Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

How did postmodernism find a place in the history of science? Animated by the programme of social history elaborated during the 1960s, the 1970s saw significant works of scholarship and dedication. The innovations of Merton, Price, and Kuhn found concrete application in analyses of eighteenth-century German chemistry, physics in modern Germany and the United States, French scientific institutions, British natural history, and the general issue of the Newtonian synthesis. But this systematic and time-consuming labour took place in a time of growing anxiety about the material survival of the labourers. A long period of economic contraction coupled with demographic changes resulted in a dearth of academic posts for an entire generation of young scholars. Historians of science fared better than linguists or classicists, but the academy groaned under the mass of men and women hired in the flush of the fat 1960s.

The ingenuous assertions of the 1960s – that war is the root of domestic poverty, that racial prejudice and discrimination against women are structural features of capitalism – derived from a perception of social life; to understand the world one had to measure its demography and political economy. By the 1980s, however, mere writings were held to be at once examples and sources of oppression. Postmodernists claim that the ideas and institutions of modern science are irredeemably sexist; that experiment and mathematics, applied to the investigation of nature, are little more than tricks; that science has more in common with styles of clothing than geometric certainty. The assertions appear in the absence of persuasive documentation, for the role of evidence itself is called into question. Indeed, documentation for postmodernists is mere adornment. The content of footnotes or endnotes matters less than the appearance of having appealed to instance and precedent – a matter of legitimizing authority.9 Sociologist Bruno Latour has published widely reviewed essays about the scientific work of Einstein and Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) without appealing to their scientific publications. Another postmodernist, Latour’s sociologist colleague Steven Shapin, alleges in a survey titled The Scientific Revolution (1996) that the revolution was a ‘non event’10 – even though his examples persuade a reader of the cause in question.

Latour and Shapin are cavalier about evidence because they hold that all knowledge derives from social interaction. In a sympathetic reading of Latour, philosopher Chris McClellan summarizes the extreme form of this contention: ‘everything is actively linked to everything else, while the only form to this seamless cloth comes from the varying durability and strength of the associations that tie it together.’11 Shapin’s unusual approach to evidence and reason lies at the centre of a related essay, A Social History of Truth (1994). There he contends that in seventeenth-century England, rhetoric and social standing overwhelmed open discussion of experimental results, and that as a result from its inception modern science has maintained standards and practices at odds with the search for universal truths.

Shapin’s sociology of science has generated unprecedented discussion in the pages of the journal founded by George Sarton, Isis. Historian Mordechai Feingold observed: ‘Shapin’s approach is ahistorical. He denies the historian possession of any privileged knowledge of the past. Meanings and intentions in history are forever lost, and all one can do is concentrate on ideals – “publicly voiced attitudes”…’ Feingold affirmed the importance of assuming that ‘there are historical facts that can either sustain or invalidate interpretations’, and he insisted ‘that a scholar who abolishes boundaries between facts and interpretations must be held accountable’. Feingold again summarized Shapin’s methodology: ‘Notwithstanding the “elaborate” sources Shapin has gathered, all too often his conclusions are shaped by a confusing and inaccurate discussion of the literature, including citing out of context and the occasional cropping of texts.’ Shapin himself replied to the criticism, but without mentioning Feingold by name or providing a reference for Feingold’s review. Feingold then patiently reasserted the importance of evidence and Shapin’s misleading use of it: ‘Thanks to a skillful deployment of rhetoric – copious repetitions intended to drive a message home and the articulation of many key sentences in a subtle and confusing manner – the reader, who has not infinite time to engage in hermeneutics, can easily mistake the conceivable for the actual.’12 Although we can imagine a flying horse and may deliver orations about it, the image remains firmly in the realm of fiction.

An exchange about the African roots of Western science also reveals the postmodernist style. Sociologist Martin Bernal has contended that much of Hellenic wisdom derived from Egyptian civilization. Bernal believes that ‘many cultural similarities that could reasonably be attributed to independent invention in distant communities should not be so explained for those between societies as close in time and place as Egypt and Greece’. But in commenting on Bernal’s work, historian of science Robert Palter requires stronger canons of reason. Palter notes that the Egyptians had no mathematical astronomy resembling Greek works, that Egyptian mathematics never attained the sophistication of Babylonian and Greek expressions; and that the traditions of medicine in Egypt and Greece diverged considerably. The point is that Bernal’s desire to demonstrate that Aryan civilization derived from black antecedents displaces a concern for evidence.13 Postmodernist palladins now ride to the rescue of false assertions. In a spirited review of a recent book that criticized propositions advanced by both Bernal and Shapin, the historian of science M. Norton Wise has declined to admit more than that the critics have ‘doubtless … located some blunders’. Wise prefers to submerge substantive issues in a farrago of unrelated material.14 By their allegations of wilful misrepresentation, these exchanges are untypical of academic debate in history of science. They point to significant discontent with disciplinary standards.

The word discipline carries many meanings, anthropologist Clifford Geertz reminds us, and all of them relate to authority.15 A leitmotif of the careers of Merton, Price, and Kuhn is a concern with the bounds of authority in science. To explore authority they counterposed the scientific discipline with its complementary social structure, the corporate institution. Disciplines function according to general, abstract rules and principles; they attract adherents who earn their living in various ways, profess manifold credos, and pray to diverse gods. Institutions, however, operate by corporate structure and private covenant; they demand allegiance to a chain of command. At the risk of oversimplification, one might say that disciplines exhibit an abstract solidarity while institutions exhibit a more earthy, organic solidarity. Exploring the authority of disciplines and institutions to elaborate the counterpoint of tradition and innovation, in Kuhn’s words, is the project that has animated historians of science since the 1960s. In this book, we begin by considering scientific institutions.

The postmodernist interlude reminds us that generalization is a privilege of experience. The concrete experiences analysed by historians of science – whose number as full-time, dues-paying, certified practitioners is only in the thousands – have transformed our vision of the human condition. They give us new pictures of the ways that people have seen the natural world, and they have added to a long list of misconceived apprehensions. Despite occasional claims to the contrary, the discipline of history of science is indeed regular, cumulative, and progressive.

Recent debates about whether science expresses truths about the world call to mind an observation by a sixteenth-century patron of natural knowledge, Thomas Gresham (1518/19–1579). Councillor of state, founder of the British stock exchange, and endower of a college that served as the nucleus of the Royal Society and persisted into the twentieth century, Gresham proposed a principle of economics that has been epitomized as: ‘Bad money drives out good money.’ That is, silver currency will inevitably force gold currency out of circulation. The principle applies more generally to governments, trades, and professions. In a parliamentary system of government, the actions of one corrupt delegate can provoke a vote of ‘no confidence’ that will produce new elections. Gresham’s Law suggests why professional corporations are concerned about enforcing standards. If isolated unscrupulous practices shake confidence in, for example, stock brokerage, physical therapy, or dental surgery, people will cease patronizing the enterprise. In the world of scholarship, outrageous or demonstrably false assertions can bring an entire specialty into disrepute. Gresham’s Law has found an application in the history of science through the claims of postmodern writers.16

An elegy for postmodernism has been written by Frank Lentricchia, professor of English at Duke University and for decades one of the most persistent critics of the notion that ideas have integrity. He confesses that he lived a double life. He read great literature because it transported him with insight and delight. But he taught that ‘what is called “literature” is nothing but the most devious of rhetorical discourses (writing with political designs upon us all), either in opposition to or in complicity with the power in place’. There were two of him. ‘In private, I was tranquillity personified; in public, an actor in the endless strife and divisiveness of argument, the “Dirty Harry of literary theory,” as one reviewer put it.’ The contradiction produced a crisis and a response. Lentricchia finally decided that there were writers, clever and dull, whose writings could be read with pleasure and profit. Some writings, he has concluded, transcend the accidental circumstances of the writer.17 The observation carries over to science. Some of what we see is conditioned by our upbringing, but seminal syntheses of natural knowledge transcend the circumstances of their formulation.

We do not choose our parents, our mother tongue, or the circumstances of our early years. The world is not made for our effortless gratification. Rather, we respond to the imperatives of existence. The latitude of that response – how much we do by choice and inspiration and how much we are instructed to do by way of convention and authority – is one of the most interesting problems for people who study the course of cultures and civilizations. The following pages will have succeeded if they convey a sense of the many ways that we have seen what is all around us.

I INSTITUTIONS

1 Teaching: Before the Scientific Revolution

Well into middle age the man awoke with a nightmare about honours examinations at his undergraduate college. For years the nightmare took the same form. He was unprepared for the material. Other students streamed towards the classrooms, confident that they had mastered Heine and Heisenberg, Proust and politics, evolution and revolution. He was all at sea, barely familiar with the course syllabi. Before intimations of mortality replaced the fear of inadequacy in the man’s sleeping consciousness, the examination dream evolved a more complicated and quite preposterous plot: though the man held a doctorate, he was returning to complete an undergraduate college degree.

Most people have experienced an anxiety dream about school. The reason is clear: schooling is an unnatural and traumatic event. Children are confided to a stranger for instruction in abstractions. They are required to commit great quantities of facts to memory, largely by the intermediary of the written word. It comes as no surprise that some creative minds have questioned the value of traditional schooling, with its emphasis on examinations. Albert Einstein (1879–1955), in one of his earliest popular writings, found little to commend the traditional German secondary school-leaving examination, the Abitur. The examination was injurious to mental health precisely because it gave rise to nightmares. Furthermore, a good deal of time in the last year of secondary school was wasted in preparing students for the test.1 Einstein himself never submitted to the Abitur, although he once failed the entrance examination for the Zurich polytechnical institute, and his lover failed the final examinations there.

Einstein studied in Germany and Switzerland, and he may even have attended school briefly in Italy. He could have affirmed that many nations have a hierarchy of schools where citizens are obliged to receive state-sanctioned training. Knowledge may be imparted anywhere, and skills may be acquired on the job, but an academic institution carries an ethos and acts as a crucible for culture. Most important is teaching manners – the essential, outward features of daily life that distinguish civilization from barbarism. Some academic institutions even instruct about what to say at a cocktail reception, which utensil to pick up first at a dinner party, and how to act au courant of the latest intellectual fad. With the eclipse of gentry, priests, and community healers, academic graduates have increasingly been called to officiate in matters large and small.

Whence this prestige attached to the resources controlled by a self-perpetuating guild? The vast majority of academic diplomas no longer lead directly to a post in the workaday world. Today they do not provide evidence, except indirectly, of having mastered the skills required to succeed in business or public affairs. And in an age of sliding-fee structures, social class and family wealth are no longer associated with the crest of a particular institution.

Schools generally are conservative social institutions, and prestige radiates from their traditions, customs, and rituals. They divide the day into class hours and the year into semesters, the calendar of events culminating in colourful ceremonies at which diplomas are conferred. These rituals of formal schooling, which express a way of ordering the world, have entered into the consciousness of a large part of the world’s peoples.

School rituals deriving from religious or moral outlooks vary from place to place. Yet all schools subscribe to one common idea. They hold that knowledge may be acquired through diligent study. There are other kinds of knowledge deriving from religious or artistic inspiration. But schools hold that most things can be learned. The central notion here concerns a distillation of tradition. Learning about knowledge, largely from books, is what has been called science for a thousand years.

In schools, a master imparts knowledge to acolytes, who may eventually create something new beyond their lessons. Whether scholastic lessons are abstract or practical, esoteric or mundane, schools prepare students for a place in society. That place is generally keyed to facility with the written word, which has been the most secure means of transmitting knowledge from one generation to another. In fact, it is not unreasonable to imagine that schools invented writing, and hence that schools are the prime mover of history – the science of knowing the past by its documentation.

In this chapter and the next one we examine how schools of higher learning have been involved with scientific tradition and change. We shall see that academia has both promoted scientific innovation and also stifled it. One of the challenges facing universities in the new millennium will be to implement new ways of breathing relevance into the accomplishments and promises of the past.

The Mediterranean world

What we know about science education in antiquity derives from a variety of documents: a few hundred clay tablets from several sites in Mesopotamia; a few treatises written on papyrus; and diverse histories and texts recopied and reprinted in Chinese, Greek, Arabic and Latin. To this must be added inscriptions on stone, masonry, coins, and pottery, precious castings and carvings, and the accumulated wisdom of archaeology. Because our knowledge of the distant past derives from fragmentary sources, it has sometimes been said that the study of antiquity appeals to people who like mastering a small, fixed syllabus. The sources, however, are much more abundant than commonly imagined.

Clay tablets allow us to conclude that schools existed in Mesopotamia, and that they coincided with the earliest representations of the Sumerian language about 3100 BC. Among the documents of Old Sumerian, which existed until about 2500 BC, are school exercises – lists of signs and words. At the time of the Semitic invasion of Mesopotamia, about 1700 BC, we find a compendium of celestial omens called the Enuma Anu Enlil. These omens concern the moon’s eclipses, halos, and conjunctions with fixed stars; solar eclipses; weather and earthquakes; and planetary stations. They held special importance for those who believed in astrology, a system of correspondences constructed between celestial phenomena and terrestrial events. The celestial phenomena must have been catalogued over centuries and at diverse places by trained observers. These circumstances suggest an early social pairing of priestly and scholastic functions.

Many of the Sumerian calculations we possess treat practical measuring problems, often involving land area. (In modern terms they reduce to complicated algebraic equations, often cubic or even quadratic expressions.) The problems are sometimes formulated with what we may call malice of forethought (correct answers are integral numbers), and sometimes they have absurd proportions (lengths stretching more than a thousand kilometres or food for an impossibly large army). We have problem sets both with and without solutions, and some solutions feature elementary mistakes. We must conclude that the corpus relates to instruction in schools. The techniques were no doubt useful for keeping track of state assets, but it seems more reasonable to imagine that this specialized knowledge served better to discipline young minds.

The presence of codifying abstruse calculations (whatever their ostensible, practical referent) implies the existence of schools, even if we cannot say much about scholastic organization. Egyptian mathematics, for example, is based on unit fractions – fractions where the numerator is always one. It is possible to speculate about the origin of such a convention (in terms of family structure, inheritance practices, land tenure and taxes), but there can be no disagreement about the ultimate impracticality of the convention for advanced mathematics. Among the few surviving compendia of Egyptian mathematics, we find calculations dividing the contents of a jug of beer into minuscule parts, obviously a school exercise by its lack of utility.

A new kind of teaching emerged in the fifth century BC, and it left its mark on learning in all cultures with access to the Mediterranean world. The innovation related to a group of Greek teachers known as Sophists. They were private professional pedagogues (like later-day itinerant lecturers) who operated in a free-market economy. They would teach by contract whatever people wanted to learn. Their syllabuses suited individual tastes, and their pitch seems to have been a mixture of affable cultivation and practical skills designed to propel a citizen forward in his city.

Their innovations notwithstanding, Socrates (ca.470–399 BC) and Plato (ca.427–347 BC) were teachers in the Sophist tradition, even though they distinguished themselves by their strong claim to methodological precision and systematization of knowledge. Plato’s Academy occupied a large athletic facility long used by teachers like him. Aristotle (384–322 BC), who might have succeeded Plato, created his own school at another athletic facility, the Lyceum. Aristotle’s chosen successor Theophrastus (372–287 BC) produced written anthologies of his pre-Socratic predecessors in addition to general manuals and new works. He purchased land near the Lyceum and donated it in perpetuity to his colleagues for a school, although the Lyceum’s library left Athens for Anatolia as a result of an ideological schism. Later the library returned to Athens and eventually found its way to Rome (as spoils of conquest), where it received wide notice. Permanency of place and syllabus, coupled with the international and public nature of instruction, produced a search for certainty rather than, as with the Sophists, mere expediency.

The Academy and the Lyceum were institutions of higher learning. They departed from the smorgasbord of Sophist offerings whose heritage we find, today, in undergraduate liberal-arts curricula. Young people associated with these schools absorbed particular truths as well as the spirit of the place, and then contributed to the discourse; it pleased some men (we have no clear record of women scholars) to stay on for part or all of a lifetime. The excitement of scholarly discussion and the presence of libraries, where knowledge was collected and stored, made such a choice attractive. We possess no diplomas from antiquity because the world of Greek learning was so small as not to require them. A quick conversation would be enough to establish a person’s credentials.

State funding ensured the contemplative life of these colleges, which continued in some form for many hundreds of years. At least at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, academic contemplation related directly to political involvement. Because the end of all learning was to train better citizens, scholars often applied themselves to statecraft. The goal was to produce someone like Henry Kissinger or, more optimistically, Woodrow Wilson, each of whom was a distinguished academic before entering politics.

The Big Three – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – closed the Greek golden age. In the far-ranging conquests and the subsequent Hellenizing process initiated by Alexander the Macedonian, these and other thinkers of contemporary renown received tremendous exposure. What distinguishes the sequence of the Big Three is not speculative moral or political philosophy, but rather a tradition of collective enquiry into nature. They also sought explanations rooted in experience and capable of standing up under sustained, reasoned debate. Whatever the philosophical colour of knowledge-seekers in Hellenistic times (the philosophies came in dozens of hues), their accomplishments depended on libraries and secular centres of higher learning.

Institutions with a teaching function began to take shape, emphasizing the search for knowledge of nature, with the result that the contentious ethical-political side receded into the background. A pupil of Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus, Demetrius Phalerius (ca.345–293 BC), deposed as dictator of Athens, went to the Egypt of one of Alexander’s generals turned potentates, Ptolemy I Soter; there Ptolemy, acting on Demetrius’s advice, founded the institute for advanced study known as the Museum of Alexandria. The name suggests a secular temple for receiving inspiration by the muses, the nine avatars of arts and letters (including astronomy) in classical antiquity. Though under the direction of a priest (until Rome imposed a supervisor) and with their material needs overseen by curatorial staff, the Museum’s fellows were free to study what they liked. They lived sumptuously at the king’s expense. They had outdoor galleries and lecture theatres for learned discussions, and they ate in a large dining hall. Attached to the Museum were a botanical garden and what became the largest library of Mediterranean antiquity, the Serapeum. The prestige of the Museum made it a magnet for scientists throughout Hellenistic and Roman times – Euclid (fl. ca.295 BC), Apollonius of Perga (fl. ca.200 BC), Aristarchus (ca.310–230 BC), Eratosthenes (ca.276–ca.195BC), Archimedes (ca.287–212 BC), and Hero (fl. AD 62) all resided in Alexandria for longer or shorter periods. Museum fellows could and did take on pupils – the grammarians Dionysius Thrax of Alexandria (fl. AD 40) and Apion (fl. AD 30) are traditionally held to have studied there under Didymus (b. 63 BC). Scholars generally found it a safe haven from political storms. The Museum was the nerve centre of a cultural community that we would find today in places like the Cambridges.