The Scientific Revolution

"Shapin’s book is probably the best brief introduction to what science is and how it appeared and when it appeared. It begins, famously, with a sentence which is enough to make many people roll their eyes: ‘There was no such thing as the scientific revolution and this is a book about it.’ The book is full of this kind of ironic postmodernism that can be very irritating, especially to scientists who like to have things nailed down, but it is incredibly rich and interesting. Shapin describes what happened during the scientific revolution, but it’s above all a discussion of the literature, the historiography. It looks at how attitudes to the scientific revolution have changed, and where the term came from. Effectively, the idea appeared in the mid-20th century when scientists turning to history began to look back at the period when Newton and Boyle were working. What Shapin has done in this book—and in other parts of his oeuvre—is to question the narrative scientists employ when they project what they think they do today onto the past, when people behaved differently and believed very different things. For example, some of the 17th-century thinkers I’ve written about came up with material explanations for where life came from, but were driven primarily by religious feelings. Their argument was that spontaneous generation could not exist. Organisms could not come out of nothing because that would contradict the idea that the universe was ordered and the reason the universe was ordered was because God had created it. 17th century thinkers had very contradictory views; if you just read back, imagining that Newton was like Brian Cox, you won’t really understand what was going on. Newton held what might look like highly contradictory views—as well as setting out a mathematical basis for fundamental physical phenomena, he also believed in alchemy and so on. To understand Newton fully, we need to appreciate these interconnections and contradictions. That’s why Shapin’s book is an extremely important work. I don’t agree with all of it—for example, I do think that there was a scientific revolution, but it did not conform to the caricature of a single event producing modern science overnight. This isn’t surprising—you can’t condense the French Revolution down to the events of the 14th of July 1789. Revolutions are very long, sprawling things that are contradictory and rarely proceed in any kind of linear or coherent manner, but nevertheless they do produce transformations in thinking, in behaviour, in organisation. That’s what was happening during what historians might call the ‘long 17th century’, which stretched from the 16th century, when people were beginning to investigate anatomy and astronomy using modern techniques, right up to Darwin. This was a very long period in which much of what we now recognise as science was slowly congealing and materialist explanations were being sought and found in all areas of investigation. Yes and no. The book was written in 1998, just after the peak of the ‘science wars’ in academia, when the prevalence of postmodern ideas in sociology and history led some to suggest that all knowledge was up for grabs. Amongst the more extreme views put forward by sociologists of science there were some who argued that science was just another story, no more valid than myths from peoples throughout the world. Shapin’s book does not put forward this view, but he challenges our assumptions and make us think about what science is and how it got to be the way it is. Scientists would obviously argue that it is no accident that science and technology actually work. Science is not just a story we tell ourselves, it is an increasingly accurate representation of how the universe works. It is striking that scientists simultaneously have two discourses about this question. On the one hand, we have knowledge, we know how things work. But we also say that we doubt things and that there’s nothing better than being wrong, in other words, the root of progress is that we don’t know how things work. The really exciting part of science is realising what we don’t know and how we can find it out. For example, it is technically possible that evolution by natural selection might turn out to be wrong, but given the vast amount of evidence, that possibility is so unlikely that I’m not going to bother about it. If we discovered tomorrow that it were wrong, that would of course be very exciting—just like physicists get very excited about the possibility of Einstein being wrong—it would open up a new challenge. In general, however, we’re proceeding stepwise towards greater knowledge. For example, the validity of Newtonian mechanics wasn’t negated by Einstein’s discoveries: it simply became applicable to one particular realm. Despite our subsequent discoveries, we use equations derived from Newton’s laws to send probes to distant planets or to moons like Enceladus. My disagreement with Shapin is that I think science is different from other forms of human knowledge, and there are things that we most definitely know. I think."