The Scientific Revolution

From The Scientific Revolution
(pp. 1-4, 96-100)

(Posted July 24, 1998 · Issue 35)

Editor's note: In The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin effects something of a revolution of his own, as he reexamines some long-established ideas concerning the beginnings of modern scientific thought and practice. Shapin argues that the Scientific Revolution of the late 16th to early 18th centuries did not in fact happen, or at least, not as the cataclysmic and autonomous event related by traditional histories. Moving easily from big picture to specific detail, Shapin weaves a rich new tapestry of scientific history and invites us to look at it from many angles. Here, the author introduces his themes, and later describes the development of the air pump, one of the most important machines of the Scientific Revolution, and its significance as both instrument and metaphor.

The Scientific Revolution: The History of a Term

There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it. Some time ago, when the academic world offered more certainty and more comforts, historians announced the real existence of a coherent, cataclysmic, and climactic event that fundamentally and irrevocably changed what people knew about the natural world and how they secured proper knowledge of that world. It was the moment at which the world was made modern, it was a Good Thing, and it happened sometime during the period from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. In 1943 the French historian Alexandre Koyré celebrated the conceptual changes at the heart of the Scientific Revolution as "the most profound revolution achieved or suffered by the human mind" since Greek antiquity. It was a revolution so profound that human culture "for centuries did not grasp its bearing or meaning; which, even now, is often misvalued and misunderstood." A few years later the English historian Herbert Butterfield famously judged that the Scientific Revolution "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes. . . . [It is] the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality." It was, moreover, construed as a conceptual revolution, a fundamental reordering of our ways of thinking about the natural. In this respect, a story about the Scientific Revolution might be adequately told through an account of radical changes in the fundamental categories of thought. To Butterfield, the mental changes making up the Scientific Revolution were equivalent to "putting on a new pair of spectacles." And to A. Rupert Hall it was nothing less than "a priori redefinition of the objects of philosophical and scientific inquiry."

This conception of the Scientific Revolution is now encrusted with tradition. Few historical episodes present themselves as more substantial or more self-evidently worthy of study. There is an established place for accounts of the Scientific Revolution in the Western liberal curriculum, and this book is an attempt to fill that space economically and to invite further curiosity about the making of early modern science [1]. Nevertheless, like many twentieth-century "traditions," that contained in the notion of the Scientific Revolution is not nearly as old as we might think. The phrase "the Scientific Revolution" was not in common use before Alexandre Koyré gave it wider currency in 1939. And it was not until 1954 that two books - written from opposite ends of the historiographic spectrum - used it as a main title: A. Rupert Hall's Koyré-influenced The Scientific Revolution [2] and a volume of J.D. Bernal's Marxist Science in History called The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Although many seventeenth-century practitioners expressed their intention to bring about radical intellectual change, they used no such term to refer to what they were doing.

From antiquity through the early modern period, a "revolution" invoked the idea of a periodically recurring cycle. In Copernicus's new astronomy of the mid-sixteenth century, for example, the planets completed their revolutions round the sun, while references to political revolutions gestured at the notion of ebbs and flows or cycles - fortune's wheel - in human affairs. The idea of revolution as a radical and irreversible reordering developed together with linear, unidirectional conceptions of time. In this newer conception revolution was not recurrence but its reverse, the bringing about of a new state of affairs that the world had never witnessed before and might never witness again. Not only this notion of revolution but also the beginnings of an idea of revolution in science date from the eighteenth-century writings of French Enlightenment philosophes who liked to portray themselves, and their disciplines, as radical subverters of ancien régime culture. (Some of the seventeenth-century writers this book is concerned with saw themselves not as bringing about totally new states of affairs but as restoring or purifying old ones.) The notion of a revolution as epochal and irreversible change, it is possible, was first applied in a systematic way to events in science and only later to political events. In just this sense, the first revolutions may have been scientific, and the "American," "French," and "Russian Revolutions" are its progeny.

As our understanding of science in the seventeenth century has changed in recent years, so historians have become increasingly uneasy with the very idea of "the Scientific Revolution." Even the legitimacy of each word making up that phrase has been individually contested. Many historians are now no longer satisfied that there was any singular and discrete event, localized in time and space, that can be pointed to as "the" Scientific Revolution. Such historians now reject even the notion that there was any single coherent cultural entity called "science" in the seventeenth century to undergo revolutionary change. There was, rather, a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world, each with different characteristics and each experiencing different modes of change. We are now much more dubious of claims that there is anything like "a scientific method" - a coherent, universal, and efficacious set of procedures for making scientific knowledge - and still more skeptical of stories that locate its origin in the seventeenth century, from which time it has been unproblematically passed on to us. And many historians do not now accept that the changes wrought on scientific beliefs and practices during the seventeenth century were as "revolutionary" as has been widely portrayed. The continuity of seventeenth-century natural philosophy with its medieval past is now routinely asserted, while talk of "delayed" eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutions in chemistry and biology followed hard upon historians' identification of "the" original Scientific Revolution.

How to Make an Experimental Fact

Figure 1

Just as the mechanical metaphor lay at the heart of new strands of natural philosophy, so mechanical means came to assume a new importance in making knowledge. This stress on artificially contrived experiments is nowhere more apparent than in research programs associated with the Royal Society of London (founded in 1660) and especially with its most influential fellow, Robert Boyle. The air pump invented for Boyle by his assistant Robert Hooke in the late 1650s swiftly became emblematic of what it was to do experimental natural philosophy (figure 1). It was the Scientific Revolution's greatest fact-making machine. How did the air pump work? How was it reckoned to make factual scientific knowledge? And how was the resulting knowledge offered as a remedy for existing intellectual ills and as an exemplar of how properly scientific knowledge ought to be produced? The following pages offer a vignette of a specific, highly influential set of knowledge-making practices, while later sections warn against the assumption that they were universally approved, even by fellow modern mechanical philosophers.

The air pump had an emblematic character in two respects: first, it and the practices mobilized around it were made into models of the right way to proceed in experimental natural philosophy. The Royal Society vigorously advertised its experimental program throughout Europe, and experimentation with the air pump was repeatedly pointed to as a paradigm of experimental philosophy. The natural philosophical use of instruments like the air pump was recognized as a new thing in the seventeenth century, attracting widespread support, imitation, and also opposition. Many histories of experimentation in natural science plausibly tell origin stories tracing back to Boyle's air pump.

Second, manipulations with instruments like the air pump could yield general natural philosophical knowledge only insofar as the effects artificially produced in and by them were taken as reflecting how things were in nature. Chapter 1 discussed the general modern rejection of the Aristotelian distinction between "nature" and "art." Unless it was accepted that there was a basic similarity between the products of nature and those of human artifice, experimental manipulations with machines could not stand for how things were in nature, and the spread of the clock metaphor for nature, as well as the credibility of telescopic observations of the heavens, marks that acceptance. Experimentation with such instruments opened up the possibilities of enormous control and convenience. One might in principle lay on experimental phenomena at will, at any time, in front of any observers, without waiting for them to occur naturally; one might even produce effects that were not at all accessible to normal human experience. In the case of the air pump much of the natural philosophical interest in its artificially made phenomena proceeded by accepting that the vacuum it produced might stand for what would be observed if one were to travel to the top of the atmosphere. The pump might make accessible and manifest the invisible, and normally insensible, effects of the air. Yet these practical recommendations in favor of artificial experimentation were utterly dependent on accepting the principle that the products of human art could and did stand for the order of nature. Without that basic acceptance, there could be no secure inference from what experimental apparatus made manifest to the natural order of things.

The air pump was intended to produce an operational vacuum in its great glass receiver. By repeatedly drawing the piston (or "sucker") of the pump up and down and adjusting the valve and stopcock connecting the receiver to the brass pumping apparatus, quantities of air could be removed from the receiver. The effort of drawing the sucker down became more and more difficult until at last it resisted all human effort. At that point Boyle judged that he had exhausted almost all atmospheric air from the receiver. This itself counted as an experiment, and it was reported as the first of Boyle's series of forty-three New Experiments Physico-mechanical Touching the Spring of the Air (1660). It was this operational vacuum that was to stand for the impossible task of traveling to the top of the atmosphere, and Boyle offered a mechanical account of the tactile experience of working the sucker.

Figure 2

The exhausted receiver of the air pump was, however, less significant as an experiment in itself than as a space in which one might do experiments (figure 2). The receiver had a removable brass cover at the top, over an opening big enough to allow instruments to be inserted into the glass globe, and the rest of Boyle's series of trials on the properties of air consisted of observations of objects and apparatus placed in the receiver. Consider the seventeenth experiment in this series, which Boyle characterized as "the principal fruit I promised myself from our engine." This experiment consisted simply of placing the Torricellian apparatus - the mercury barometer described in chapter 1 (figure 3) - into the receiver,

Figure 3

which was then gradually exhausted. Boyle announced an expectation about this experiment that at once indicated its emblematic status and its role as confirming a broadly mechanical view of nature. He expected that as the receiver was exhausted the level of mercury in the barometer would fall. And when he had totally, or almost totally, exhausted the receiver, then the mercury in the long tube would descend all the way, or almost all the way, to that contained in the vessel below. If Pascal's brother-in-law had carried his barometer not just up the Puy de Dôme but to the very top of the ocean of air surrounding the earth, this is what he would have observed. And indeed, whereas there was no change in the mercury's height when the barometer was placed in the receiver and sealed up, Boyle observed that the level of mercury descended with each "exsuction" of the pump until finally, when the receiver could be exhausted no more, it stood just a little above the level of mercury below [3]. If he turned the stopcock to let a little air back into the receiver, then the mercury reascended a bit.

Moreover, the progressive fall in the level of mercury within the receiver could not be accounted for as simply an effect of the air's weight - although, as Pascal and others had established, the air did have weight. Whereas the mercury in the vessel under Pascal's tube was exposed to the air, that in the receiver of Boyle's pump was not. It could not be said that a column of the atmosphere was weighing down on the mercury in the vessel, since the receiver's glass stood between the mercury and the atmospheric column. The weight of the body of air enclosed within the receiver itself could not be very much, certainly not enough to support a thirty-inch column of mercury. Another notion therefore seemed to be needed to account for the experimental phenomena mechanically, and this Boyle called the pressure or the spring of the air. From these and other phenomena of the pump Boyle inferred that the corpuscles of air probably have an elastic, springlike character that resists forces acting upon them and that expands when those forces are diminished. The more force you exert on an enclosed body of air, the more force it exerts back. When a quantity of air was removed from the receiver, the expansive force of the remaining air was reduced. The mercury of the enclosed barometer descended because, as Boyle said, there was then insufficient pressure to resist the weight of the mercury [4].

Steven Shapin teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at San Diego. He is currently working on a cultural history of the scientist's role.

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Endlinks

Catalog of the Scientific Community in the 16th and 17th Centuries - a searchable database of over 600 detailed biographies, including entries for Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: A Synopsis from the Original by Professor Frank Pajares - summarizes Thomas Kuhn's well-known work and is a good introduction to how scientific revolutions have been considered by others.

Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England - a review of another recent book by Steven Shapin.

A Short History of Vacuum Terminology and Technology - an introduction to the scientists who contributed to the study of vacuums and the machines that generate them.

Medical/Scientific Fine Art: Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump - classic painting depicts an experiment using Boyle's air pump on something other than a barometer. For a more moving description of the scene, see James Gurley's poem.

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