Baroque Science by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris (review)

Baroque Science is an ambitious attempt to re-cast our notions of seventeenth-century science entirely. The authors, Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, specifically eschew the grand narratives of the “scientific revolution.” Instead, they root that revolution’s main protagonists—Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton—within a particular vision of baroque culture, one fraught with paradox and the tensions of the natural/artificial divide. In doing so, they re-inscribe the “revolution” they specifically mention only in passing. Baroque Science is a work of impressive scholarship, enjoyable to read, and an important interpretation for anyone in dialogue with the historiography of seventeenth-century science.

The great originality of this book is that Gal and Chen-Morris look at the emergence of an observation-based mathematical natural philosophy with new eyes. They do not fall under the spell of the promoters of this new science, or take as obvious Galileo’s famous dictum that nature is written “in the language of mathematics.” Rather, they unveil seventeenth-century justifications of the new science as “feigning” the pathways between the imputed mathematical structures of nature, new scientific apparatus, and rationality itself. Their fascination is for the ways in which baroque science enforced, rather than uncovered, a mathematical order of physical experience.

In Baroque Science, the key to new attitudes toward empirical observation and the mathematization of nature is found in seventeenth-century optics. The authors show that theoretical and practical advances in baroque optics changed what it meant to observe, affected what it meant to imagine, and offered a bridge between the mathematical and physical more immediate and universal than did other “mixed sciences.” Here, both the astronomical revolution and the mechanization of nature are extensions of the new optical sciences and technologies of the century.

In Gal and Chen-Morris’s narrative, Kepler—with his writings on optics and his announcement in Astronomia Nova that mathematicians will invade the territory of physicists—is the central founding father of baroque science. The book covers all the main characters one might find in any standard scientific revolution textbook, but rarely resists overturning conventional interpretations of their work. Gal and Chen-Morris redefine Kepler’s discursive optics against his scholastic forebears and his Aristotelian contemporaries; they re-cast the comet controversy between Galileo and Orazio Grassi as one over optical instrumentation and re-examine Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities; they invert wisdom on Descartes’ method of doubt; they reexamine the correspondence between Hooke and Newton on the inverse square law as it pertains to commonplaces of optics, and recast Newton as not so much a unifier of seventeenth-century physics as a discursive thinker. In a final chapter, they examine the key role of imagination in the new conceptions of seventeenth-century knowledge, with special attention to the correspondence between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth on the passions. In fact, it is in the imagination, “this most Baroque of the faculties,” that Gal and Chen-Morris claim the real power of the new science lies.

As the authors point out, few historians of science have attempted to locate seventeenth-century science on the same canvas with baroque art and culture. Their book is framed by references to art and literature—by Vermeer and Rubens on the art of seeing and Shakespeare on the art of the imagination—and is peppered with the techniques of cultural history. However, these discussions have an illustrative rather than structural role in the argument. Indeed, the interest in capturing motion, in the play of art and nature, in blurring the line between the fantastic and the real, all characterize works of baroque art. Yet we are not really meant to focus on any bleeding between the creative arts and scientific practice, but brought to a better understanding of a broad tapestry that might have grounded the epistemological issues that are the real core of Gal and Chen-Morris’s discourse.

This is a rich and ambitious book, but it should not...