Styles of Knowing: A New History of Science from Ancient Times to the Present

4. From Scholar to Virtuoso: The Renaissance Origins of the Experimental Style

46 Aristotle made observations, bUt did not perform experiments. Archimedes performed experiments, but kept quiet about them, at least in his formal arguments. In Greek and Roman antiquity, experiment was not regarded as a valid path to knowledge. Experimentation, generally in the form of trial and error, was the province of the arts and crafts, and of engineering . Science studied nature, which was understood to exclude human intervention. In the Middle Ages, some scholars posed questions that lent themselves to experimental investigation, but in practice this led merely to a slight expansion of the scope for personal experience and observation. By about 1600, this situation had changed completely. Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, and Marin Mersenne, the leading scientists of this period— or natural philosophers, as they were known in those days—attested to the importance of experiment in science through their words and actions. Bacon believed that scientists had to force nature to divulge its secrets. The way to exercise this force was by applying the thumbscrews, “twisting the lion’s tail,” forcing nature to do something it would not normally do—in short, experimentation. Though Bacon did not carry out any significant experiments of his own, his experimental philosophy had a profound influence on the century that followed, especially in England and the Neth-´ 4 From Scholar to Virtuoso The Renaissance Origins of the Experimental Style When one goes too near [to great nobles], one gets burned; when one goes too far away, one freezes. —Johann Joachim Becher From Scholar to Virtuoso ´ 47 erlands, two countries that were to become major centers of experimental science. Marin Mersenne represented a different aspect of the new experimental philosophy. A moderate Skeptic, he placed more confidence in the practical results of an experiment than in theoretically proven theses about nature . But it was Galileo who truly introduced experimentation into science. Galileo was active in the same period as Bacon and Mersenne, but was not influenced by them (though he did influence them). His most significant experiments had to do with the law of falling bodies, which states that the distance traveled by a falling object is proportional to the square of the time elapsed and that, in principle, there is no difference in the speed at which light and heavy objects fall. Galileo deduced from this law that the path of a projectile must be parabolic. In other words, Galileo did two things at once; he carried out experiments, but within the framework of a mathematical physics of his own design. “The book of nature,” he famously said, “is written in the language of mathematics.”1 Where did he get this idea? The obvious answer, which turns out to be difficult to prove, is that experiment entered science by way of engineering. There is an undeniable conceptual link: both engineering and scientific experimentation involve interfering with the natural course of things, making phenomena bend to your will. The historian of science Edgar Zilsel drew a connection between engineering and the origins of modern experimental science. According to Zilsel, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy a kind of cross-fertilization took place between three different groups. University scholars, humanists, and artisan-engineers crossed paths at the countless academies in the cities of Italy.2 The early Italian academies were social clubs under the patronage of a ruler; in some cases, “academy” was no more than the name for a onetime intellectual gathering at the sovereign’s table.3 No one denies the profound importance of the Italian humanists, but the same cannot be said of the artisan-engineers. Their influence on science is more difficult to demonstrate, and for this reason, Zilsel’s thesis has often been challenged. In the sixteenth century, no branch of engineering had made even a rudimentary attempt at quantification, according to the historian of science Rupert Hall, who argues that it was not until well into the eighteenth century that engineering was put on a more or less scientific footing. This seems to rule out any possibility that engineering contributed to the development of science. Hall argues that the experimental turn was an achievement of theoretical scientists, an autonomous development produced by science itself.4 Likewise, the quantitative aspect of experimentation , the key element of measurement, which was very clearly present 48 ¨ From Scholar to Virtuoso in Galileo’s work, could not have come to science from engineering. Hall claims that, if anything, it was the...