the calculations. It includes Tycho Brahe’s value for the deviation of the Arctic pole-star from true north, 2 deg. 55 min. but gives 3 degrees as a good approximation. It also includes a list of the right ascension and declination of bright, brilliant stars not far from the equator for determining variation at night and the construction of an instrument to do so. It closes with instructions on how to construct an instrument for finding the ortive amplitude on the horizon. For those who don’t know, the ortive amplitude is defined thus:
The arc of the horizon between the true east or west point and the centre of the sun, or a star, at its rising or setting. At the rising, the amplitude is eastern or ortive. (Wiktionary)
Instrument for determining variation on landInstrument for determining variation at sea at nightan instrument for finding the ortive amplitude on the horizon.
All the above is very much in Wright’s area of expertise rather than Gilbert’s, so the claim that he wrote this chapter is very plausible. This of course raises the question as to whether Wright was the author, or co-author of, or advisor on other sections of the book of a similar technical nature. This question could probably only be answered if we could find Gilberts working notes, draft manuscript(s), or correspondence from when he was working on the book. Unfortunately, when he died he donated his library and one assumes his papers to the College of Physicians of which he was President. I say, unfortunately, because the College of Physicians and its entire library was lost in the Great Fire of London, so we will never know if Wright contributed more to De Magnete or not.
As I explained in episode XII of this series where I introduced the work of the ancient Greek engineers and their machines, the discipline mechanics derives its name from the study of machines.
Greek μηχανική mēkhanikḗ, lit. “of machines” and in antiquity it is literally the discipline of the so-called simple machines: lever, wheel and axel, pulley, balance, inclined plane, wedge, and screw.
Just as some scholars during the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate studies, absorbed, criticised, and developed the works of Aristotle and John Philoponus on motion, and those of Aristotle and Ptolemaeus on astronomy, so there were others who took up the translated works of the Greek engineers such as Hero of Alexandria and Philo of Byzantium, extending and improving their work on machines. The Islamic texts on machines have an emphasis on timekeeping and hydrostatics.
For the earliest Islamic book on machines, we turn once again to the translation power house, the Persian Banū Mūsā brothers Abū Jaʿfar, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir (before 803 – February 873); Abū al‐Qāsim, Aḥmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir (d. 9th century) and Al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir (d. 9th century), the sons of the astronomer and astrologer on the court of the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn, Mūsā ibn Shākir. Amongst their approximately twenty books, of which only three survived, the most famous is Kitab al-Hiyal al Naficah (Book of Ingenious Devices), which draw on knowledge of the works of Hero and Philo but also on Persian, Chinese, and Indian sources but which goes well beyond anything achieved by their Greek predecessors.
It contains designs for almost a hundred trick vessels and automata the effects of which, “were produces by a sophisticated, if empirical, use of the principles of hydrostatics, aerostatics, and mechanics. The components used included tanks, pipes, floats siphons, lever arms balanced on axles, taps with multiple borings, cone-valves , rack-and-pinion gears, and screw-and-pinion gears.”[1]
A thirsty bull gets to drink. Courtesy of Library of Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul, manuscript A.3474, model 6.How a thirsty bull gets to drink. From D. Hill, The Book of Ingenious Devices, model 6.(Right) Lamp with a perpetual wick. Courtesy of Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, arabischen Handschriften, manuscript 5562, model 96. (Left) Inner workings of a lamp with a perpetual wick. From D. Hill, The Book of Ingenious Devices, model 96.
In the ninth century the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Mustaʿīn (c. 836 – 17 October 866) commissioned the philosopher, physician, mathematician, and astronomer Qusta ibn Luqa al-Ba’albakki (820–912) to translate Hero’s Mechanica, a text in which Hero explored the parallelograms of velocities, determined certain simple centres of gravity, analysed the intricate mechanical powers by which small forces are used to move large weights, discussed the problems of the two mean proportions, and estimated the forces of motion on an inclined plane, which has only survived in the Arabic translation.
Ibn Khalaf al-Murādī
In al-Andalus in the eleventh century, the engineer Ibn Khalaf al-Murādī about whom we know almost nothing authored Kitāb al-asrār fī natā’ij al-afkār (The Book of Secrets in the Results of Ideas), which describes 31 models consisting of 15 clocks, 5 large mechanical toys (automata), 4 war machines, 2 machines for raising water from wells and one portable universal sundial.
When I looked at the science of engineering and saw that it had disappeared after its ancient heritage, that its masters have perished, and that their memories are now forgotten, I worked my wits and thoughts in secrecy about philosophical shapes and figures, which could move the mind, with effort, from nothingness to being and from idleness to motion. And I arranged these shapes one by one in drawings and explained them.
Al-Muradi, The Book of Secrets in the Results of Ideas
Page from The Book of Secrets in the Results of IdeasPage from The Book of Secrets in the Results of IdeasPage from The Book of Secrets in the Results of Ideas
The most spectacular of all the Islamicate text on machines and mechanics is the Kitab fi ma’rifat al-hiyal al-handasiya, (The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) commissioned in Amid (modern day Diyarbakir in Turkey) in 1206 by the Artuqid ruler Nāṣir al-Dīn Maḥmūd (ruled 1201–1222) and created by the artisan, engineer artist and mathematician Badīʿ az-Zaman Abu l-ʿIzz ibn Ismāʿīl ibn ar-Razāz al-Jazarī (1136–after 1206).
All that we know about al-Jazarī comes from his book. He was born in 1136 in Upper Mesopotamia the son of the chief engineer at the Artuklu Palace, the residence of the Mardin branch of the Artuqids the vassal rulers of Upper Mesopotamia, a position he inherited from his father. Al-Jazarī was an artisan rather than a scholar, an engineer rather than an inventor.
The book, which al-Jazarī wrote at the command of Nāsir al-Dīn, is divided into fifty chapters, grouped into six categories; I, water clocks and candle clocks (ten chapters); II, vessels and figures suitable for drinking sessions (ten chapters); III, pitchers and basins for phlebotomy and ritual washing (ten chapters); IV, fountains that change their shape and machines for the perpetual flute (ten chapters); V, machines for raising water (five chapters); and VI, miscellaneous (five chapters): a large ornamental door cast in brass and copper, a protractor, combination locks, a lock with bolts, and a small water clock. Donald R. Hill, DSB
A Candle Clock from a copy of al-Jazaris treatise on automataAl-Jazari’s “peacock fountain” was a sophisticated hand washing device featuring humanoid automata which offer soap and towels.
His work was clearly derivative and he cites the Banū Mūsā, the mathematician, astronomer, and astrolabe maker Abū Ḥāmid Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al‐Ṣāghānī al‐Asṭurlābī (died, 990), Hibatullah ibn al-Husayn (d. 1139), and a Pseudo-Archimedes as sources. Many of his devices are improved models of ones described by Hero of Alexandria and Philo of Byzantium. He probably also drew on Indian and Chinese sources.
The book is clearly written in straightforward Arabic; and the text is accompanied by 173 drawings, ranging from rudimentary sketches to full page paintings. On these drawings the individual parts are in many cases marked with the letters of the Arabic alphabet, to which al-Jazarī refers in his descriptions. The drawings are usually in partial perspective; but despite considerable artistic merit, they seem rather crude to modern eyes. They are, however, effective aids to understanding the text. Donald R. Hill, DSB
Diagram of a hydropowered perpetual flute from The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by Al-Jazari in 1206.The elephant clock was one of the most famous inventions of al-Jazari
The book was obviously fairly widespread in Islamicate culture judging by the number of surviving manuscripts but unlike the work of the Banū Mūsā it was first translated from the Arabic into a European language in modern times.
Our last Islamic engineer is the Ottoman Turk polymath Taqi ad-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf ash-Shami al-Asadi (1526–1585), who as we saw in the last episode designed, built, and managed the observatory in Istanbul for Sultan Murad III (1546–1595). Taqī al-Dīn is famous for his mechanical clocks about which he wrote two books.
The Brightest Stars for the Construction of Mechanical Clocks (al–Kawākib al–durriyya fī waḍҁal–bankāmāt al–dawriyya) was written by Taqī al-Dīn in 1559 and addressed mechanical-automatic clocks. This work is considered the first written work on mechanical-automatic clocks in the Islamic and Ottoman world. Taqī al-Dīn mentions that he benefited from using Samiz ‘Alī Pasha’s private library and his collection of European mechanical clocks.
al–Ṭuruq al–saniyya fī al–ālāt al–rūḥāniyya is a second book on mechanics by Taqī al-Dīn that emphasizes the geometrical-mechanical structure of clocks, which was a topic previously observed and studied by the Banū Mūsā and al-Jazarī.
Mechanical clock of Taqī al-Dīn. Image taken from Sifat ālāt rasadiya bi-naw’in ākhar.
He also wrote The Sublime Methods in Spiritual Devices (al-Turuq al-saniyya fi’1-alat al-ruhaniyya) a treatise in six chapters 1) clepsydras, 2) devices for lifting weights, 3) devices for raising water, 4) fountains and continually playing flutes and kettle-drums, 5) irrigation devices, 6) self-moving spit.
Sixteenth-century Ottoman scientist and engineer Taqi al-Din harnessed surging river water in his designs for an advanced six-cylinder pump, publishing his ideas in a book called ‘The Sublime Methods of Spiritual Machine’. The pistons of the pump were similar to drop hammers, and they could have been used to either create wood pulp for paper or to beat long strips of metal in a single pass.
The self-moving spit in part six uses an early steam turbine as motive power:
“Part Six: Making a spit which carries meat over fire so that it will rotate by itself without the power of an animal. This was made by people in several ways, and one of these is to have at the end of the spit a wheel with vanes, and opposite the wheel place a hollow pitcher made of copper with a closed head and full of water. Let the nozzle of the pitcher be opposite the vanes of the wheel. Kindle fire under the pitcher and steam will issue from its nozzle in a restricted form and it will turn the vane wheel. When the pitcher becomes empty of water bring close to it cold water in a basin and let the nozzle of the pitcher dip into the cold water. The heat will cause all the water in the basin to be attracted into the pitcher and the [the steam] will start rotating the vane wheel again.”
Naturally by Taqī al-Dīn’s time the Renaissance was in full swing in Europe and European artist-engineers were already writing their own books on machines and mechanics.
As can be seen Islamic engineers knew of and built on the work of their Greek predecessors and the work of the Banū Mūsā and Ibn Khalaf al-Murādī became known in Europe exercising an influence on the European developments in machines and mechanics. There was also an information flow in the 16th century between the observatory in Istanbul and Europe.
[1] E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanisms, Magic, Nature, and Art, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015 p. 20 quoting Donald Hill, “Medieval Arabic Mechanical Technology,” in Proceedings of the First InternationalSymposium for the History of Arabic Science, Aleppo, April 5–12 1976, Aleppo: Institute forb the History of Arabic Science, 1979.
Roland Jackson is a historian of nineteenth-century science in Great Britain, who is the author of a highly praised biography of John Tyndall, The Ascent of John Tyndall: VictorianScientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual (OUP, 2018), which given the nature of some of Tyndall’s research work established Jackson as an expert on the early history of the very actual climate debate. He has, also, in this capacity published some very sensible work on the, somewhat heated, “did Tyndall steal from Eunice Newton Foote” discussion. Tyndall also features in Jackson’s newest book, albeit as just one of a cast of a multitude of expert voices, Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023)[1].
Jackson’s book is a vast repository of information, detailing the interactions between experts–scientists, engineers, medical advisers–and politicians over an extraordinary wide range of topic, seemingly from every aspect of human activity, in Great Britain throughout the nineteenth century, cooked down to a bare minimum to fit it into its slightly more than three-hundred pages. If expanded to its fullest extent, the information packed into those pages would, with certainty, fill a multi-volume encyclopaedia. However, despite its compactness, Jackson’s tome is not dry and indigestible, but well written, highly readable, informative, lucid, at times almost lyrical and it left this reader, at least, with a strong desire to discover more in greater depth about, what seems like, a thousand different topics.
In the nineteenth century expert advisors interacted with and were consulted on a myriad of different topic by politicians, including health and safety in mines, factories, and explosive stores, public heath, the building of railways and the prevention of rail accidents, the prevention of marine disasters, the design of weapons, taxation, and much more. To handle all of these diverse topics in one continuous, chronological narrative would, I think, produce a highly complex and probably unreadable text, but Jackson approaches the task with a different strategy.
His book is divided into seven section, six of which, excluding the first, deals with an area of public political policy and in which Jackson then deals with separate and interrelated topics chronological, showing how the handling of them by politicians and their expert advisors developed throughout the century, the main divisions are–(II) Empire and War, (III) Food, (IV) Infrastructure and Transport, (V) Industry, (VI) Social Condition and Public Health, (VII) Revenue and Standards.
As already pointed out his opening section (I) is different and deals with the Rise of Science. The books opening sentences state:
Any starting point for a history of scientific advice to the British state will be arbitrary. The founding in 1660 of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, generally known as the Royal Society, is as good a place as any to begin. That is because this organization, surviving today as Britain’s elite scientific institution, had strong links to the state from the outset.
This is followed by a brief sketch of the evolution of science in general and the Royal Society in particular during the eighteenth century leading up to the major sea change that the Royal Society underwent in the early part of the nineteenth century and the emergence of new scientific bodies such as the British Association, the Geological Society, the Astronomical society, the Institute of Civil Engineers, and others. The medical profession had professional societies with much older roots. Jackson goes deeper into both the Royal Society and the British Association.
Having established the sources of many of the expert advisors, in particular the Royal Society, Jackson now takes us, topic for topic, through those areas where politicians called upon those advisors to dispense their wisdom to the political decision making machine, the British Parliament in Westminster. On each topic the reader gets introduced to a seemingly endless flood of committees and Royal commissions that were formed and in which selected advisors were called upon to add their opinions to the weight of the decision making process.
What is made very obvious, particular in the first half of the century in how little influence those selected advisors had on any given issue in comparison to other political factors and how often inquiries petered out without any substantial legislation making it onto the books. It becomes very clear the parliamentarians, who themselves come almost exclusively to the upper echelons, practiced what would now be labelled a libertarian attitude to reform, propagating the view that problems such as health and safety or pollution would be regulated by the owners of the factories, railways, or whatever because it was in their own interest and didn’t need the interference of the state in their private affairs. This attitude being oft contrary to the advice given by the experts. Whilst reading, the term that kept popping up in my head was laissez faire but as Jackson did not use the term in his main text, I began to wonder if I was misinterpreting his narrative. However, in his excellent twenty-seven page Conclusion, of which more later, he uses laissez faire to describe exactly those attitudes where it had occurred to me.
It is interesting to follow how as the century advanced this laissez faire approach was gradually eroded, as it became more and more obvious that the various areas were anything but self-controlling and/or self-improving and that legislation based on the advice proffered by the experts in those committees and commissions was actually necessary. Sometimes, this recognition and the necessary implementation took a look time to finally come to fruition. Jackson drops the example of air pollution, a constant theme throughout the nineteenth century was only finally, really tackled with the Clean Air Act of 1956! Decimalisation of the British currency was discussed and recommended by the experts for much of the century, but was rejected by the politicians on the grounds that it would not be understood and thus rejected by the great unwashed, probably leading to public disturbances, it was finally introduced on 15 February 1971! Metrication was on the table from early on in the century when the need for a unified national system of weights and measures was under discussion but was initially rejected in favour of the Imperial System as being too French and too revolutionary. It continued to be discussed and recommended by the experts throughout the century but despite the 1897 Weights and Measures Act, which finally legalised the use of metric units for trade, it was first 1965 before Britain began metrication, although as Jackson points out they still have miles and the pint!
Some random thoughts on the political side from the vast convolute that Jackson presents. The major influence on policies by members of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords was due to personal vested interests; these launching, disrupting, blocking, or even killing of policy initiatives on a regular basis. The number of times that proposed legislations was stymied by a change of government. The constant back and forth between the government and local authorities over responsibility for areas such as sewage disposal and public health before late in the century central bodies with responsibility for the area were finally established. The highly active role of the Privy Council in the nineteenth century, then still a powerful political force, unlike today.
On the other side, within a long list of expert advisors who served on committees, gave evidence to Royal commissions, gave advice on specific problems, and were consulted on a bewildering range of topics, a small number of names, some of them well known from the history of science keep cropping up again and again asked to apply their expertise to the latest problem under discussion. One gets the feeling that figures such as Michael Faraday, George Airy, John Tyndall and Lyon Playfair must have spent their entire time rushing from one advisory meeting to another, in between doing extensive scientific research into some relevant political question or another. One aspect that I personally found fascinating was the battles between medical experts who supported the different theories of the hypothesised general causes of ill health, this being a period when the real answers were not yet know, a strong reminder how recent the discovery of the real scientific causes of disease is.
The aspect of the book that most impressed me whilst reading is how Jackson manages to juggle the streams of information that he delivers to his readers without sending their brains into overload, truly a master class in succinct formulation and delivery. I mentioned earlier that the information that he delivers is very compact and if expanded to its fullest extent, the information packed into those pages would, with certainty, fill a multi-volume encyclopaedia. Jackson did, in his original manuscript unpack and expand some examples of how the problems were approached and handled in a series of case studies. The publishers decided the book was too long and the case studies were sacrificed in the service of comparative brevity. However, these have been published separately under the title Case Studies in Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State: A companion to Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), two-hundred pages of absolutely fascinating reading available in hardback and paperback at very reasonable prices (the main book is not cheap) and almost given away as a Kindle.
The book closes with a twenty-eight page Conclusion: Constraints on Influence, which summarises the entire contents of the book brilliantly and in its entirety would make for a much better review than my feeble efforts.
There are sadly no illustrations, but there are very extensive endnotes that largely refer to the impressive bibliography but also contain occasional supplementary information to specific points. As already stated the bibliography is very long and very impressive, in particular the very, very long list of Parliamentary Papers that Jackson consulted during his research. There is also a very comprehensive index.
This book is, in my opinion, destined to become a classic and an obligatory read for scholars of virtually all aspects of nineteenth-century British science, engineering, and medicine, as well as scholars of nineteenth-century British politics. It is a serious academic tome and not really designed for the casual reader, although the case studies could definitely appeal to a wider audience. However, I suspect that those scholars who do take up Jackson’s excellent tome will, like myself, find themselves going, now that is fascinating or really!, I must find out more about it.
[1] Roland Jackson, Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Pa., 2023
Over the years, experience has taught me to be very wary of books about either the history or the philosophy of science written, not by historians or philosophers, but rather by practicing scientists. There are, of course, notable exceptions but such books are often at best questionable and unfortunately oft a total disaster. My caution, potential bullshit antenna set of an alarm when I first stumbled across the advertising for David B. Teplow’s The Philosophy and Practice of Science, but then I noticed that it had a ringing endorsement from Hasok Chang, and I became curious. In my opinion Hasok Chang is a living master of the history of science and if he endorses something then it is worth paying attention, so I asked Cambridge University Press for a review copy and having received one I’m now reviewing Teplow’s tome.
We start off with a general impression, this is a monumental book, by which I’m not referring to its physical dimensions, it’s slightly larger than octavo and has about four-hundred pages. What makes it monumental is the vast amount of detailed information that Teplow has managed to pack into those four hundred pages, which is both its strength and, given its principal intention, its weakness, about which more later. It is a brilliant tour de force into which Teplow has obviously poured his heart and soul, mining to the depths and regurgitating in small portions the 770 papers and monographs that he lists in his bibliography. A process that has taken him a decade since he spent a year at Cambridge University as a visiting scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science under the guiding hand of Hasok Chang with a detailed proposal for the book in his luggage. For all of the energy and scholarship that Teplow has invested in his book it is, unfortunately, from my standpoint as a historian of Early Modern science, at least in one aspect fatally flawed. But I will deal with that later first the positive aspects.
In his preface Teplow writes:
I argue that excellence in scientific practice requires inculcation not only in its empirical form, but also in its historical development, philosophy, and sociology, which the student and scientist should integrate into their design and performance of experiments, interpretation of results, dissemination of findings, and evaluation of the veracity and importance of their work. This is what I consider the “process of science.”
The process of science is this book and this book is the process of science. The manner in which it is written is scientific behaviour, which means thinking deeply and diggingdeeply. As you read, you will not only be asking questions, but you will also be learning how and why to ask and answer them. [emphasis in original]
He delivers what he promises!
The book is in six sections rather than chapters. The first is the introduction and the second rather short chapter is Defining Science. The following four chapters are elements of Teplow’s process of science and each is divided into subsections and the subsections are divided into subsections, each covering an aspect of the central topic of the section.
The introduction explains Teplow’s motivation for the rest of the book. Having sketched the importance of science in modern society, he explains that if you really want to understand science you need not only to study science but also its history, philosophy, and sociology. Also, this approach should lie at the centre of science education. The main purpose of the book is to explain to young ongoing scientists why, in order to become good scientists, they need to study the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Here we meet one of Teplow’s favourite devices, tables containing list of the points he is trying to make the second table 1.2 gives twenty-two bullet point answers to the question Why integrate science history, philosophy, and practice? He then explains his programme in the remaining chapters.
Defining science turns out in Teplow’s hands to be a more than somewhat difficult undertaking. He presents a quite large selection of definitions of science provided by philosophers and scientists and shows how each of them whilst having merits is in some why deficient. Towards the end of the chapter, he writes:
We have seen that many definitions of science have been proffered, each of which may have merit but none of which can define science in the absolute. The scope and complexity of science precludes this. One might thing this puts the idea of science on a weak footing. After all, how can we practice something if we don’t even know what it is? Answer: many forms of science are practiced and this diversity not only is a good thing, but it is one of the most important ways quantum leaps science [sic] are made.
There are two things to note here, this failure to really pin down some aspect of science occurs again and again throughout the book and he explains why this can be viewed as a strength rather than a weakness.
There is one glaring bizarre statement in the chapter that I can’t ignore. Having started the chapter by explaining the science is about knowledge and that the theory of knowledge is epistemology, he then launches his investigation with Aristotle:
Our epistemological quest begins with the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC), and interestingly, with the word root of epistemological, epistḗmē (Greek: ἐπιστήμη). In Aristotle’s era, epistḗmē meant knowledge. The word he used for this type of knowledge was scientia, which is the root of the Latin word science.
Of course, Aristotle did not use the word scientia, which is Latin for knowledge and has nothing to do with Greek. The word science, whilst derived from scientia it’s not Latin but according to the etymological dictionary is mid-14c French. How that got past the fact checkers and copyeditors I can’t quite fathom.
The third chapter is titled Learning Science and the first subsection explain why one should learn the history and philosophy of science in order to learn science itself. There is another of Teplow’s tables with a long list of questions about science that can only really be answered with the philosophy and/or history of science.
The next section is basically a long list of well known scientific facts, such as the boiling point of water, that on closer examination turn out not to be facts at all. The message being that in science one should look deeply and question everything.
The following section, Scientific Intuition, I found to be somewhat problematic. Teplow say, probably correctly, that if you wish to become a scientist you need a certain undefined feel for the subject, his scientific intuition. I don’t have any real problems with this and I think it applies to any profession. Put trivially, it you don’t like drawing and can’t sketch for toffees than maybe you shouldn’t consider becoming a graphic artist.
It is the next part of this section that worries me. To illustrate his point, he brings short but detailed biographies of the life and work two prominent twentieth-century figures in the life sciences, the biophysicist Max Delbrück (1906–1981 and the biologist Lee Hood (1938). The biographies are very good and both men are truly fascinating and truly exceptional. Unfortunately, because they are so exceptional it tends to confirm the widespread popular misconception than one needs to be some kind of unique genie to become a scientist. You can’t become a physicist if you are not Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein or some combination of both.
US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld in a news briefing on 12 February 2002 famously made the following statement:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
People who couldn’t be bothered to actually think about what he said poured out a great deal of ridicule and scorn at his expense but it is actually a profound analysis and would have made a good chapter heading for the next part of Teplow’s book.
In the pages of the next sections, which are very good, Teplow looks first at knowledge and its acquisition and then ignorance , which, as he correctly points out, is possibly more important in science than knowledge. Science is trying to find answers for the things we don’t know, i.e. of which we are ignorant, rather than simply accumulating lists of things we do know.
Chapter four takes a deep dive into the history of science in an attempt to determine what exactly is the much talked about scientific method. Starting with The Edwin Smith Papyrus (3000–2500 BC), a manuscript on ancient Egyptian medicine, and ending with Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) and the philosophical rejection of method, Teplow takes us through twenty-five different version of scientific methodology, in somewhat more than seventy pages, covering all the big name. This is on the whole well done although I do have some negative comments. However, before I deal with those, I found his treatment of the nineteenth century–John Herschel, William Whewell, John Stuart Mill, Claude Bernard, William Stanley Jevons–very good, in particular his in depth study of the ideas of Jevons, who tends to get overlooked.
Happily, he includes a section on Ptolemy (c. AD 100–170) which is on the whole very good but then he goes and spoil it with the simple sentence, Ptolemy assumed from the onset, as Aristotle had suggested, that the cosmos was geocentric. When will modern science writers finally learn that if one makes simple empirical observations of the heavens without any prior knowledge, then it is very obvious that we live in a geocentric cosmos. It is the most logical, i.e. scientific, explanation for what one observes.
Teplow observes, quite correctly, that in his optics, Ibn al-Haytham (965–1040) works in a way that is very similar to the way that modern scientist work, quoting other people when making this judgement. However, he fails to note that al-Haytham is working almost identically to Ptolemy in his optics, which whilst praising him for his methodology in astronomy Teplow never mentions, implying that al-Haytham is doing something totally new.
By Al-Biruni we get the classic, “The precision of his astronomical instruments and experimental work is obvious from his determination of the radius of the Earth, 6,339.6 km, which is the same, within experimental error, as that determined by modern scientists (6,356.8–6,378.1 km).” No mention of the fact that it would have been literally impossible for al-Biruni to have made the measurement in the way he describes.
Teplow has a section on Roger Bacon in which he quotes various people disputing that Bacon made a contribution to the scientific method. He quotes the Center for Islamic Studies as follows:
It is absolutely wrong to assume that experimental method was formulated in Europe. Roger Bacon, who, in the west is known as the originator of experimental method, had himself received his training from the pupils of Spanish Moors [my emphasis], and had learnt everything from Muslim sources. The influence of Ibn al-Haitham on Roger Bacon is clearly visible in his works. Europe was very slow to recognize the Islamic origin of her much advertised scientific (experimental) method. In his book, “The Making of Humanity,”Briffault states, “It was under their successors at the Oxford School that Roger Bacon learned Arabic and Arabic science. Neither Roger Bacon nor his later namesake has any title to be credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no more than one of the apostles of Muslim science and method to Christian Europe; and he never wearied of declaring that the knowledge of Arabic and Arabic science was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge.
To find this ahistorical garbage in a serious book is to say the least stunning. That Roger Bacon was the first European to write about and propagate the optics of al-Haytham is true but that he had received his training from the pupils of Spanish Moors, and had learnt everything from Muslim sources, is toral cobblers. Also, as far as I know Bacon did not read Arabic.
After various other medieval philosophers, Teplow delivers an interesting discussion on the other Bacon, Francis and then we arrive at Galileo! Why do rational people lose their marbles as soon as the hear or read the name Galileo and switch into hagiography mode?
“We now come to Galileo Galilei, whose approach to science does make him a father, and maybe even thefather of the scientific method.”
Really? Teplow quotes as confirmation of the highly dubious judgement those leading historians and philosophers of science, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking! Who am I to argue with such authorities?
Teplow tells us Galileo studied mathematics in Pisa. No, he didn’t, he studied medicine and broke off his studies. He received mathematical tuition privately after he had left the university. Teplow has Cosimo II de’ Medici appointing him Chief Mathematician and Philosopher. Chief of what? He was actually court philosophicus and mathematicus. “It was here that Galileo produced his two most famous works Dialogue […] and Discourses […]. In the former work, among other things, Galileo provides arguments supporting the accuracy of the Copernican model of the universe, in contradistinction to the model of Ptolemy.”
In the Dialogo Galileo produces a lot of polemic and hot air but very few real arguments supporting the Copernican model, because he doesn’t really have any. However, Teplow seems to think that we have to maintain the myth. It gets worse.
“Before Galileo, many had argued for the importance of integrating mathematics with observation. Some of these arguments were philosophical in nature and some were applied. However, it was Galileo’s integration of mathematics (including geometry) with experiment, for example, in his validation of the Copernican model of the universe…”
Yer wot? Galileo never validated the Copernican model, he couldn’t and his polemical arguments for the Copernican system featured very little mathematics. In fact, the best mathematical validation for a heliocentric system was Johannes Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion, which Galileo studiously ignored. Love the including geometry! What other mathematics did Galileo use?
I suppose the extensive work of Kepler and Stevin combining mathematics and observation before Galileo somehow doesn’t count. Teplow doubles down on his version of the myth that Galileo introduced mathematics into natural philosophy in his section on the methodology of Isaac Newton. Here he says, “We have also seen that Newton, following Galileo, integrated mathematics into natural philosophy.” There were a very large number of scholars in the seventeenth century using mathematics in natural philosophy between Galileo and Newton, several of whom had a much bigger influence on Newton’s work that Galileo. Teplow compounds his historical ignorance with a footnote to this sentence:
It should be noted, at the time mathematics and natural philosophy were considered two independent fields, the former of which was felt by many to be inferior to the latter, as mathematics was considered the province of engineers and artisans.
Teplow’s claim had been true in the sixteenth century, which is when the division between the two field started to crumble, but by the time Newton wrote the Principia it had been for quite a long time no longer the case.
Of course, Teplow includes the infamous Il Saggiatore quote about the Book of Nature being written in the language of mathematics to justify his claims. He goes completely over the top with his closing quote: Galileo had made “a clear break from the past, deliberately replacing the scientist-philosopher with the mathematical scientist.” A quote from Clavelin M. The Natural Philosophy of Galileo (MIT Press, 1974). You have to ignore an incredible amount that Galileo wrote to believe that. Sublunar comets, theory of the tides anybody?
Teplow delivers good discussions of Descartes, Boyle, and Newton before arriving at the nineteenth century, his discussion of which I have already praised. His discussion of the Logical Positivist and Popper is also acceptable and then we arrive at the scandal child of the philosophy of science, Paul Feyerabend. He gives a reasonably good account of Feyerabend’s anarchistic approach to scientific method and the earthquake it caused within the philosophical and scientific communities but, perhaps, surprisingly ends by viewing Feyerabend’s contribution to the debate positively.
I don’t remember ever coming across half a paragraph of just nineteen lines that manages to cram in so many history of science and technology myths, errors, and falsehoods as the one that I recently read whilst soaking in a hot bath. A truly monumental cluster fuck!
I’ m not going to repeat it here but if you want to know more, go and read it!
The passage that I dissected there leads into a section on Data-Driven Research the last subsection on the scientific method. In his conclusion, titled, The Scientific Method: Yes, No, Maybe?, Teplow answer is, “Scientific method, in fact, is pluralistic in nature.” Correct in my opinion.
The fifth chapter is actually the heart of the book, having dealt with various aspects of the philosophy of science, Teplow now turn to Science in Practice, in a section that covers 163 of the 350 pages of text in the book. He dissects with a very sharp scalpel every conceivable aspect of actually doing science from choosing a project to the truth, or lack of it, of the theories produced in five sections and twenty-nine subsections. Bringing varying and contrasting views on every topic handled, a master class in in-depth analysis.
If you want to know how science is created and the validity of each step of the process this is the place to turn or is it? However, I have a nagging feeling that Teplow’s thoroughness is to a certain extent self-defeating. In his cover blurb Hasok Chang writes the following:
A veritable intellectual feat including a sweep of the whole history of scientific methodology … [it is] a philosophical manual for working scientists, especially those who are in the early stages of their careers. I hope that generations of students and researchers entering their scientific careers will discover this book and benefit from its abundant wisdom.
Those 163 pages, presenting in quite incredible detail every aspect of scientific practice, are, due to their conciseness and compactness, also incredibly dense and anything but an easy read. I find it hard to imagine the average recently graduated doctoral student or freshly baked post-doc devoting the time and energy to ploughing their way through Teplow’s exhaustive and exhausting analysis. Less and simpler might have been better but I could well be wrong. I for one am not going to offer you an in-depth analysis.
I will, however, draw attention to another couple of Teplow special history claims. In his section Observation⟶Interpretation Having established that Ptolemy grew up in a geocentric world dominated by the cosmology of Aristotle, Teplow writes:
Not surprisingly, Ptolemy’s first model incorporated simple circular orbits of the sun and planets around the Earth. […] To improve the accuracy of the model, Ptolemy implemented epicycles (“orbits within orbits”) within each planets orbital path (deferent), made the Earth eccentric (moved it away from the center of all orbitals) and created an equant, a point offset from the orbital center by an amount equal to the offset of Earth.
Ptolemy’s first model did not incorporate simple circular orbits but incorporated epicycles, deferents and eccenters, which he had inherited from earlier astronomers and mathematicians, from the very beginning. All he added was the equant point.
The image on the right is what you actually see from the earth. If you want to see the image on the left you first have to travel outside of the solar system. This is a still from a short video. the original video is on my blog post
After a lot of hogwash about how Ptolemy should have shaken off his ingrained bias and chosen the simple, i.e. heliocentric model, we then get the classic:
Bias imposed on natural philosophers from the public, and especially the Catholic Church, acted to stifle interest in such models and squelch discussion and publication of these models. The Church was particularly sensitive to interpretations of scientific results that produced conclusions contradicting the prevailing theological view that the Earth must be at the center of the universe. One must remember that the suggestion of heliocentricity was heresy, an act that carried heavy legal penalties, including death. Galileo was, in fact charged and convicted of heresy for his confirmation of Copernicus’s results and further promulgation of the idea of heliocentric heavens. [my emphasis]
Regular readers of this blog already now how much rubbish is contained in those few lines but for the sake of any new readers… The Catholic Church only got sensitive about heliocentricity when in 1615, Galileo and Paolo Antonio Foscarini started telling it how to interpret the Bible, not a wise thing to do in the middle of the Reformation/Counter Reformation. Scholars were free to discuss or publish these models as long as they treated them hypothetically their actually scientific status at the time, and not as established fact. The suggestion of heliocentricity was never formally declared heretical, to claim otherwise is a myth. Galileo was not charged with heresy but with breaching a Church injunction not to hold or teach the theory of heliocentricity (as fact). He was found guilty of grave suspicion of heresy and not heresy, a completely different offense. Galileo in no way confirmed Copernicus’ result, he wasn’t able to. What results? Copernicus published a hypothesis, which was unsupported by the available empirical facts at the time.
The final chapter or section of the book is as its title, Science as a Social Endeavour, suggests a brief tour of the sociology of science. A positive aspect of the book as science is all too often handled as if it takes place in some sort of intellectual vacuum. After some interesting discussions on the role, function, and status of practicing scientists in a social context.
Unfortunately, Teplow once again displays his ignorance of pre-modern science. He provides one of his tables with the title Issues about which truth and opinion collide.
This is an important aspect of the sociology of science and in general Teplow handles it well, dealing with the conflicts between science and pseudo-science quite extensively.
Five of his examples are classical science contra non-scientific with an either/or, either you accept the science or you reject it and believe in some sort of non-scientific hogwash. However, the situation with astronomy and astrology is totally different. To quote myself from an essay I wrote for the Forbidden Histories website:
Over a period of something between three and four thousand years, astronomy and astrology were not rivals or competitors but two sides of the same coin, Siamese twins joined at the hip only separated in the final phases of the so-called scientific revolution.
[…]
Ptolemy wrote [in his Tetrabiblos] that the science of the stars has two aspects, one that determines the position of the stars and the other that determines their influence. We would call the first astronomy and the second astrology…
Teplow justifies his inclusion of the pair astronomy/astrology in a footnote:
It is interesting, but not surprising that the same type of pseudo-scientific tripe was expounded by astrologers [who were also the astronomer, which Teplow doesn’t mention] in the eleventh century. However, what is very surprising that even then, some natural philosophers, such as the famous Islamic scholar al-Biruni, condemned this pseudo-science. Referring to astrologers, al-Biruni wrote”… [they] would stamp the sciences as atheistic, and would proclaim that they lead people astray to make ignoramuses, like him, hate the sciences and scientists. For this will help him conceal his ignorance, and to open the door for the complete destruction of both science and scientists.” (see Chapter 6, al-Biruni-On the Importance of the Sciences, in Levi, Islamic Central Asia : An Anthology of Historical Sources (Indiana University Press , 2010)).
It is clear from the context that al-Biruni is referring to one individual (him, his) so I don’t why Teplow has written “they,” also the objections of the unknown critic appear to be theological rather than astrological. I’m not going to go into it here but al-Biruni’s views on the practice of astrology are much more complex and he even wrote a book on astrology:
The Tafhīm. A manual of instruction in astrology, well over half of the book is taken up with preliminaries to the main subject. Persian and Arabic versions are extant, both apparently prepared by Bīrūni himself. It is arranged in the form of questions and answers. There are five chapters in all, the first (thirty-three pages in the Persian edition) on geometry, ending with Menelaus’ theorem on the sphere. The second (twenty-three pages) is on numbers, computation, and algebra. Chapter 3, the longest (229 pages), deals with geography, cosmology, and astronomy. From it a complete technical vocabulary may be obtained, as well as sets of numerical parameters, some of them uncommon. The next chapter (thirty-one pages) describes the astrolabe, its theory and application. Only the last chapter (223 pages) is on astrology as such, but it is complete and detailed. (E. S. Kennedy, DSB)
The Tafhīm is regarded by historians of Islamic astrology as one of the best explanatory texts on the topic. So, Teplow’s quote is not quite the slam-dunk that he thinks it is.
Teplow closes his book with a subsection, The Progress of Science: Paradigms,Research Programmes, and Traditions, which looks at the philosophy of science theories of Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Larry Laudan respectively. The accounts are brief, possibly too brief. For my taste his account of Kuhn’ Paradigms is too benevolent and I don’t think he has really understood Lakatos’ Research Programmes. I can’t really comment on his analysis of Laudan’s work as I’ve never read it.
Teplow’s book is illustrated with a fairly large number of his tables, various diagrams. and some pictures. On the subject of footnotes, he writes at the end of the preface:
One need not read all 777 footnotes, but I encourage the reader to patiently take the time to do so because footnotes reveal interesting and surprising thinks not generally taught to students not known by even the most accomplished practicing scientists.
The book doesn’t have a bibliography in the normal sense but a consecutively numbered list of 770 references that are numbered in the sequence in which they appear in the text. A quote or a text summary in the text is then simply referenced with a number, [555] for example. There is a very skimpy and as I discovered relatively useless index. A couple of time I found historical examples, like the ones I have criticised above, and neglected to note where they were, thinking I could find them again in the index! No chance!
Despite all of the negative comments in my review I actually think this is a very good book. The majority of the history of science examples that Teplow brings are from comparatively recent areas of the biological sciences, where he is personally at home. These are as far as I can judged well researched and accurate. However, as I have illustrated he lets himself down with the very poor quality of his references to earlier eras of the history of science. Otherwise, the book has lots of valuable information for those who wish to understand the process of science, all of which is assiduously researched and presented. Personally, I think it is too compact, too dense, and simply too much for the average ongoing young scientist to sit down and plough their way through it. However, I think, with the historical errors corrected, it would make an excellent textbook for a half or even a full year course for ongoing scientists and I personally have long thought that such a course should be part of the education of every ongoing scientist.
Up till now I have treated Greek culture in antiquity as if it were a single entity existing from the pre-Socratics in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE down to John Philoponus in the sixth century CE and beyond. This is, of course, anything but the truth. Before Alexander the Great, there was a collection of city states scattered along the coasts of the Black Sea and Asia minor, the Mediterranean coast of North East Africa, modern day Greece, Southern Italy, and parts of the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain that were vaguely united because they spoke various dialects of a common language. From about 500 BCE the Persian Empire controlled the Greek city states in Asia Minor and Macedonia.
These city states waged war with each other and rose and fell in prominence and power. In 336 BCE Alexander came to power and as is well known from school history lessons conquered a very large chunk of Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, introducing the so called Hellenistic period and culture after the fragmentation of his Empire following his early death. The Hellenistic period is considered to have covered the period from Alexander’s death in 323 BCE down to the death of Cleopatra VII, yes that Cleopatra, in 30 BCE.
The Romans began to exercise a strong influence over Greece in about 200 BCE, eventually swallowing it by about the turn of the millennium. From now on Greece and other Greek speaking areas such as Alexandria in Egypt were Roman provinces. Under the Romans Greek science reached a high point of sorts in the second century CE with the medical writings of Galen (129–216) and the writings of Ptolemaeus (fl. 150) on astronomy, astrology, optics, geography, and music. At this time educated Romans read the works of Greek philosophers and scientists in Greek. From the second century onwards, it was basically all downhill for Greek scholarship till Constantine I moved the capital of the empire to Byzantium, in the early fourth century, renaming it New Rome, later he would name it Constantinople. From now on the empire was split into two, the Western and Eastern Empires and whilst the Eastern Empire flourished the Western Empire continued to decline. However, neither empire produced any significant scientific advances. As already explained in the last episode, Neoplatonism in various shades was the predominant philosophical direction.
In the sixth century CE, very few people could still read Greek, so Boethius (c. 480–524) and Cassiodorus (c. 485–c. 585) both of them Neoplatonic Christians in the service of Theodoric the Great (454–526) the Ostrogoth ruler of Italy between 493 and 526, thought efforts should be made to conserve manuscripts of Greek learning and also to translate them into Latin.
Boethius set out to translate the complete works of Plato and Aristotle but actually achieved very little before he was put to death still relatively young. He only managed Aristotle’s work on logic. If he translated any other works they did not survive. He is said to have written texts on the Quadrivium–arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. He produced a loose translation of the treatise on arithmetic of the Neopythagorean Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. 60–c. 120 CE) and wrote a textbook on music both of which became standard textbooks in the Middle Ages. His purported translations of Euclid and Ptolemaeus have not survived.
Medieval illustraion of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius Source: Wikimedia Commons
Like Boethius, Cassiodorus was politically active on the court of Theodoric. When he retired he founded the monastery of Vivarium near Squillace in Calabria right down in the south of Italy. Here he wrote, amongst other things, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum (543–555), a recommended reading list, a guide for introductory learning of both “divine” and “secular” writings. The first section deals with divine literature but the second reflects what would become the seven liberal arts , the Trivium and Quadrivium–grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. Cassiodorus and his Institutiones served as a model for other Christian monasteries, to conserve and copy manuscripts of classical learning.
Frontispiece showing Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus (seated opposite Theodoric), fol. 2r of Leiden ms. vul. 46 (Gesta Theodorici), Manuscript on vellum. 186 ff., 220 x 125 mm. Fulda, dated 1176/7. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636), another Neoplatonic Christian, is generally regarded as the final figure in scholarship in classical antiquity, although he can also be regarded as a proto-scholastic. His contribution to the preservation of classical knowledge was his Etymologiae, a summa of universal knowledge. An encyclopaedia consisting of 448 chapters in 20 volumes. Written in Latin, it abridges and summarises the Roman Learning in Late Antiquity. As such he preserved many fragments of classical learning that would have been hopelessly lost. However, because of its popularity many important works were no longer copied and so lost. The Etymologiae continued to be immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages, There were at least ten printed editions between 1470 and 1530.
Isidore of Seville holding a book. Fortyfour (44) books. Text: qua rogatum eo fecit quamvis imperfectum relinquerat .. libris divisi et fuit libri quadraginta quatuor. Isidorus Source: Wikimedia Commons
The works of Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore formed the basis of the curriculum during the Middle Ages, first of the Latin schools attached to the cathedrals and then later of the undergraduate degree at the medieval universities.
Two things are important to note, firstly in opposition to a widespread popular myth, propagated by many militant atheists, Christianity and Christians were not responsible for the decline and loss of classical learning in late antiquity. In fact, the opposite is true, what survived in Europe did so because it was conserved and copied in monastery libraries, which is where much of it was found by the manuscript hunters during the Renaissance.
“Until the 12th century brought translations from Arabic sources, Isidore transmitted what western Europeans remembered of the works of Aristotle and other Greeks, although he understood only a limited amount of Greek.” This quote from the Catholic Enyclopedia indicates the next step of our story. After the decline of classical knowledge in Europe there was a brief period of less than two centuries before it began to be studied, criticised, and further developed in the Islamic Empire in Arabic translation. This raises the question as to why the newly emerging Islamic culture undertook the translation and appropriation of classical Greek learning.
In order to put this massive transition of knowledge into context we need to make a sketch of the early history of Islam. According to Islamic tradition Muhammed (570–632), born in Mecca, began to receive revelation from revelation from the Angel Gabriel in 610 at the age of forty. He began to preach, first privately, then publicly, then in 622, persecuted by the Meccans, he and his follower fled to Medina (the Hijra, emigration), the year now regarded as the birth year of Islam. Note that Isidore of Seville was still alive and compiling his Etymologia. Muhammed died in 632 and was succeeded by the first four caliphs Abū Bakr till 634, ʿUmar till 644, Uthman ibn Affan till 656, and Ali ibn Abi Talib till 661. The last three were all assassinated. Ali ibn Abi Talib’s son Hasan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib was declared caliph, but a major war broke out between different fractions and eight months after his appointment he abdicated in favour of Mu’awiya I, the governor of Syria and the founder and first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty or caliphate.
During this period Islam had expanded at a phenomenal rate and from its humble beginnings it had conquered the whole of the Arabic peninsula, the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, large parts of Byzantium and Persia, as well as the Mediterranean coast of North Africa by 1655. The Umayyad Caliphate ruled the Islamic Empire from 661 until 750, expanding it further with the conquests of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Central Asia, Sind, and parts of Chinese Turkestan.
Age of the Caliphs Expansion under Muhammad, 622-632 Expansion during the Rashidun Caliphate, 632-661 Expansion during the Umayyad Caliphate, 661-750 Shows modern borders. Source: Wikimedia Commons
During the first four caliphates Muslim were fully occupied with creating and defining their religion and expanding, through conquest, their area of influence, and had little or no interest in Ancient Greek or any other knowledge for that matter. The Umayyad Caliphate had moved the capital of the empire to Damascus, which had previously been part of Byzantium and was therefore predominantly Greek speaking. Most of the administration was also Greek speaking but they too showed no real interest in acquiring the corpus of Ancient Greek knowledge. All of this would change dramatically with the end of the Umayyad Caliphate in 750.
For various reasons the Umayyed dynasty were increasingly unpopular and in 750 they were overthrown in the ‘Abbāsid Revolution. I’m not going to detail the twists and turns in the struggle for power between the ‘Abbāsids and the Umayyads, but the ‘Abbāsids managed to forge a large coalition of Muslims and non-Muslims, which succeeded in toppling the Umayyads and leading to the establishment of the ‘AbbāsidCaliphate.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
It was now that the extraordinary appropriation of Ancient Greek knowledge began under the second ‘Abbāsid Caliph al-Manṣūr (714–775), who reigned from 754 to 775.
How extraordinary this was is explained by Dimitri Gutas:
A century and a half of Graeco-Arabic scholarship has amply documented that from about the middle of the eighth century to the end of the tenth, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books that were available throughout the Eastern Byzantine Empire and the Near East were translated into Arabic. What this means is that all the following Greek writings, other than the exceptions just noted, which have reached us from Hellenistic, Roman, and late antiquity times, and many more that have not survived in the original Greek, were subjected to the transformative magic of the translator’s pen: astrology and alchemy and the rest of the occult sciences; the subjects of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and theory of music; the entire field of Aristotelian philosophy throughout its history: metaphysics, ethics, physics, zoology, botany, and especially logic – the Organon; all the health sciences: medicine, pharmacology, and veterinary science; and various marginal genres of writing, such as Byzantine handbooks on military science (the tactica), popular collections of wisdom sayings, and even books on falconry – all these subjects passed through the hands of the translators.[1]
The translation movement, which began with the accession of the ‘Abbāsids to power and took place primarily in Baghdad, represents an astounding achievement which, independently of its significance for Greek and Arabic philology and the history of philosophy and science (the aspects that have been overwhelmingly studied to this day), can hardly be grasped and accounted for otherwise than as a social phenomenon (the aspect of which has been little investigated), To elaborate: The Graeco-Arabic translation movement lasted, first of all, well over two centuries; it was no ephemeral phenomenon. Second, it was supported by the entire elite of ‘Abbāsid society: caliphs and princes, civil servants and military leaders, merchants and bankers, and scholars and scientists; it was not the pet project of any particular group in the furtherance of their restricted agenda. Third, it was subsidized by an enormous outlay of funds, both public and private; it was no eccentric whim of a Maecenas or the fashionable affectation of a few wealthy patrons seeking to invest in a philanthropic of self-aggrandizing cause. Finally, it was eventually conducted with rigorous scholarly methodology and strict philological exactitude – by the famous Hunayn ibn-Ishāq and his associates – on the basis of a sustained program that spanned generations and which reflects in the final analysis, a social attitude and the public culture of the early ‘Abbāsid society; it was not the result of the haphazard random research interests of a few eccentric individuals who, in any age or time, might indulge in arcane philological and textual pursuits that in historical terms are proven irrelevant.[2]
Why did the ‘Abbāsids initiate this mind blowing socio-political, socio-cultural programme of intercultural translation? What motivated it? What did they intend to achieve? In what follows I will give a sketch of an answer based on the arguments presented by Dimitri Gutas in his book.
One of the ‘Abbāsids strongest allies in their rebellion against the Umayyads were the Persians both Islamic and non-Islamic. They, of course, were hoping for independence but that was not on the ‘Abbāsids agenda. To pacify the Persians and help them accept their fate the ‘Abbāsids utilised the tactic of cultural–political assimilation rather than subjugation. Most notably, they built a new capital city for the Islamic Empire in Persia, the legendary Baghdad just north of the Sassanian capital of Ctesiphon and the adopted Persian ideologies and practices, where they were not in conflict with Islam. To these belonged the mass translation of scholarly text from Greek. How this came about needs a little background.
In 750 when we say Persia, we are talking about the Sassanian Empire, which was established in 224 CE and lasted till 651 when it was conquered by the Arabs. It arose on the ruins of the Achaemenid Empire, the Persian Empire defeated by Alexander in 330 BC, when Adashir I defeated the Parthians and they regarded themselves as the true heirs of the Achaemenid Empire. The Sassanians had a myth/legend that Zoroaster, the founding prophet of their religion, was, in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian canonical scriptures, the source of all leaning. The Chinese have a similar myth concerning the Yellow Emperor, who is said to have discovered and invented everything. When Alexander conquered Persia he copied all of this leaning had it translated into Greek and sent back to Greece. He then destroyed all traces of it in Persia. Basically, everything from Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristotle et al had been stolen by Alexander from the Persians. Quoting Gutas again:
[4] In the confines of India and China, however, there survived some things [of these books] which the kings of Persia had copied and preserved there when charged to do so by their prophet Zoroaster and Gāmāsb the learned…
[6] Then Ardašīr ibn-Bābak the Sassanian sent to India and China for the books which were there and also to Byzantium. He had copies made of whatever had reached there and traced the few remains that survived in ‘Irāq. He collected those that were dispersed and brought those that had been separated.
[7] After him, his son Sābūr did the same until these books had been copied in Persian in the way in they had been [compiled by] Hermes the Babylonian who ruled over Egypt, Dorotheus the Syrian [of Sidon], Qaydarūs the Greek from the city of Athens which is famed for its science, Ptolemy the Alexandrian and Farmāsb the Indian. They commented upon them and taught them to the people in the same way in which they had learned from all those books which originated in Babylon.
[8] After Ardašīr and Sābūr, Kisrā [Chosroes I] Anūširwān [531–78] collected these books, put them together [in their proper order]. And based his acts on them on account of his desire for knowledge and love for it.[3]
This is just one of several accounts of Alexander’s theft of Persian knowledge and the attempts to retrieve it made by the Sassanians. There was an imperative in Sassanian society to retrieve the “stolen” knowledge and translate it into Pahlavi (Middle Persian). Some texts had already been translated into Pahlavi when al-Manṣūr started his programme of assimilation. He simple adopted the Sassanian imperative and set the translation moment in motion beginning by translating the Pahlavi texts into Arabic and then extending to the Greek scholarly literature which was also translated into Arabic. As already noted above the Islamic overlords more that fulfilled that imperative in which they were assisted by Persian, Jewish and Syriac Christian scholars, and translators. The latter often translated first from Greek into Syriac, an Aramaic dialect, and then into Arabic.
Much of the Pahlavi literature, which was first translated, was astrological and al-Manṣūr adopted astrology, which had previously been unknown in pre-Islamic Arabic culture, although the Umayyads dabbled they didn’t seriously adopt it. He did so in a big way because astrology played a significant role in Persian court culture where the astrologer was a valued court advisor. When he built Baghdad, he had four astrologers, the Persian court astrologer Nawbaht and his colleagues Māšā’allāh, al-Fazārī, and ‘Umar at-Tabari, determine the most fortuitus day to lay the foundation stone, 30 June 762.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The transfer of Greek and also Indian and Chinese knowledge into Arabic in the Middle Ages played a significant role in the history of the evolution of the sciences. When I first started becoming interested in the history of science main stream texts still claimed that the Arabic scholars merely preserved the Greek knowledge and added nothing new to it. We now know that this is rubbish and in the next episodes of this series I shall be looking at the Arabic contribution to the evolution of physics.
[1] Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad andEarly ‘Abbāsid Society(2nd–4th, 8th–10th centuries), Routledge, 1998 p. 1
A couple of weeks back, another Renaissance Mathematicus friend, David Hop, drew my attention once again to the same Rogan/Tyson interview, this time a longer section in which NdGT extemporises about the space telescope, Hubble, and Antoni Leeuwenhoek before he reaches the section I dissected back in May last year. As to be expected Motor-Mouth-Tyson spews out a non-stop stream of pure drivel, which truly demands the attention of the HIST_SCI HULK:
NdGT: Why do you think the Hubble Telescope…the mirror issues notwithstanding, which were ultimately fixed when, it was first launched…Why was it so successful? Version of the Hubble telescope previously launched by the military, looking down. The model for that telescope had already been conceived and built and was operating. Then we said we want one of those OK but that’s not public that this is going on. The telescope gets designed has the benefit of previous versions of it having been used successfully but looking down. We look up, this the perennial two way street astronomy in the old days and in modern times astrophysics.
One doesn’t need to be a fucking rocket scientist to recognise that a military spy satellite, looking down, is technically, optically, functionally, conceptionally different to a space telescope, looking up. But is there any truth in Tyson’s stream of verbal garbage? Now neither Hulky nor I are experts on the Hubble Telescope, it wasn’t built in the seventeenth century, but Wikipedia has good articles on the history of Hubble and on the history of military spy satellites too. Tyson could have taken the time to read them before opening his mouth. But what the hell, why ruin a good story with facts? Neil, “who cares about facts”, Tyson obviously didn’t bother.
The Hubble Space Telescope as seen from the departing Space Shuttle Atlantis, flying STS-125, HST Servicing Mission 4. Source: Wikimedia Commons
To save you having to turn to Wikipedia, a brief synopsis. We start with the military as Motor-Mouth-Tyson thinks they started the ball rolling and NASA jumped on the bus having seen that it works.
The United States Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched the first American satellite, Explorer I, for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on January 31, 1958. The information sent back from its radiation detector led to the discovery of the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts.
Wikipedia
Note the date!
The theoretical idea goes back a bit further:
Herman Potočnik explored the idea of using orbiting spacecraft for detailed peaceful and military observation of the ground in his 1928 book, The Problem of Space Travel. He described how the special conditions of space could be useful for scientific experiments. The book described geostationary satellites (first put forward by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) and discussed communication between them and the ground using radio, but fell short of the idea of using satellites for mass broadcasting and as telecommunications relays.
Wikipedia
Note once again both civil and military!
Turning to space telescopes and Hubble:
In 1923, Hermann Oberth—considered a father of modern rocketry, along with Robert H. Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky—published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (“The Rocket into Planetary Space”), which mentioned how a telescope could be propelled into Earth orbit by a rocket.
Wikipedia
So not exactly a recent idea!
The history of the Hubble Space Telescope can be traced to 1946, to astronomer Lyman Spitzer’s paper “Astronomical advantages of an extra-terrestrial observatory.”
Wikipedia
Note the date, twelve years before that first military launch of a satellite looking down!
Spitzer devoted much of his career to pushing for the development of a space telescope. In 1962, a report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recommended development of a space telescope as part of the space program, and in 1965, Spitzer was appointed as head of a committee given the task of defining scientific objectives for a large space telescope.
Wikipedia
Liman Spitzer Source: Wikimedia Commons
Also crucial was the work of Nancy Grace Roman, the “Mother of Hubble”. Well before it became an officialNASA approved, she became the program scientist, setting up the steering committee in charge of making astronomer needs feasible to implement and writing testimony to Congress throughout the 1970s to advocate continued funding of the telescope. Her work as project scientist helped set the standards for NASA’s operation of large scientific projects.
Space-based astronomy had begun on a very small scale following World War II, as scientists made use of developments that had taken place in rocket technology. The first ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun was obtained in 1946, and NASA launched the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) to obtain UV, X-ray, and gamma-ray spectra in 1962. An orbiting solar telescope was launched in 1962 by the United Kingdom as part of the Ariel programme, and in 1966 NASA launched the first Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) mission. OAO-1’s battery failed after three days, terminating the mission. It was followed by Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2(OAO-2), which carried out ultraviolet observations of stars and galaxies from its launch in 1968 until 1972, well beyond its original planned lifetime of one year.
Wikipedia
I could go on, but I think that is enough to show that the Hubble Space Telescope was definitively not a case of the civil space programme copying an idea from the military space programme and that Motor-Mouth-Tyson is, as per usual, spreading high grade bovine manure.
NdGT: The invention of the telescope [babble between Tyson and Rogan] Galileo perfects the telescope He learns that the telescope has just been invented in the Netherlands the Dutch were opticians, so they invented the telescope and the microscope within a couple of years of one another This transforms science.
The Dutch were opticians! So what? So were people all over Europe. Funnily enough the man credited with having invented the telescope, Hans Lipperhey, lived in Middelburg in the Netherlands but was actually a German. The invention of the telescope and/or microscope had nothing to do with nationality.
Rogan: Why did they invent the eyeglass the reading glass?
NdGT: The reading glass was earlier than that, but I don’t know when, The real advance was putting two lenses in line with one another. Trivial in modern times but that was a huge conceptual leap and what you would accomplish [sic] and in so doing depending on how you curve them and how you grind the shape of those lenses you would get a microscope or a telescope. And we’re off to the races!
It you are going to pontificate about the history of optics and the invention of the telescope and the microscope, you really should know when eyeglasses were invented, as one of the central questions, in that history, is why did it take so long from the invention of eyeglasses, around 1260, to the invention of the telescope in 1608? The accepted thesis in answer to this question is contained in Rolf Willach’s magisterial Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope: A Life of Influence and Exile (American Philosophical Society, 2008). Willach argues convincingly that it was not putting two lenses in line with one another that led to the telescope, several people had done that without creating a telescope, but masking or stopping down the lens. The shape or form of a hand ground lens becomes more inaccurate the further one goes from the middle. These inaccuracies in the outer areas of the lens cause a distorted image, no problem in eyeglasses where one looks through the centre of the lens, but a major problem in the attempt to create a telescope. Lipperhey was probably the first to mask or stop down the lens so that only the central, correctly ground, portion of the lens gets used to create the image.
I could write a whole book about Motor-Mouth-Tyson, “depending on how you curve them and how you grind the shape of those lenses you would get a microscope or a telescope.” Let’s just say an explanation it is somewhat wanting in more ways than one.
NdGT: That’s basically the birth of modern science as we think of it and conduct it. Because you say to yourself, my senses I don’t trust them to be the full record of what’s going on in front of me.
That the telescope and the microscope extended human perception and added new layers of empiricism to the study of nature is beyond discussion but to call it the birth of modern science is typical Motor-Mouth-Tyson hyperbole.
NdGT: You pull out a microscope, oh my gosh, Leeuwenhoek , the microscope guy, he got a drop of pond water, puts it under his microscope, just to think to do this, it’s just water, why do you think that’s something interesting to do? He said, I wonder, he was curious and puts it under and sees little, what he described as animalcules happily aswimming.
Rogan: Animalcules!
NdGT: Animalcules, these are like the amoebas and paramecia. So, he writes to…he reports on this to the scientific authorities, and they don’t believe him. They say Van Leeuwenhoek, we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter. Why would anyone believe this that there’s entire creatures, an entire universe of creatures thriving in a drop of pond water. And so, the way science works, one report does not make it true, you need verification. They sent people to the Netherlands to verify his results and there it was the birth of microscopy and then they look at everything. Cells you know, they need vocabulary to describe what you are seeing.
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Portrait by Jan Verkolje, after 1680 Source Wikimedia Commons
Leeuwenhoek now gets the Motor-Mouth-Tyson stir some half facts with a portion of liquidbovine manure and splatter the result over the listener treatment. Leeuwenhoek did not put his drop of pond water under his microscope because that is not how his single lens microscopes worked. Wait a minute didn’t our narrator just explain that to make a microscope you need to put two lenses in line with one another? If you are building a compound microscope you do indeed need at least two lenses and often more, but Leeuwenhoek is famous for the fact that he used single lens microscopes of his own special design.
A replica of a microscope by Van Leeuwenhoek Source: Wikimedia Commons
The small spherical lens is embedded in a metal plate and the specimen to be viewed in placed on the spike behind the lens and the whole apparatus is held up to the light. At the time Leeuwenhoek examined pond water with his microscope, microscopists were examining anything and everything with their microscopes, so nothing very special in this act. “He reports on this to the scientific authorities” sounds like something out of a dystopian novel by Kafka or Orwell. At the time he was corresponding with the Royal Society in London, basically, at the time, a private gentleman’s club for those interested in natural philosophy, who were publishing the results of Leeuwenhoek’s microscopic investigation in the Philosophical Transactions.
The letter with the animalcules, a term coined by Henry Oldenburg Secretary of the Royal Society, when translating from Leeuwenhoek’ original colloquial Dutch was sent in 1676 and was by no means his first letter.
.. this was for me, among all the marvels that I have discovered in nature, the most marvellous, and I must say that, for me, up to now there has been no greater pleasure in my eye as these sights of so many thousands of living creatures in a small drop of water, moving through each other, each special creature having its special motion.
Leeuwenhoeks animalcules letter to Oldenburg
The prominent Dutch physician Reinier de Graaf made Oldenburg aware of Leeuwenhoek’s investigations in a letter from 1673:
That it may be the more evident to you that the humanities and science are not yet banished among us by the clash of arms, I am writing to tell you that a certain most ingenious person here, named Leewenhoek [sic], has devised microscopes which far surpass those which we have hitherto seen, manufactured by Eustacio Divini and others. The enclosed letter from him, wherein he describes certain things which he has observed more accurately than previous authors, will afford you a sample of his work: and if it please you, and you would test the skill of this most diligent man and give him encouragement, then pray send him a letter containing your suggestions, and proposing to him more difficult problems of the same kind.
Oldenburg followed de Graaf’s suggestion and from then on the Royal Society regularly published Leeuwenhoek’s letters with his latest investigations until his death in 1723.
Motor-Mouth-Tyson’ comment, “They say Van Leeuwenhoek, we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter” is a piss poor joke and has no place in an account of the history of science. Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of single cell organisms did indeed cause some consternation because the Royal Society’s resident microscopists, Robert Hooke and Nehemiah Grew where initially unable to replicate his observations, their microscopes were not powerful enough. Later Hooke would succeed but in the meantime the Royal Society was justifiably sceptical. The situation was not improved by Leeuwenhoek’s refusal to explain his methods out of fear of being plagiarised.
Tyson is quite correct that scientific results have to be verified, usually by replication. Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, which Tyson introduces in the part of the interview that I dissected last time, were also initially met with scepticism, particularly as people were unable to replicate them. Something Tyson doesn’t mention. They were only accepted after the Jesuit astronomers of the Collegio Romano had finally succeed in replicating them.
The Royal Society did indeed send a delegation to control Leeuwenhoek’s results. This was not in anyway exceptional in the seventeenth century where personal testimony from reliable witnesses was a common form of verification. When the Royal Society doubted the accuracy of Johannes Hevelius’ astronomical observations, because he refused to use telescopic sights on his instruments, they sent Edmond Halley to Danzig to investigate the matter. The measuring of atmospheric pressure using a primitive barometer by Pascal’s brother in law, Florin Périer, was witnessed and confirmed by Minim Fathers from a local friary. Here we have an interesting aspect of personal witness verification, church officials, rather than natural philosophers, were regarded as the most reliable and trustworthy witnesses. The delegation that went to visit Leeuwenhoek to investigate his animalcules’ reports was led by Alexander Petrie, minister to the English Reformed Church in Delft; Benedict Haan, at that time Lutheran minister at Delft; and Henrik Cordes, then Lutheran minister at the Hague. The visit was for Leeuwenhoek a success and his observations were fully acknowledged by the Royal Society.
NdGT: … and there it was the birth of microscopy and then they look at everything. Cells you know, they need vocabulary to describe what you are seeing.
As I pointed out in an earlier post this was not the birth of microscopy, although Leeuwenhoek took it to a new level. Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680), Robert Hooke (1635–1703, and Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) were all prominent microscopist contemporaries of Leuwenhoek, who all started their investigations and also published some of their results before Leeuwenhoek began his investigations. The were also not to first and these scholars, particularly Robert Hooke, had already been looking at everything. Ironically, Motor-Mouth-Tyson’s example “cells” had already been discovered by Hooke. His Micrographia (1665) contains a microscopic image of the cells in cork. Hooke coined the term because he thought they looked like the monk’s cells in monasteries.
Robert Hooke’s microscopic image of cork displaying the cell structure Source: Wikimedia Commons
NdGT That was the journey down small then the journey went big, and Galileo perfects the telescope…
This is where the section of the interview that we dissected back in May last year begins. Motor-Mouth-Tyson is slowly becoming the HISTSCI_HULKS favourite punch bag although the man is so dumb, it’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. On a serious note, NdGT is wildly successful all over the Internet and almost everything he spews forth, and there’s an awful lot fit, about the history of science is either highly inaccurate or simply false and unfortunately his adoring fans don’t know better. Equally unfortunate is the fact that he simply ignores the criticisms of those who know better.
Just as the period of dominance of Aristotelian philosophy in antiquity was succeeded by the rise to dominance of Stoicism and Epicureanism, as I documented in the fifth episode of the series, so they too began to lose their hold on the world of thought in late antiquity. From the middle of the third till the middle of the seventh century CE thought in the ancient world was dominated by Neoplatonism. The term Neoplatonism is a neologism created to describe a renaissance of nominally Platonic thought that took place in this period. The term itself is to some extent misleading, whereas the terms Stoic, Peripatetic or Platonic signify a single school founder by a single philosopher with a set of doctrines developed by that founder, Neoplatonism doesn’t. To quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Late antique philosophers now counted among “the Neoplatonists” did not think of themselves as engaged in some sort of effort specifically to revive the spirit and the letter of Plato’s dialogues. To be sure, they did call themselves “Platonists” and held Plato’s views, which they understood as a positive system of philosophical doctrine, in higher esteem than the tenets of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, or any other subsequent thinker. However, and more importantly, their signature project is more accurately described as a grand synthesis of an intellectual heritage that was by then exceedingly rich and profound. In effect, they absorbed, appropriated, and creatively harmonized almost the entire Hellenic tradition of philosophy, religion, and even literature—with the exceptions of Epicureanism, which they roundly rejected, and the thoroughgoing corporealism of the Stoics. The result of this effort was a grandiose and powerfully persuasive system of thought that reflected upon a millennium of intellectual culture and brought the scientific and moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the ethics of the Stoics into fruitful dialogue with literature, myth, and religious practice. In virtue of their inherent respect for the writings of many of their predecessors, the Neoplatonists together offered a kind of meta-discourse and reflection on the sum-total of ideas produced over centuries of sustained inquiry into the human condition.
Plotinus (c. 204/5–270 CE) is regarded as the first of the Neoplatonists. Central to his philosophy and in fact to all of the Neoplatonists is monism expressed through the concepts of the One and Henosis.
Head in white marble. Ostia Antica, Museo, inv. 436. Neck broken through diagonally, head broken into two halves and reconstructed. Lower half of nose is missing. One of four replicas which were all discovered in Ostia. The identification as Plotinus is plausible but not proven. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Plotinus taught that there is a supreme, totally transcendent “One”, containing no division, multiplicity, or distinction; beyond all categories of being and non-being. His “One” “cannot be any existing thing”, nor is it merely the sum of all things (compare the Stoic doctrine of disbelief in non-material existence), but “is prior to all existents”. Plotinus identified his “One” with the concept of ‘Good’ and the principle of ‘Beauty’. (Wikipedia)
Henosis is the word for mystical “oneness”, “union”, or “unity” in classical Greek. In Platonism, and especially Neoplatonism, the goal of henosis is union with what is fundamental in reality: the One the Source, or Monad. (Wikipedia)
Plotinus was succeeded by his pupil Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234–c. 305 CE),
Porphire Sophiste, in a French 16th-century engraving Source: Wikimedia Commons
who was in turn succeeded by his pupil Iamblichus (c. 245–c. 325 CE).
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Both Theon of Alexandria (c. 335–c. 405 CE) and his daughter Hypatia (c. 360–c. 415 CE) were Neoplatonists but their philosophy differed from that of the acolytes of Iamblichus, which dominated Neoplatonic thought in Alexandria during their time.
The Neoplatonic philosopher-mathematicians produced commentaries on and annotated editions of the major Greek mathematical works. Theon was a textbook editor, who produced annotated edition of Euclid’s Elements, Euclid’s Data, his Optics and Ptolemaios’ Mathēmatikē Syntaxis. Theon’s edition of the Elements was, until the nineteenth century, the only surviving edition.
Theon of Alexandria is best known for having edited the existing text of Euclid’s Elements, shown here in a ninth-century manuscript Vatican Library via Wikimedia Commons
We have no surviving works by Hypatia but the Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopaedia of the ancient Mediterranean world lists three mathematical works for her, which it states have all been lost. The Suda credits her with commentaries on the Conic Sections of the third-century BCE Apollonius of Perga, the “Astronomical Table” and the Arithemica of the second- and third-century CE Diophantus of Alexandria. Alan Cameron, however, argues convincingly that she in fact edited the surviving text of Ptolemaeus’ Handy Tables, (the second item on the Suda list) normally attributed to her father Theon as well as a large part of the text of the Almagest her father used for his commentary. Only six of the thirteen books of Apollonius’ Conic Sections exist in Greek; historians argue that the additional four books that exist in Arabic are from Hypatia, a plausible assumption. So once again, what we have is that Hypatia was like her father a textbook editor.
Proclus Lycius (412–185) wrote a commentary on Euclid’s Elements. According to Thomas Heath in volume one of his edition of The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements:
It is well known that the commentary of Proclus on Eucl. Book I is one of the two main sources of information as to the history of Greek geometry which we possess, the other being the Collection of Pappus.
First Latin edition of one of the major works by Proclus Lycaeus (412-485), founder and head of the neo-Platonic school of Athens: a commentary on the first book of Euclid’s “Elements of Geometry”, Source: Wikimedia Commons
Pappus of Alexandria (fl. 320) produced an encyclopaedic compendium of ancient Greek geometry, astronomy , and mechanics in eight books entitled, Synagoge (Συναγωγή) or Collection. This work, whilst highly important as a record of the history of Greek mathematics, remained virtually unknown until the sixteenth century when it was translated and published by Federico Commandino (1509–1575) in 1588. It became influential in the seventeeth century. The Suda credits him with a commentary on the first four books of Ptolemaios’ Mathēmatikē Syntaxis, now lost. He also wrote commentaries on Euclid’s Elements fragments of which are preserved in Proclus and on Ptolemaios’ Ἁρμονικά (Harmonika), now lost.
Title page of Pappus’s Mathematicae Collectiones, translated into Latin by Federico Commandino (1588). Source: Wikimedia Commons
Apart from small odds and ends, such as Pappus’ hexagon theorem in projective geometry, these Neoplatonic philosopher-mathematicians produced very little original work. However, their role in recording and conserving Greek mathematical works should not be underestimated.
The non-mathematical Neoplatonic philosophers also contributed almost nothing new to the roots of the discipline of physics that I have sketched in the previous episodes of this series but their obsessively inclusive, eclectic agglomeration of the works of earlier Greek philosophers, in particular Plato and Aristotle, meant that these works that had slid into the background during the dominance of Stoicism and Epicureanism was once again brought into the foreground and passed on down to future generations.
All three of the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam took a strong interest in Neoplatonism because of its strongly monist core and often became first acquainted with the works of Plato, Aristotle, and other earlier Greek philosophers through Neoplatonic sources rather than through the originals. In the history of science transmission of sources often takes indirect roots.
Above I said that Neoplatonic philosophers also contributed almost nothing new to the roots of the discipline of physics, however, there is one very notable exception, the sixth century Christian, Neoplatonist John Philoponus (c. 490–c. 570) of Alexandria. Philoponus was a pupil and sometime amanuensis of the Neoplatonist philosopher Ammonius Hermiae (C. 440–c. 520),who was also from Alexandria but had studied in Athens under Proclus before returning to Alexandria to teach. He lectured on Plato, Aristotle and Porphyry of Tyre, as well as on astronomy and geometry. As is often the case most of his supposed numerous writings have not survived. He is known to have lectured and written extensively over Aristotle as did Philoponus his pupil. However, whereas Ammonius seems to have been positive in his assessments of Aristotle, Philoponus was highly critical.
Amongst his voluminous writings Philoponus wrote extensive critiques of almost all of Aristotle’s texts of which in our context a couple are of great importance. As a Christian Philoponus rejected Aristotle’s concept of an eternal cosmos, replacing it with a cosmos created by God in its entirety in one moment. Because his cosmos was a single unified whole he rejected Aristotle’s division of the cosmos into supralunar and sublunar regions. The cosmos was overall the same and subject to the same laws. In this he was following the Stoics, and his philosophy is heavily influenced by Stoic concepts. Philoponus also anticipates Descartes in stating that bodies have extension in space.
Most important in the history of physics Philoponus rejects both Aristotle’s concept of fall and his concept of projectile motion. It seems that, unlike Galileo, Philoponus really did drop objects of differing weight from a tower and concluded that they fall almost at the same speed:
“if one lets fall simultaneously from the same height two bodies differing greatly in weight, one will find that the ratio of their times of motion does not correspond does not correspond to the ration of their weights, but that the difference in time is a very small one” (In Physica, 683, 17).[1]
He dismisses Aristotle’s theory of projectile motion and produces what would later become known as the theory of impetus an important precursor to the theory of inertia.
“some incorporeal kinetic power is imparted by the thrower to the object thrown “and that” if an arrow or a stone is projected by force in a void, the same things will happen much more easily, nothing being necessary except the thrower” (ibid, 641, 29).
Denying Aristotle’s distinction between sublunar and supralunar motion, Philoponus also applied his impetus concept to the motion of the planets.
Because of his deviant religious views on the nature of the Trinity, Philoponus was declared anathema at the Third Council of Constantinople, which limited the reception of his anti-Aristotelian dynamics in late antiquity, but his works were translated into Syriac and Arabic where they would have a significant influence as we shall see in future episodes.
Philoponus was the first philosopher to go beyond the dynamics of Aristotle and his concepts are the beginnings of the path that would eventually lead to the modern theories of that branch of physics.
As I explained at the very beginning of this series the Greek concept ta physika was very different from what we envision when we hear the word physics today. In fact, this series is an attempt to sketch the path from the ta physika of Greek antiquity to the emergence of our modern physics in the Early Modern Period. We can find fragments of the roots of physics is various different areas of thought in antiquity and I have already looked at the philosophers, the mathematicians, the astronomers, ancient Greek optics, and statics. Today, I will turn my attention to the engineers, which means basically the first century BCE Roman architect, Vitruvius (c. 75–after c. 15 BCE)
A 1684 depiction of Vitruvius presenting De Architectura to Augustus. Source: Wikimedia Commons
and the first century CE Greek engineer and mathematician, Hero of Alexandria (fl. 60 CE).
Image of Hero of Alexandria from a 1688 German translation of Hero’s Pneumatics Source: Wikimedia Commons
Although there are other aspects to their work the principal reason for including them is their work on machines, as I pointed out in the last episode, mechanics comes from study of machines.
Greek μηχανική mēkhanikḗ, lit. “of machines” and in antiquity it is literally the discipline of the so-called simple machines: lever, wheel and axel, pulley, balance, inclined plane, wedge, and screw.
As I explained in my series on Renaissance Science the re-emergence of the works of Vitruvius and Hero in the Renaissance triggered a whole culture of artist engineers and of machine books, both of which played a significant role in the cross over between the theoretical book knowledge of the scholastics and the practical knowledge of the artisans or better said the dissolving of the boundary between them creating a meld between the two types of knowledge that would over the next two and a half centuries lead to the modern concept of knowledge or science. Whereas the early knowledge of machines consisted of how they function and how to construct them, the emerging modern physics explained why they work.
Both Vitruvius and Hero of Alexandria were building on a long tradition of machine-building, Ancient Greek engineers, most of whose work has not survived but who are referenced by later authors such as Vitruvius, Hero, and Pliny. We have the fourth century BCE military engineer Polyidus of Thessaly, who served under Philip II of Macedon (382–336) and his two students Diades of Pella and Charias, all three of whom are referenced by Vitruvius in his own section on siege engines in Book X of De architectura.
Polyidus of Thessaly is credited with the Helepolis siege tower, shown as model above Source: Wikimedia Commons
They are also included in a list of “those who have written about machines” in the preface to Book VII on Finishing:
…those who have written about machines like Diades, Archytas, Archimedes, Ctesibios, Nymphodoros, Philo of Byzantium, Diphilos, Democles, Charias, Polyidos, Pyrrhos, and Agesistratos.
Taken from Vitruvius Ten Books on Architecture Ed. Ingrid D Rowland & Thomas Nobel Howe
Nymphodoros, Diphilos, and Democles are not otherwise known. Pyrrhos (318–272 BCE), King of Epirus, was a renowned military strategist, who wrote a thesis on siegecraft.
A marble bust of Pyrrhos from the Villa of the Papyri at the Roman site of Herculaneum, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, Italy Source: Wikimedia Commons
I have a separate post on Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BCE), who is without doubt the most well-known engineer in antiquity. Archytas (c. 420–c. 355 BCE) was a mathematician associated with the Pythagoreans. He is thought to have been a pupil of the Pythagorean, Philolaus (c. 470–c. 385 BCE) and to have been the teacher of Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 390–c. 340 BCE). Like many figures in antiquity much was written about him but none of his own writings have survived. He is credited with the creation of the concept of the quadrivium–arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy–which became the basis of mathematical education first on the Latin schools and later the universities in the Middle Ages. Vitruvius’ Book X Chapters 13, 14, and 15 are almost identical to chapters on siegecraft from the Περὶ μηχανημάτων Perì mēchanēmátōn (On Machines) by Athenaeus Mechanicus (fl. mid-to-late 1st century BCE) and the, no longer extant book, of Agesistratos (late 2nd century BCE), about whom almost nothing in known, is thought to be the common source.
This just leaves Ctesibios and Philo of Byzantium from Vitruvius’ list. Ctesibios (fl. 285–222 BCE) wrote extensively on compressed air, i.e. pneumatics, but none of his work survives. However, he is referenced by Athenaeus, Vitruvius, Pliny, Proclus, and Philo of Byzantium.
Hydraulic clock of Ctesibius, reconstruction at the Technological Museum of Thessaloniki Source: Wikimedia Commons
Philo of Byzantium (c. 280–c. 220 BCE), also known as Philo Mechanicus, only gets referenced by Vitruvius, Hero, and the mathematician Eutocius of Ascalon (c. 480s–c. 520s CE), who discussed his method for doubling a cube. Almost nothing is known about him, other than that he spent most of his life in Alexandria. He left only one known work is an encyclopaedic book on mechanics the Syntaxis (Μηχανική Σύνταξη, Mēkhanikḗ Sýntaxē). This only survives in fragments, but internal references allow us to recreate the titles of all nine sections:
Peri Epistolon (Περὶ Ἐπιστολῶν, Perì Epistolō̂n) – On Letters (coding and hidden letters for military use)
Belopoeica, Parasceuastica, and Poliorcetica are extant in Greek, as are fragments of Isagoge and Automatopoeica. For a long time only the first sixteen chapters of Pneumatica were known in a Latin translation of an Arabic text but in the early twentieth century three new fuller Arabic manuscripts were found, one in the Bodleian and two in the library of the Hagia Sophia.
Philo of Byzantium. Pneumatica: Facsimile and Transcript of the Latin … 534, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munchen
As can be seen Vitruvius and Hero are part of a tradition of Greek mechanics that extends over more than five centuries but it is only with the two of them that we have complete books that were rediscovered, translated, and printed in the Early Modern Period, contributing significantly to the practical turn that was an important feature of the emergence of modern science.
Once again with Vitruvius, we have a figure from antiquity about whom we know very little. He seems to have worked in some capacity for Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE) and as a military engineer for Caesar’s grandnephew and adopted heir, Gaius Octavius (63 BCE–14 CE), later the Emperor Augustus. Upon retirement he came under the patronage of Augustus’ sister Octavia Minor (c. 66–11 BCE).
He is, of course, renowned as the author of De ArchitecturaLibri Decem, (Ten Books on Architecture), which is actually a description not a title, signifying ten parchment scrolls on the subject of architecture. As with the Elements of Euclid, there is a discussion as to whether Vitruvius actually wrote all ten books or merely brought together and edited the contents produced by several authors. The ten books are:
Book 1: First Principles and the Layout of Cities
Book 2: Building Materials
Book 3: Temples
Book 4: Corinthian, Doric, and Tuscan Temples
Book 5: Public Buildings
Book 6: Private Buildings
Book 7: Finishing
Book 8: Water
Book 9: Astronomy, Sundials and Clocks
Book 10: Machines
Viewed from our standpoint a peculiar mixture of themes but in antiquity there existed no division between architecture and mechanical engineering. In fact, service as a military engineer, like Vitruvius, was one of the two available sources for architectural training. The other was an apprenticeship as a builder. Although this seems strange to us now, we should remember that Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), who wrote the first architectural treatise in the Renaissance, De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building) based on Vitruvius, written between 1443 and 1452 but published in 1485 as the first printed book on architecture, was a mathematician, who considered mathematics as the foundation of the arts and the sciences. Also following the Great Fire of London in 1666, the two architects who rebuilt London were Christopher Wren (1632–1723), astronomer, mathematician and physicist, and Robert Hooke (1635–1703), a polymath, who was predominantly a physicist Neither of them was a trained architect.
Of the ten books, it is the last three that in the Early modern period had an influence on the emergence of physics. Book 8, which deals with the practical side of water supplies is in some respects a treatise on applied hydrostatics.
All illustration from Vitruvius taken from Vitruvius Ten Books on Architecture Ed. Ingrid D Rowland & Thomas Nobel Howe, CUP, ppb. 2001 There are many more and I heartily recommend this book
Book 9 deals with time a central theme in physics and the water clocks that he describes also, like parts of Book 8, an application of hydrostatics, with the more complex ones also involving the construction of machines.
It is Book 10 he opens up the full panoply of mechanics, the construction of machines. We find pully systems, cranes for building sites, cranes for ships and harbours, methods for hauling large blocks, winches, water wheels, bucket chains, the water screw, water pumps, hydraulic organs, hodometers (a mileometer) on land and on water, and to close a wide range of military weapons and siege engines. All of these machines are on a theoretical level examples of applied physics and explaining how and why they worked in terms of forces was a natural consequence of the Renaissance machine culture that Vitruvius’s book helped to inspire.
Note the aeolipile in the middle of the second row under Pneumatic
Included amongst Vitruvius’ machines is the toy steam engine, the aeolipile, which is most commonly associated with Hero of Alexandria to whom we now turn.
Illustration accompanying Hero’s entry in Pneumatica, published in the first century AD. “No. 50. The Steam-Engine. PLACE a cauldron over a fire: a ball shall revolve on a pivot. A fire is lighted under a cauldron, A B, (fig. 50), containing water, and covered at the mouth by the lid C D; with this the bent tube E F G communicates, the extremity of the tube being fitted into a hollow ball, H K. Opposite to the extremity G place a pivot, L M, resting on the lid C D; and let the ball contain two bent pipes, communicating with it at the opposite extremities of a diameter, and bent in opposite directions, the bends being at right angles and across the lines F G, L M. As the cauldron gets hot it will be found that the steam, entering the ball through E F G, passes out through the bent tubes towards the lid, and causes the ball to revolve, as in the case of the dancing figures.” Source: Wikimedia Commons
Unlike Philo of Byzantium and Vitruvius, who each only wrote one book, Hero left us with several works and that is all that he left us. As one source put it, apart from his works we know nothing at all about him. The earliest mention of his works is by Pappus around 300 CE and he himself quotes Archimedes making c. 250 BCE another terminus. He has been dated from 150 BCE to 250 CE, but Otto Neugebauer demonstrated that a lunar eclipse that Hero describes, in his Dioptra, having observed took place in 62 CE, hence flourished c. 60 CE.
Hero was a mathematician and an engineer and based on his texts he is judged by historians to have been a practical man rather than a scholar, although some of his texts appear to be the lectures of a teacher. His work also shows him to have carried out much in the way of experiments. His surviving works are:
Pneumatica (Πνευματικά), a description of machines working on air, steam or water pressure, including the hydraulis or water organ
Automata, a description of machines which enable wonders in banquets and possibly also theatrical contexts by mechanical or pneumatical means (e.g. automatic opening or closing of temple doors, statues that pour wine and milk, etc.)
Mechanica, preserved only in Arabic, written for architects, containing means to lift heavy objects
Metrica, a description of how to calculate surfaces and volumes of diverse objects
On the Dioptra, a collection of methods to measure lengths, a work in which the odimeter and the dioptra, an apparatus which resembles the theodolite, are described
Belopoeica, a description of war machines
Catoptrica, about the progression of light, reflection, and the use of mirrors
Automata by Hero of Alexandria (1589 edition) Source: Wikimedia CommonsSpiritali di Herone Alessandrino ridotti in lingua volgare da Alessandro Giorgi da Vrbino. – In Vrbino : appresso Bartholomeo, e Simone Ragusij fratelli, 1592. – [4], 82 c. : ill. ; 4º Source: Wikimedia CommonsModern reconstruction of wind organ and wind wheel of Heron of Alexandria (1st century AD) according to W. Schmidt: Herons von Alexandria Druckwerke und Automatentheater, Greek and German, 1899 (Heronis Alexandrini opera I, Reprint 1971), p. 205, fig. 44; cf. introduction p. XXXIX Source: Wikimedia Commons
There are other works attributed to him, but the attributions are considered doubtful. As can be seen, apart from the Catoptics, which I dealt with separately in the episode on optics, his surviving work covers much of the same territory as the mechanical chapters of Vitruvius Like Vitruvius, Hero was a major influence on the evolution of the anti-scholastic scientific thought, when his texts became known in the Early Modern Period.
Having in the last two episodes dealt with the first two of the three so-called mixed sciences, astronomy and optics, I shall now deal with statics[1]. Although receiving far less attention in antiquity that the other two, statics received much attention in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period and went on to become a constituent of modern physics, defined thus:
Statics is the branch of classical mechanics that is concerned with the analysis of force and torque acting on a physical system that does not experience an acceleration, but rather, is in equilibrium with its environment. (Wikipedia)
In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the concept of force did not exist, so we here find the discipline developed around the concept of weight. Statics is one half of the discipline of mechanics from the ancient Greek μηχανική mēkhanikḗ, lit. “of machines” and in antiquity it is literally the discipline of the so-called simple machines: lever, wheel and axel, pulley, balance, inclined plane, wedge, and screw.
Given that statics plays a major roll in engineering it is not surprising to find that Archimedes wrote one of the two principal texts on the subject in antiquity.
Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BCE), whose work on the topic was his On the Equilibrium of Planes (Ancient Greek: Περὶ ἐπιπέδων ἱσορροπιῶν, Romanised: perí epipédōn isorropiôn) was not the first to tackle the subject.
Archimedes’ first suppositio: On plane equilibrium, Heiberg 1881, p. 142.
His work was preceded by a text known in Latin as the Questiones Mechanicae (Mechanical Problems), which in the Middle Ages was attributed to Aristotle (384–322 BCE) but is now considered to actually be by one of his followers or by some to be based on the earlier work of the Pythagorean Archytas (c.420–350 BCE).
Greek edition of the Questiones Mechanicae printed in Paris: Andreas Wechel, 1566.
There was also a On the Balance attributed, almost certainly falsely to Euclid (fl. 300 BCE), which won’t play a further role here. Later than Archimedes there was the Mechanica of Hero of Alexandria (c. 10–c. 70 CE), unknown in the phase of the Renaissance we shall be reviewing but discussed along with the work of Archimedes in Book VII of the Synagoge or Collection of Pappus (c. 290–c. 350 CE).
The two major texts are the pseudo-Aristotelian Questiones Mechanicae and Archimedes’ On the Equilibrium of Planes, which approach the topic very differently. The Questiones Mechanicae is a philosophical work, which derives everything from a first principle that all machines are reducible to circular motion. It gives an informal proof of the law of the lever without reference to the centre of gravity. The pseudo-Euclidian on the Balance contains a mathematical proof of the law of the lever, again without reference to the centre of gravity.
Pages from the Questiones MechanicaePages from the Questiones Mechanicae
In Archimedes’ On the Equilibrium of Planes the centre of gravity plays a very prominent role. In the first volume Archimedes presents seven postulates and fifteen propositions using the centre of gravity to mathematically demonstrate the law of the lever.
Diagram to P6, 7. Two magnitudes, whether commensurable[Prop. 6] or incommensurable [Prop. 7], balance at distances reciprocally proportional to the magnitudes. Archimedes. “On the Equilibrium of Planes or The Centres of Gravity of Planes, Book I”. In The Works of Archimedes. Ed. T.L. Heath. Cambridge UP, 1897.
The volume closes with demonstrations of the centres of gravity of the parallelogram, the triangle, and the trapezoid. Centres of gravity are a part of statics because they are the point from which, when a figure is suspended it remains in equilibrium, that is unmoving. In volume two of his text Archimedes presents ten propositions relating to the centres of gravity of parabolic sections. This is achieved by substituting rectangles of equal area, a process made possible by his work Quadrature of the Parabola (Greek: Τετραγωνισμὸς παραβολῆς).
[1] This very short post is largely a repeat of the longer post on statics that I wrote in my Renaissance Science series of blog posts. However rather than simply refer to the earlier text by direct link I decided to include it here in this series for completeness sake.
Robert Norman’s The Newe Attractive (1581) was the most scientific study of magnetism and the magnetic compass between Petrus Peregrinus’ Epistola de magnete from 1269 and William Gilbert’s De Magnete from 1600 and like the former featured strongly in the latter.
As is all too often the case with comparatively minor Renaissance figures we know next to nothing about Robert Norman. His dates of birth and death are unknown and all that is known about his origins is that they were humble. According to his own account he spent eighteen or twenty years at sea before he settled down at Ratliffe (Ratcliff) part of the Manor and Ancient Parish of Stepney on the north bank of the Thames between Limehouse (to the east) and Shadwell (to the west), as an instrument maker and self-styled ‘hydrographer’.
The Hamlet (administrative sub-division) of Ratcliff in Joel Gascoyne’s 1703 map of the Parish of Stepney Source: Wikimedia Commons
Ratcliffe in earlier times was also known as “sailor town”. It was originally known for shipbuilding but from the fourteenth century more for fitting and provisioning ships. In the sixteenth century various voyages of discovery were supplied and departed from Ratcliffe, including those of Willoughby and Frobisher.
Wikipedia
Norman’s principal claim to fame is as the discoverer of the second deviation of the magnetic compass needle, after variation or declination, magnetic dip or inclination. This, as observed by Norman, was the fact that the compass needles that he made did not sit horizontally on the middle point but the north end dip down at the north end, as he described it in chapter three of his The Newe Attractive:
“…rising alwaies to finish and end the, before I touched the needle I found continually that after I touched the Irons … the North point … would bende under the Horizon…”
The modern definition:
Magnetic dip, dip angle, or magnetic inclination is the angle made with the horizontal by the Earth’s magnetic field lines. This angle varies at different points on the Earth’s surface. Positive values of inclination indicate that the magnetic field of the Earth is pointing downward, into the Earth, at the point of measurement, and negative values indicate that it is pointing upward. The dip angle is in principle the angle made by the needle of a vertically held compass. (Wikipedia)
Strictly speaking Norman was not the first to discover magnetic dip, that honour goes to the Franconian astronomer, mathematician and instrument maker, Georg Hartmann (1489–1564), who discovered it in 1544 and described it, with a lot of other information on magnetism and compasses, in a letter he wrote to Duke Albrecht of Prussia (1490–1568). However, he never published his discovery, and the letter to Albrecht only became known in the nineteenth century, so the laurels for the discovery are usually awarded to Norman. On a side note, Hartmann measured the magnetic variation of Rome in 1510 finding it to be 6°.
Georg Hartmann Source: Astronomie in Nürnberg
Norman first noticed the dip on a six-inch compass needle that he had manufactured and initially thought that it had been somehow spoilt during the making process. He devised a series of experiments to try and find the cause and discovered that the needle was OK, and the cause was some attractive power of the Earth. Having discovered that dip was a natural phenomenon and constructed a dip-circle and measured the angle of dip for London that he measured accurately as 71° 51’.
Figure of a dip circle, illustrating magnetic dip Robert Norman – Page 17 of The Newe Attractive via Wikimedia Commons
The discovery of magnetic dip and Norman’s invention of the dip-circle to measure it led to speculation that dip could be used to determine latitude by overcast skies in the same way that it had been hoped to determine longitude by magnetic variation. Although, the dip-circle became a standard piece of the navigator’s equipment throughout the seventeenth century its use to determine latitude never came about.
Having dealt with the phenomenon of magnetic dip in a scientific manner, Robert Norman also turned his attention to magnetic variation. He dismissed the widespread idea that variation was by proportion around the globe and could thus be used to determine longitude citing the observed vagaries of variation. His comments were based on twenty years of experience at sea and the fact that the only people who gave him reliable figures for variation were those engaged in the Muscovy trade, and these did not in any way support the thesis. His book appears to have been the first publication to have an illustration of a compass card with a true north south meridian and a true east west line and then a compass north south line and a false east west line explain and indicating variation.
One important aspect of Norman’s studies of the magnetic compass is that he changed the perception of what actually took place when a compass needle stopped swinging. In the first post in this series, we briefly touched upon the supposed places to which the needle was drawn or attracted, the North Pole, the Pole star, a magnetic mountain or island etc. Norman saw it differently, to quote William Gilbert in his De Magnete:
Robert Norman, an Englishman, posits a point and place to which magnet looks (but whereto it is) not drawn : toward which magnetised iron, according to him is collimated but does not attract it.
Norman also instructed mariners to ensure that their compasses and marine charts had been made by the same people in the same locations. This was to ensure that they were based on the same value for magnetic variation. A compass combined with a marine chart from two different locations based on different variation values could and did lead to serious navigation problems on the open sea. He included a table of five different sorts of sailing compasses with their corresponding marine charts.
David Waters, The Art of Navigation (Henry C. Taylor, 1958) p. 155
The Newe Attractive contained other material useful to navigators. The 1585 second edition contained a Regiment of the Seas “exactlie calculated unto the minute” valid for thirty years and presented in the same form as Medina and William Bourne, which contained a wealth of useful information.
and as I wrote in the episode on Borough the book contained Borough’s A Discourse on the Variation, which was specifically written to be included as an appendix.
This treated the problem of variation “both Practically and Mathematically,” for the enlightenment of the simple and also the learned sort of mariner. Borough’s text contains a lot of polemic on the necessity of learning mathematics for navigation and also urging mariners to determine and record compass variation on their voyages. For this purpose, Robert Norman designed and constructed a new, improved variation compass to make the task of determining variation easier. Borough also strongly supported Norman’s rejection of the idea that variation was by proportion around the globe.
The combined Norman/Borough book went through new expanded and improved editions in 1585, 1592, 1611, and 1614.
In 1584, Norman published a second book, The Safegard of Sailers, or, Great Rutter, a manual of coastal sailing mostly translated from Dutch sources but with additional content of his own.
This book was dedicated to Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham and Lord High Admiral of England.
Charles Howard (1536-1624), 1st Earl of Nottingham *oil on canvas *208.5 x 139.5 cm *ca. 1620 *inscribed b.l.: Carolus Baro. Howard de Effingham, Comes Nottingham, summus Angliae Admirallus – Ductor Classium 1588 -. Obijt anno 1624. Aetat. 88 Source: Wikimedia Commons
The main thing that distinguishes Robert Norman from other English writers on navigation, magnetism, and the compass in the sixteenth century is the systematic series of experiment that he designed and carried out first, to determine if magnetic dip was a real natural phenomenon and secondly to conceive and construct the dip circle to measure dip. In his ODNB article on Robert Norman, Jim Bennett[1] wrote:
Norman has attracted considerable interest on account of his self-conscious adoption of an experimental approach and his unusual application of instruments. He was deploying his dip circle at a time when instruments were associated not with natural philosophy but with applications of mathematics to practical arts. He was sensitive that, as an ‘unlearned mechanician’, he would scarcely have been expected to concern himself with an area of practical mathematics relevant to natural philosophy, but he vigorously asserted the worth of investigations by practical men, who had the relevant art ‘at their finger ends’, while their more learned critics were ‘in their studies amongest their bookes’. Norman saw himself and his fellow mechanics as heirs to the vernacular tradition of mathematical publication, exemplified by the works of Robert Recorde and Billingsley’s English translation of Euclid.
[1] Jim Bennett was a truly great historian of scientific instruments and history of science museum curator, first in Cambridge at the Whipple and then in Oxford at the History of Science Museum. Sadly he died last Saturday, 28 October 2023, whilst I was using his article to write this blog post.
If your philosophy of [scientific] history claims that the sequence should have been A→B→C, and it is C→A→B, then your philosophy of history is wrong. You have to take the data of history seriously.
John S. Wilkins 30th August 2009
Culture is part of the unholy trinity—culture, chaos, and cock-up—which roam through our versions of history, substituting for traditional theories of causation. – Filipe Fernández–Armesto “Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration”
The Renaissance Mathematicus 