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Although Franklin was largely self-educated, he nevertheless became quite familiar with a version of the new science developing in Europe as a result of the work of Isaac Newton. I. Bernard Cohen has argued that this new science should be seen not as a single monolithic approach to experimental science but one conditioned by two different works by Newton (Cohen 1990, 14). The ¤rst, the work best-known to later philosophers and scientists, is Newton’s Principia Mathematica, a treatise written in Latin that set out to provide a mathematical description of the laws of motion following a geometrical model. Despite his interest in Newton’s Principia, however, it is unlikely that Franklin had an adequate background in math to use the text (Cohen 1990, 15). At the same time, the other work by Newton, The Opticks, published in English with a minimum of math, would have both been accessible to Franklin and would have presented a strategy of conducting science that could serve as a model of the experimental approach Franklin adopted. While the Principia presented a picture of science struggling toward a single uni-¤ed picture of the world, the Opticks, while it shared the goal of the Principia, proceeded by experiment. “My design in this book,” Newton says, “is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypothesis, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments” (Newton 1931, 1). The volume presents a series of propositions, each followed by a detailed description of an experiment that con¤rms the proposition. The volume ends with thirty-one “queries,” or speculative propositions, that had yet to be con¤rmed by experiment or mathematical proof. While the method of the work did not claim the certainty of the Principia, it provided a model for scienti¤c investigation that could contribute to the larger project of a uni¤ed theory of the universe that was accessible to people with limited formal training and resources. “As in Mathe189 c h a p t e r n i n e Science and Sovereignty maticks, so in Natural Philosophy,” Newton says in the concluding section of the Opticks, “the Investigation of dif¤cult Things by the Method of Analysis [making Experiments and Observations] ought ever to precede the Method of Composition [the process of combining hypotheses into a general theory]” (Newton 1931, 404). As a result, Franklin could feel justi¤ed in pursuing science piecemeal as a process of responding to particular questions and phenomena, particularly those present in ordinary experience. In 1747 Franklin began a series of experiments on electricity the results of which he presented to his friend Peter Collinson, who in turn presented them to the Royal Society and then published them in a pamphlet in 1751.1 Franklin’s 1750 letter, published later as “Considerations and Conjectures,” reveals a crucial innovation in Franklin’s approach to experimental science. He begins, following Newton, by presenting electricity as “subtile” particles that behave like a ®uid (Franklin 1959, 4: 10–11). After introducing his ¤ndings on the way pointed objects conduct electrical ®uid, he admits that he has “some Doubts about them,” but “even a bad Solution read, and its faults discovered, has often given Rise to a good idea in the Mind of an ingenious Reader” (Franklin 1959, 4: 17). “Nor is it of much Importance,” he continues, “to know the Manner in which Nature executes her Laws; ’tis enough, if we know the Laws themselves. ’Tis of real Use to know, that China left in the Air unsupported , will fall and break; but how it comes to fall, and why it breaks, are Matters of Speculation. ’Tis a pleasure indeed to know them, but we can preserve our China without it.” The conclusion is a key to understanding the way in which Franklin differed from Newton in his understanding of the meaning of experiments. For Newton, experiments are preliminary to the development of a deductive mathematical system that will explain “why” things work the way that they do. Particles and their motions were not merely ways of explaining experiments or of providing resources for solving other problems, but are the real things of the universe .2 Franklin af¤rms the importance of theories framed in terms of particles and ®uids, but is primarily interested in the actions and interactions they describe. What is important is what happens and what can be learned to guide future actions and expectations. The principle at work in Franklin’s experimental science appears...

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