University of California, Irvine
Instructor: Dr. Barbara J. Becker
Lecture 10. Wedding Technology and Science
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Exploration |
Exploration of the new world stimulated popular interest in natural wonders. Eyewitnesses published reports of wondrous plants and animals both real and imaginary. |
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| Plant samples were collected and displayed in teaching gardens like the one at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands: |
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Rather than rely on pictures in books, students could see plants for themselves, examine their stems, leaves, flowers, and seeds and observe their growth and decay. Increase in trade and travel abroad increased opportunities for non-scholars to gather and share new knowledge outside the confines of the university system. Beautiful and/or intriguing objects, both natural and man-made, were collected by wealthy and worldly individuals who organized and displayed them privately in rooms called Kunstkammers or "cabinets of curiosities." |
The cabinet of pharmacist Francesco Calzolari (1522-1609)
at Verona, 1622
The cabinet of pharmacist Ferrante Imperato (1550-1631) at Naples, 1672 |
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The rise of the New Philosophy in the 17th century engendered new patterns of social organization with participants as seekers, probers, and witnesses. One vocal proponent of this "new" philosophy was Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon studied at Cambridge University from age 12-15. Reading Aristotle's work left him dissatisfied and critical, particularly of Aristotle's natural philosophy. Bacon began to question the university system's blind and unquestioning adherence to the works of ancient philosophers. He blamed the guild structure of universities for stifling, not facilitating, the acquisition of new and useful knowledge. Bacon urged loosening the university's stranglehold on knowledge transmission in order to achieve real social and economic progress. To accomplish that goal, he argued vigorously not only for the rejection of ancient teachings but for the entire overthrow of the authority of the ancients. The disputation, for example, was (and still is) an important element in university instruction. It was originally designed to give young scholars the opportunity to argue thoughtfully and creatively against the authority of their masters. By Bacon's time, the disputation had devolved into a meaningless exercise -- verbal battles over words in which the fundamental ideas of the ancients were always on the winning side. For Bacon, such pointless exercises only proved that teaching and knowledge had become divorced from utility and practice. Venerating long-dead ideas in old books would not and could not stimulate new inventions. A new philosophy must be established from scratch. To do that, the scholar must turn to nature itself, observe it directly, strain and stretch it, categorize it. |
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Francis Bacon (1561-1626) In Bacon's view • the natural world is a maze; • the scientist is an explorer who travels through the maze of nature like Columbus; • a scientist can get somewhere and make discoveries if he travels enough; and • the scientist/explorer must use signposts -- crucial experiments to determine which way to go next. |
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Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical. The former, like ants only heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both, extracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts.... The true labor of philosophy resembles [that of the bee], for it neither relies entirely nor principally on the powers of the mind, or yet lays up in the memory the matter afforded by the experiments of natural history and mechanics in its raw state, but changes and works it in the understanding.... [T]he reverence for antiquity, and the authority of men who have been esteemed great in philosophy ... have retarded men from advancing in science.... [B]y far the greatest obstacle to the advancement of the sciences ... is to be found in men's despair and the idea of impossibility.... [T]he secrets of nature betray themselves more readily when tormented by art than when left to their own course....  |
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Bacon's "new" philosophers:
"Intelligentsers" encouraged and maintained active communication among widely-scattered virtuosi:
Italy Accademia dei Lincei [Academy of the Lynx-Eyed] (1603-1630)
-Cesi (Il Celivago--the heaven-wanderer) -Johannes Van Heeck (L'Illuminato--the enlightened one) -Anastasio Di Filiis (L'Eclissato--the eclipsed one), and -Francesco Stelluti (Il Tardigrado--the slow one)
Accademia del Cimento [Academy of Experiment] (1657-1667)
A meeting of the Accademia del Cimento
England Gresham College
"Invisible College" (1645-1660)
Our business was (precluding matters of theology and state affairs), to discourse and consider of Philosophical Enquiries, and such as related thereunto: as physic, anatomy, geometry, astronomy, navigation, statics, magnetics, chemics, mechanics, and natural experiments; with the state of these studies, as then cultivated at home and abroad. We then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in the veins, the venae lactae, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, the nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape (as it then appeared) of Saturn, the spots in the sun, and its turning on its own axis, the inequalities and selenography of the moon, the several phases of Venus and Mercury, the improvement of telescopes, and grinding of glasses for that purpose, the weight of air, the possibility, or impossibility of vacuities, and nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies, and the degrees of acceleration therein; and divers other things of like nature. Some of which were then but new discoveries, and others not so generally known and embraced, as now they are, with other things appertaining to what has been called The New Philosophy, which from the times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) in England, has been much cultivated in Italy, France, Germany, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in England. Royal Society of London (1660- )
France Montmor Academy (1648-1664)
Académie des Sciences (1666- )
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| New tools were invented, improved and disseminated. Wedding technology and science enabled investigators to measure Nature more precisely and identify patterns of small, but essential
differences.
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Pneumatics |
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