Discussion 6

 

Of all the changes that swept over Europe in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most widely

influential was an epistemological transformation that

we call the "scientific revolution." In the popular mind,

we associate this revolution with natural science and

technological change, but the scientific revolution was,

in reality, a series of changes in the structure of

European thought itself: systematic doubt, empirical

and sensory verification, the abstraction of human

knowledge into separate sciences, and the view that the

world functions like a machine. These changes greatly

changed the human experience of every other aspect of

life, from individual life to the life of the group. This

modification in world view can also be charted in

painting, sculpture and architecture; you can see that

people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are

looking at the world very differently.

Making

the

Universe

Visible

The scientific revolution did not happen

all at once, nor did it begin at any set

date. Realistically speaking, the scientific

revolution that we associate with Galileo,

Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, began

much earlier. You can push the date back

to the work of Nicolaus Copernicus at the

beginning of the sixteenth century, or

Leonardo da Vinci in the middle of the

fifteenth. Even then, you haven't gone

back far enough and you haven't

included all the factors that contributed

to the set of epistemological

transformations that we call the

scientific revolution.

You're safer to find the origins of the

scientific revolution in the European re-

discovery of Aristotle in the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries. Aristotle entered

the European Middle Ages by means of

the Islamic world, which had preserved

both Aristotelean and Platonic

philosophy after Europe had completely

forgotten it. Originally, Aristotle based

knowledge on a kind of empiricism:

Aristotle would investigate a question by

a.) examining what everyone else had

said about the matter, b.) making

several observations, and finally, c.)

deriving either general or probable

principles on the matter from both a and

b. This method of thinking, which is the

theoretical origin of empirical thought,

formed the rudiments of a new

revolution in human thinking in the

twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The

earliest Aristotelians were burned as

heretics (in a medieval university, when

they fired you, they really fired you—

have you ever wondered where the

expression might come from?);

eventually, Aristotelianism was

combined with church doctrine to form a

hybrid type of inquiry: Scholasticism.

Unlike Aristotelianism, Scholasticism did

not have a strong empirical bent, but

some Aristotelean thinkers took to

Aristotle's empiricism like a duck to

water. In the thirteenth and fourteenth

century, empirical science began to take

off. People such as Roger Bacon

conducted empirical investigations on

natural phenomenon, such as optics.

The rage of all the medieval scientists,

however, was alchemy. Now alchemy is a

greatly misunderstood phenomenon—we

associate it with mad monks trying to

turn lead into gold. In the Middle Ages,

however, it referred to a variety of

questions, some of them were mystical

and religious, but most were questions

we would consider to be standard

chemistry problems. The medieval had

inherited the science from Islam, for

chemistry was never a separate

discipline in Greek or Roman thought. In

fact, the words, "chemistry" and

"alchemy," are both Arabic words, as are

many of the terms that you use in a

chemistry course, such as "alkali,"

"alembic," and "alkane." Alchemy, or

chemistry, is one of the most important

scientific revolutions in the Middle Ages,

for the people who worked on alchemical

questions by and large invented most of

the empirical methods that would form

the cornerstone of empirical science in

the seventeenth century. The most

important of these scientists was Roger

Bacon. Besides inventing gunpowder,

Bacon devised the trial and error method

of finding knowledge while cataloging

very carefully all the circumstances of of

these trials. This is the germ of

experimental science. The word,

"experiment," comes from the word,

"experience." An experiment, then, is an

experience, but it is a controlled

experience. What an experiment

concludes is the following: if the

experience of a natural phenomenon is

controlled in a certain way, that

experience will be identical to any

repeated experience that is controlled in

precisely the same way. Experimental

science, then, requires that all factors

that have gone into the experience of

the natural phenomenon be cataloged in

some way. This, by and large, is what

Bacon invented in a rudimentary form.

There was a scientific revolution of sorts

in the high Middle Ages that in many

ways rivalled the later scientific

revolution in its sweeping changes, but

all the cultural components were not in

place. So the scientific revolution of the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did

not produce a way of thinking about the

world that closely resembles our own

(this is why some morons think that

there was little scientific "progress" in

the Middle Ages). You see, even in the

high Middle Ages, Europeans believed

that the center of all truth and

experience was in God and that an

overweening concern with material

phenomenon was a serious neglect of

one's soul and one's dependence on

God. The medieval also deeply

distrusted human perception (though

this is somewhat of an

oversimplification). Not only was human

perception variable and untrustworthy,

the material world itself was deceptive.

Rather than a vehicle for truth, the

material world was put in place to

actively distract humans from the real

task.

It's hard to pinpoint the shift in these

attitudes. The introduction of humanism

in the fourteenth century was in large

part based on the idea that human

intellect and creativity were trustworthy,

and human experience was, to some

extent, a reliable base on which to hang

knowledge. But the humanist revolution

didn't happen all at once; the dichotomy

between "experience" and "authority"

was a vexed question throughout the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. What

should you believe? What your

experience shows you? Or what

authorities, including the church and the

bible, tell you to believe?

While it's hard to pinpoint the shift in

European attitudes, the first,

unambiguous statement of this shift in

values comes in Leonardo da Vinci's

treatise on painting:

Here, right here, in the eye, here forms, here colors,

right here the character of every part and everything of

the universe, are concentrated to a single point. How

marvelous that point is! . . . In this small space, the

universe can be completely reproduced and rearranged

in its entire vastness!

The argument Leonardo is making is that

the entire universe can be made

visible to human sight, and human

vision can encompass the universe in the

same way that God can encompass the

universe. When Leonardo says that all

the forms and colors of the universe are

concentrated in the human eye as to a

single point, he is reversing the medieval

definition of God, which postulated that

God was the single point in which all

parts of the universe are gathered, as in

Dante Alighieri's vision of God at the end

of his poem, Paradise :

Within his depths I saw internalized,

ingathered with love into his volume, all

the scattered leaves of the universe:

substances, accidents, and their

characteristics, as if they were all

combined, so that what I saw was a

single point.

This was a profound shift in the

European world view. In a fundamental

way, it postulated that human

experience was and should be the

central concern of human beings. It also

postulated that human sensory

experience, especially vision, was not

only a valid way of understanding the

universe, it also made it possible for

humans to understand anything

whatsoever about the universe. Making

the universe visible, then, became a

shared project among a number of

Europeans; extending human vision with

microscopes and telescopes seemed like

a good idea. Europeans had the scientific

knowledge to produce microscopes and

telescopes since the time of Bacon; no-

one really thought to make them until

making all parts of the universe visible

became a viable project.

Making

the

Universe

Move

It's hard for us to really understand, but

the universe for most of human

experience has been a small and very

intimate place. We live in such a vast

universe, both temporally and spatially,

that the controversies surrounding the

motions of the universe in the sixteenth

and seventeenth century seem

ludicrous. However, the universe for

Europeans in the sixteenth century was

very small. In its largest version, it could

fit within the orbit of Pluto. When a

Mesopotamian astrologer climbed his

ziggurat, or a Renaissance astronomer

climbed his tower, they weren't just

getting a better view of the stars, they

were literally getting closer.

A small universe made a great deal of

sense. Everyone could see that the

universe moved; this perhaps is one of

the oldest pieces of human knowledge.

Not only did it move, it moved in a

circular fashion. So human beings got

very good at describing this circular

motion; in particular, if the universe

moves in a circular fashion, it must be

moving around a center point. When

they thought about the size of the

universe, it was obvious to them that if

the universe were too big, then the parts

of the universe at the outer edge would

be travelling at speeds of billions of

miles per hour. Nothing could survive

speeds like this. So the universe was a

small place; the outer edge was fairly

close; in fact, both the Egyptians and the

Mesopotamians lived in a universe that

would fit within the orbit of the moon.

When it came time to define the central

point of this circular motion, the answer

was completely obvious. The stars

moved in a circular motion around the

earth. Look up in the sky and this

becomes immediately evident. However,

there were some astronomers in Greece

who argued that the earth was not the

center of the universe, but rather the

sun. This was an elegant solution, for it

explained all the quirky movements of

the planets. While the stars moved in

beautiful circles around the earth, the

planets also moved in circles but

sometimes they would move

backwards; this is called precession.

Even though placing the sun at the

center of the universe solved the

precession problem, it created a new

one. This meant that the earth was

moving in a circular orbit. It also meant

that the earth was moving pretty darn

fast. If the earth were moving at

thousands of miles per hour then if you

jumped straight up in the air, when you

landed, you'd hit the ground ten or

twelve miles away from the spot you

started at. Everyone could see, however,

that when you jumped straight up in the

air, you landed on the spot you started

from. (Until Isaac Newton, Europeans,

Muslims, and Asians understood only

one-half of the concept of inertia: things

at rest stay at rest. They did not figure

out that things in motion stay in motion).

The Ptolemaic Universe: The scientific

revolution really begins in Europe when

Nicolaus Copernicus challenges the

dominant model of the motion of the

universe: Ptolemy's Almagest . Ptolemy

wrestled with the problem of the motion

of the universe and all the problems

associated with precession. Since

common sense dictated that the earth

can't be moving (see the "jump"

experiment in the previous paragraph),

then the motions of the planets had to

be described in such a way as to explain

why the regularly go backwards. The

universe, however, had to still remain

logical, for precession was logical. One

could fairly accurately predict when a

planet would start moving backwards in

the sky.

Ptolemy solved the problem in two ways.

First, he made the elliptical orbits

eccentric, that is, while the planets still

orbited around the sun, the center of the

circle of their orbit was not the earth, but

a point somewhere else. Each planetary

orbit, then, had a different center of

rotation. But this still didn't explain every

instance of precession. So Ptolemy took

the planets out of their orbital path and

set them spinning around a moving point

on the orbital path., like a tether-ball

spinning around a moving pole. These

extra orbital orbits Ptolemy called

epicycles. The universe became a

grand, nonsensical Rube Goldberg

machine, with planets orbiting around

points that orbited around the earth in

uneven and unbalanced elliptical orbits.

Even Ptolemy hated it. The great virtue

of his scheme was that it fully accounted

for all planetary precession; the

downside is that it turned the universe

into a messy room. So Ptolemy actually

argued that the universe did not, in fact,

move this way; he only argued that his

system was a "mathematical fiction" that

should be used only to predict the

motions of the universe.

Somewhere along the line, though, the

astrologers and astronomers of the

Islamic world decided that the Ptolemaic

universe was, in fact, an accurate

physical description of the motion of the

universe. When Arabic science entered

the European world in the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries, so did the Ptolemaic

world view. This view would go largely

unchallenged for hundreds of years while

the universe squeaked and wobbled in

its eccentrics and epicycles.

Nicolaus Copernicus: Copernicus

(1473-1543) was the first major

astronomer to challenge the Ptolemaic

universe. Let's keep in mind, though,

that Ptolemy had his critics—starting

with Ptolemy himself. The Ptolemaic

universe was, after all, a nonsensical

affair; when King Alfonso of Spain was

introduced to the system in the

thirteenth century, he said, "If God had

made the universe thus, he should have

asked me for advice first." The result of

this criticism was not one, but hundreds

of versions of the Ptolemaic universe.

Copernicus, in the year of his death,

published On the Revolutions of the

Heavenly Spheres. This book did not

revise Ptolemy's system, as all previous

criticisms had, but rather challenged the

fundamental assumption of the

Ptolemaic universe: that the earth was

the center point of the revolution of the

heavens. In many ways, Copernicus

attempted to solve the problem of

precession by coming up with the

simplest possible explanation. By simply

moving the sun to the center of the

universe, almost all the problems with

planetary precession disappeared

(almost all). Copernicus was also a

mystical philosopher; he believed that

the sun not only symbolized but also

contained God; putting the sun at the

center of the universe was more than a

mathematical solution, it also better

explained the spiritual structure of the

universe.

The Copernican universe, however, was

still nothing like our own. It was still a

small and intimate place; moving the

orbits of the stars out too far meant that

they'd travel at impossible speeds.

Copernicus also kept the Ptolemaic

epicycles and argued that the planets

moved in circular orbits. His system,

though, was a far more accurate

predictor of planetary motion than any

that had been previously put forth. That,

argued Copernicus, was more than

enough to justify its adoption.

Arabic numerals: We need, however, to

step back and briefly discuss one other

innovation of the middle ages: the

adoption of Arabic numerals. For Arabic

numerals made the Copernican

revolution possible in a way that can't be

overstressed. Before the adoption of

Arabic science in the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries, Europeans used the

Roman numeral system. This is a

subtractive number system: numbers

are indicated by letters and the

transition to higher letters is first

preceded by subtraction:

I II III IV V

While people were fairly proficient at

working with these numerals, calculation

was not exactly a blazing fast process.

Try multiplying MDMCXLVII by CCCLXXIII

without converting them to Arabic

numerals and see how fast you can do it.

The Arabs, on the other hand, used a

place number system, which is the

number system that you've been trained

on. It consisted of ten numerals; when all

ten numerals were used up, then

another place was added and numbers

would then consist of two sets, or places,

of numerals. The immense advantage of

a place system (only the Mayans and the

Hindus also developed place systems), is

that you can do calculations extremely

rapidly. When this was introduced into

Europe, learned people began to

calculate like mad. Books upon books

piled up filled with calculations from the

hands of busy monks and busy students

and busy university teachers adding and

subtracting and multiplying and dividing.

Books of astronomical calculations

especially began to pile up: this was the

start of mathematical astronomy. As

astronomical observations and

calculations piled up, the problems with

the Ptolemaic universe also piled up.

More than anything else, it was this pile

of mathematical calculations that

pushed Copernicus to radically revise the

Ptolemaic universe.

Tycho Brahe: The man who most

greatly influenced the adoption of the

Ptolemaic system was Tycho Brahe

(1546-1601), who was one of those

fanatics doing all those mathematical

calculations of the motion of the

universe. Tables and tables and tables of

calculations. For a man with a boring

profession, however, he led a singularly

interesting life: temperamental, he had

lost his nose to syphilis, or, rather, to the

cure for syphilis, he was a raucous heavy

drinker and he died a particularly just

death for a heavy drinker. At a dinner

with a prince, he drank a bit too much,

and, since you were not allowed to leave

the table until the person outranking you

left the table, he waited out his full

bladder until it burst and sent him to the

heavens he had so lovingly observed

and calculated.

Brahe opposed the Copernican universe

and vehemently argued that the earth

was the center of the universe. In order

to prove this, however, he cataloged a

superhuman amount of astronomical

observations and calculations. These

tables of calculations made up the best

astronomical observations in any culture

at any time up to that point and would

become the basis for proving the

Copernican system to be a more

accurate model of the universe.

Johannes Kepler: Like Copernicus,

Kepler (1571-1630) believed that the sun

represented the spiritual essence and

presence of God and should be placed at

the center of the universe. He discovered

Brahe's observations and calculations

and set about using them to develop a

new, sun-centered universe. He rejected

two major aspects of the Copernican

universe: epicycles and circular orbits. In

the Keplerian universe, the planets

orbited around the sun and remained in

their orbital paths; these paths, however,

were elliptical rather than circular. This

was the big prize: by revising

Copernicus's model through the use of

Brahe's calculations, he produced a

mathematical model of the universe that

perfectly predicted planetary motions

and accounted for every instance of

planetary precession. This model he

published in the book New Astronomy in

1609, and it instantly created a

sensation. It would also inspire an Italian

astronomer, Galileo Galilei, to fit his new

observations into this Keplerian universe.

Even though the model was perfect in

terms of its predictive power, it still had

a number of problems. It still didn't

explain why the earth didn't move out

from under us when we jumped in the

air. Also: why would the planets moved

elliptically? Circular orbits made sense,

but elliptical orbits? Both of these

questions would be answered by

Newtonian physics a few decades later.

Galileo Galilei: Galileo (1564-1642)

combined the two roles of observer and

theorist and, more than anyone else,

provided the empirical discoveries that

cinched the Copernican-Keplerian

universe. First, in 1609, he eagerly read

Kepler's New Astronomy and bought into

it completely. That same year he bought

a curious new Dutch invention, the

telescope. While the telescope had been

around for a few years, he was the first

to use it to look at the heavens. What he

saw amazed even him.

The first thing he saw was mountains on

the moon. Until this time, the moon was

regarded as more or less gaseous; the

presence of mountains meant that the

moon was terrestrial, just like earth. If it

had mountains, it could also have plants

and people. The second thing he saw

were planets orbiting around the planet

of Jupiter. Five, to be exact. This was the

big banana. For if the planet of Jupiter

was an independent orbital system

orbiting around a larger system, that

meant that the sun could also be an

independent orbital system orbiting

around a larger system. The universe,

which until Galileo's time was a small

and homey place, suddenly expanded

infinitely outwards and became a vast

and incomprehensible place.

Galileo published his findings in The

Starry Messenger which he published in

1610, one year after the publication of

Kepler's New Astronomy. The Starry

Messenger was really only a pamphlet,

and Galileo would not write a full

exposition of his observations and his

model for a much larger universe until

his Dialogues on the Two Chief Systems

of the World. It was this book that

inspired the Roman Catholic church to

closely examine his observations and

models and compare them to church

doctrine and the texts of the Old and

New Testament. The Church concluded

that his ideas were at variance with both

doctrine and Scriptures and demanded,

on pain of death, that he recant his

views.

The one part of Galileo's system that

most greatly influenced all subsequent

European inquiry into the nature of the

universe was his insistence that the

universe operated according to

mathematical principles. The circle, you

might say, had been completed. The

Ptolemaic universe was a mathematical

model designed to assist predictions but

was not designed to be a physical

description of the universe. Both the

Copernican and Keplerian systems were

primarily proposed as mathematical

rather than physical models. Galileo

insisted that the two were coterminous,

that all physical description of the

universe would of necessity be a

mathematical description. His

revolutionary argument was this: if a

physical model did not fit the

mathematical properties of that

phenomenon, the physical model was

wrong. This would become the basis of

the most profound shift in European

knowledge: classical mechanics.

Making the

Universe

Move

Mechanically

Francis Bacon: The grounds for a

mechanical universe, that is, a

universe that operated like a

machine, was laid down by Galileo's

insistence that the universe operated

by predictable mathematical laws

and models. In addition, Francis

Bacon (1561-1626), added a key

element to the genesis of the

mechanical universe in his attacks on

traditional knowledge. Bacon wasn't

a scientist in our sense of the word,

but he did take great joy in telling

everybody why they were wrong. In

particular, he argued that all the old

systems of understanding should be

abandoned: he called them idols. He

believed that knowledge shouldn't be

derived from books, but from

experience itself. Europeans should

move beyond their classics and

observe all natural and human

phenomena afresh. He proposed the

Aristotelean model of induction and

empiricism as the best model of

human knowledge; in inductive

thinking, one starts with the variety

of phenomenon and derives general

principles (in deductive thinking, one

starts with general principles and

accounts for the variety of

phenomenon). This model of

systematic empirical induction was

the piece that completed the puzzle

in the European world view and made

the scientific revolution possible.

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton: The mechanical universe

in all its glory would emerge from the

work of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in

his compendious The Mathematical

Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687),

which is primarily known by the first two

words of its Latin title: Principia

Mathematica. The fundamental

arguments of the book were the

following:

The universe could be explained

completely through the use of

mathematics; mathematical

models of the universe were

accurate physical descriptions of

the universe.

The universe operated in a

completely rational and

predictable way following the

mathematics used to describe

the universe; the universe, then,

was mechanistic.

One need not appeal to revealed

religion or theology to explain

any aspect of the physical

phenomenon of the universe.

All the planets and other objects

in the universe moved according

to a physical attraction between

them which is called gravity; this

mutual attraction explained the

orderly and mechanistic motions

of the universe.

Newton's mechanistic view of the

universe, though, is an idea that derives

from Greek atomism, but Newton's

mechanistic universe would become the

dominant model in European thought for

the next several centuries (still is).

According to Newton, the universe was

like a massive clock built by a creating

god and set into motion. Actually, even

though Newton was a devout Christian,

this argument has a philosophical basis.

For Newton based his entire view of the

universe on the concept of inertia:

every object remains at rest until moved

by another object; every object in motion

stays in motion until redirected or

stopped by another object. (This latter

principle explains why we can jump in

the air without the earth moving out

from under us). According to the concept

of inertia, no object has the ability to

move or stop itself. The universe, then,

becomes a vast billiard ball table, in

which everything moves because

something else has just knocked into it

or caused it to move. But this leads to a

serious philosophical problem: who

moved the first object? How did the

universe get going if no object can move

itself? The Greek atomists, who believed

that the universe consisted of atoms (in

Greek the word atoma means

"indivisibles") that create all

phenomenon by colliding into and

combining with each other, explained

this with the concept of "swerve":

somewhere at the beginning of time, one

atom swerved all by itself and knocked

into another and hence the universe

came into being. Aristotle, on the other

hand, who also based his thought more

or less on a mechanistic view of the

universe, solved the problem by positing

an "Unmoved Mover": somewhere at the

beginning of time, an "Unmoved Mover"

(which he calls God), was able to set

things in motion without having to be

moved itself. This idea was appropriated

in the Middle Ages by the Scholastics,

who, like Aristotle, believed the universe

functioned in a rational and mechanistic

way and was set in motion and ruled

over by a rational and unmoving mover,

God. Newton adopts this idea whole-

cloth: although the universe is a vast

machine of objects moving and colliding

into each other and functioning by its

own laws, it still requires some original

thing that set it all in motion in the first

place. That thing, for Newton, was God.

But God did not run the day to day

workings of the universe (although

Newton never denied that God couldn't,

just that God didn't interfere with the

workings of the universe). If the universe

were a vast machine of interacting

objects, that meant that it could be

understood as a machine. Human reason

and the bare observation of phenomena

were sufficient to explain the universe;

one need not drag religion or God into

the explanation. If physical phenomena

were mechanistic, that means that

physical phenomena can be

manipulated, that is, engineered. This

mechanistic view of the universe, called

classical mechanics, focusses entirely

on the concept of motion, that is, at the

base of Newton's thought is an attempt

to explain why the universe moves. This

is what physics is all about: why things

change.

Newton's mechanistic view of the

universe would soon be applied to other

phenomenon as well. If the universe

were a machine and could be understood

rationally, then so could economics,

history, politics, and ethics (human

character). It also followed that if

economics, history, politics, and ethics

were mechanical, they could be

explained without recourse to religion or

God and they could be manipulated as

if they were machines, that is, they could

be improved, engineered, and made to

run better. As the Enlightenment

developed, classical mechanics would

give rise to a larger phenomenon, Deism

which is founded on the idea that all

phenomenon is fundamentally rational

and mechanistic and can be explained in

non-religious terms. All of modern

Western knowledge and the majority of

your experience is ultimately derived

from this principle. Newton's separation

of the mechanical universe from religious

explanation and the Enlightenment

concept of deism went further than this,

however. If the universe was created by

God and the universe was a rational

place, that meant that God was rational.

If one understood the workings of the

universe, one understood the workings

of the mind of God. So the separation of

physical explanation from religious

explanation was not as tightly enforced

as it seems at first glance. The great

innovation of this view for Western

religion would be the Enlightenment

insistence that religion itself be rational.

Western

Science

Moves

All the pieces were now in place, fused

there by Newton's elaborate concept of a

mechanical universe. Eighteenth century

science saw an explosion of empirical

knowledge about the physical world. A

virtual flood of empirical observations

and calculations inspired not only an

increase in knowledge, but a massive

effort to systematize that knowledge as

Newton had done. The scientific

revolution of the eighteenth century is,

above everything else, characterized by

fanatical conversion of knowledge into

rational systems.

Biology: The greatest strides in

systematizing an unsystematic science

occurred in biology. While Galileo trained

his new optical device on the stars and

discovered new worlds, another optical

device was being used to discover

equally dramatic worlds in drops of

water: the microscope. The earliest

scientists to use the microscope, Robert

Hooke in England, and Jan Swammerdam

and Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-

1723), found that plant an animal tissues

were made out of rooms or cells, but also

discovered frightening and nonsensical

monsters in mud puddles: hydras,

ameobas, and equally baffling creatures.

Systematizing this vast new catalogue of

knowledge fell to a Swedish botanist,

Karl von Linné (1707-1778), also known

as Carolus Linnaeus. In his Systema

Naturae , published in 1767, he

cataloged all the living creatures into a

single system that defined their

morphological relations to one another:

the Linnean classification system.

Morphologically distinct living creatures

he called "species," which means

"individuals." Morphologically related

species were called a "genus," which

means "kind." And so on up a scale of

more abstract morphological

relationships: family, class, order,

phylum, kingdom. Each individual

species was marked by both its species

and its genus name; this classification

system, with some modifications, still

dominates our understanding of the

system of living creatures.

There was no such thing as evolution in

Linneaus's time. The morphological

relationships between living creatures,

then, were purely descriptive; they did

not explain why living creatures seemed

to have these morphological

relationships nor why these relationships

could be abstracted to such high levels.

It was George Buffon (1707-1788) who

tried to explain these relationships, but

he couldn't really commit himself to an

evolutionary theory. What troubled

Buffon was the close morphological

relationships between humans and

primates; this implied that the account

of creation in Christianity wasn't valid.

Buffon was only willing to admit that it

was possible that all the range of living

creatures ultimately derived from a

single species which had changed over

time in the variety of its descent.

Chemistry: Chemistry, you'll remember,

was originally an Islamic import into

European culture and served as the

foundational science in the development

of European empirical and experimental

science. While chemical knowledge

advanced in leaps and bounds from the

thirteenth century onwards, nobody

could really explain how chemical

systems worked. There were a pile of

theories, but none of them fully

explained the range of chemical

phenomena. A new system of

understanding chemicals and elements

was precipitated by the discovery of

gases by Henry Cavendish and Joseph

Priestley in the latter half of the

eighteenth century. In 1766, Cavendish

discovered hydrogen (but he didn't know

what it was at the time) and found that it

would not burn all by itself; however,

when it was exposed to air, whoosh!, it

burned like crazy. In 1774, Priestley

discovered oxygen; if a candle were put

in a tube filled with oxygen, it, too,

burned like crazy. This was a great

breakthrough. Up until this point,

Europeans believed that fire was a

separate element and the properties of

combustion were derived from the

properties of fire. Cavendish and

Priestley had proven, however, that fire

was caused by the mixture of things

with a gas. Finally, Cavendish discovered

that water, which was also considered to

be an element, was, in fact, made up of

two gases: hydrogen and oxygen. A new

chemical model of the universe was

forming: the world was made up of

"compounds" of basic elements.

The picture was put together by Antoine

Lavoisier, who proved that burning was

caused by oxidation, that is, the mixing

of a substance with oxygen. He also

proved that diamonds were made of

carbon and, more importantly, argued

that all living processes were at their

heart chemical reactions. Finally, and

most importantly, he formulated the "law

of conservation of mass," which argued

that the amount of physical substance

never changes in a chemical reaction.

The only thing that changes is the nature

of chemical combinations.

Electricity: The most exciting of the

new sciences, however, was electricity.

In 1672, Otto von Guericke, was the first

human to knowingly generate electricity

using a machine, and in 1729, Stephen

Gray demonstrated that electricity could

be "transmitted" through metal

filaments. The first electrical storage

device was invented in 1745, the so-

called "Leyden jar," and in 1749,

Benjamin Franklin demonstrated that

lightening was electricity by firing up a

Leyden jar in a lightning storm (this

discovery led to the invention of the

lightening rod). However, throughout the

eighteenth century, electricity was the

most abstract of the physical sciences. It

was a toy, a bric-a-brac, in the scientific

community because nobody could think

of any real practical use for it.

Medicine: Enormous amounts of

knowledge were added to medical

practice throughout the seventeenth and

eighteenth century: anatomy,

microscopic anatomy, the circulation of

blood, inoculation (which Europeans

learned from the Ottoman Muslims) and

vaccination, and so on. Most important,

however, was a new system of

understanding human biological

processes: pathology. Enlightenment

medicine proposed that the body was a

natural system that functioned in

predictable and rational ways, that is, it

operated like a machine. Disease was a

malfunction, disease was the breaking

down of this machine: this was

pathology. All disease processes, then,

could be understood as natural

phenomena and the recovery of health

was also a natural and rational

phenomenon.

Richard Hooker