From the bestselling author of Science: A History comes the enthralling story of a revolution that shook the world. Seventeenth-century England was racked by civil war, plague and fire; a world ruled by superstition and ignorance. A series of meetings of 'natural philosophers' in Oxford and London saw the beginning of a new method of thinking based on proof and experiment.
John Gribbin's gripping, colourful account of this unparalleled time of discovery explores the impact of the Royal Society, culminating with Isaac Newton's revolutionary description of the universe and Edmund Halley's prediction of the return of a comet in 1759. This compelling book shows the triumph not as the work of one isolated genius, but of a Fellowship.
Extract from The Fellowship by John Gribbin
THE REASON WHY
The seventeenth century in Britain was one of unparalleled scientific discovery. Why? Why the seventeenth century, and why Britain? The timing is straightforward to explain as part of the Renaissance, and although an explanation of the timing of the Renaissance and the reasons for this revival of culture in Western Europe lies outside the scope of the present book, as I have argued in Science: A History a convenient marker for the start of the scientific revolution that would transform first Europe and then the rest of the world is 1543, the year in which Andreas Vesalius published De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body) and Nicolaus Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Bodies). Copernicus was Polish, but had studied in Italy; Vesalius was from Brussels, studied briefly in Paris, and carried out his greatest work in Italy. Italy was the birthplace of the Renaissance, which was fuelled by both scholars and manuscripts making the short journey from Constantinople around the time of the fall of Byzantium, in the middle of the fifteenth century. Other key (and related) developments brought about what has been called the First Industrial Revolution (I would prefer 'technological' rather than 'industrial') with the introduction in Europe of moveable type and the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. These changed the intellectual environment both by improving communications and providing information about new and exciting places, and by showing that the application of science could have practical benefits.
Fifty years after the publication of the books by Vesalius and Copernicus, Italy was still the centre of the scientific world, and in the early seventeenth century Galileo famously set out the stall of what we now call science, spelling out the key importance of experiment and observation, testing hypotheses rather than simply arguing in philosophical or logical terms about which idea is more elegant as an explanation of, say, the flight of a cannonball through the air or the passage of Mars across the night sky. In fact, Galileo was not the first person to state these ideas explicitly, and he would not have called himself a scientist, nor used the word 'science', which wasn't coined until the nineteenth century. It stems from the Latin scientia, meaning 'knowledge'; a term which Galileo and his contemporaries would have been thoroughly familiar with, although in a much broader context than our science. They would have regarded themselves as natural philosophers, the heirs to Greeks such as Pythagoras and Aristotle. But as the old saying goes, if it looks like a duck, flies like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. In modern terminology, the people who are the subjects of this book were scientists, and what they did was science; only the saddest pedant would object to my use of the word science in this context.
Other things being equal, science should have taken off in Italy following the work of Galileo, and the revolution I describe in this book should have happened fifty years sooner than it did. But other things were not equal. The dead hand of the Catholic Church stopped the scientific revolution in Italy, with the conviction of Galileo for heresy serving as a powerful incentive for other scientists to give up their work, keep quiet about it, or head for more comfortable climes. In mainland Europe north of the Alps, the development of science was hampered by wars (often religious conflicts) and pestilence. Britain too had its civil war, but this was a different kind of conflict, and one which in the end produced a group of people determined, as we shall see, to keep religion out of science and to publish their discoveries for all to share. By comparison with most of its continental neighbours, by the second half of the seventeenth century England was a stable society (if partly because the horrors of the Civil War were still recent enough to serve as a reminder that a little tolerance might be better than the alternative), more or less democratic, increasingly prosperous, and tolerant, if not of all free-thinkers, at least of the kind of free-thinking involved in science. It was, indeed, fertile ground in which the seeds of science could grow. But although the plants that grew from those seeds began to flower in the 1660s, they were in fact planted in that fertile soil almost exactly at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and nurtured through the efforts of three men - William Gilbert, Francis Bacon, and William Harvey. They were the heralds of the scientific revolution in Britain, and it is with them that my story starts.
As John Gribbin reaches his one hundredth book he takes a look back at the journey to this point and the history of science that so fascinates him.
John, The Fellowship: The Story of a Revolution is your 100th book. 100 is a fantastic achievement. How do you feel about it?
I don't actually keep count, and when it was pointed out, I was particularly pleased that it should by chance be one of the books I'm most proud of. I'm not exactly ashamed of any of them, but you only get to a hundred by writing a lot of more ephemeral books (like The Little Book of Science, which was great fun but not one for posterity). The Fellowship, I hope, is not one of those. I don't really regard the number as an achievement - I used to be a journalist, and my friends on newspapers have written at least as many words as me in the past 30 years, it's just that their words don't get stuck between hard covers and put on bookshelves.
How did you originally start out as a science writer?
When I was a PhD student in Cambridge, and desperate for money to buy such luxuries as food. I started doing short items for New Scientist, and one thing led to another. I spent five years on the staff of the science journal Nature, and wrote my first couple of books during that time. But books only really took over from journalism in the mid-1980s.
Are there books that you have particularly enjoyed writing, or that you think have been the most significant in your output?
I have the fondest memories of In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, which was the first book I wrote for myself, without a contract before starting. It was turned down by eight publishers (including Penguin) before becoming my breakthrough title, and is still in print after 21 years. I enjoyed The Little Book of Science in a different way, as a chance to present science in an offbeat fashion. But like most writers, I usually think my current project is the best and most significant.
What books have particularly influenced you over your career?
Very few books have influenced me as a writer. Going way back (1950s), my early career influences were George Gamow's Mr Tompkins series, and Isaac Asimov's non-fiction. Slightly later, Richard Feynman's famous Lectures on Physics. The writers who did influence me, as a result of collaborating with them on science fiction, were Douglas Orgill and D. G. Compton. My wife, Mary, has been a big influence in getting me to write more crisply (but she still thinks I use too many parentheses).
Have your interests changed over that time?
I've always been interested in everything to do with the way the world got to be the way it is. That's why I did astronomy rather than any other science, and why I became a science writer instead of a scientist. But, as you see from The Fellowship, I have become increasingly interested in the people who did (and do) the science, and what drives them to do it.
Do you think that The Fellowship marks a particular point in your work?
See above. The latest book is always the best! It was really Science: A History that was a bit of a turning point (and credit to Stefan McGrath for suggesting it), and that gave me the confidence to try something even more "historical." I hope people will see this as a history book about science, rather than as a science book with a bit of historical context.
You have done a lot of research for the book. What are the most intriguing things that you have discovered?
Everything in the book! But as a few examples: just how well William Gilbert understood the scientific method more than 400 years ago, and that he influenced Galileo; the incredible range of interests of the founders of the Royal Society, with Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke as prime examples; and the founder who fought on both sides in the Civil War, spied for the French, and was knighted by the English. Not many modern Fellows can match that!
And finally, on a different track, how do you like to relax when you are not hard at work.
Watching cricket or taking advantage of our latest acquisition, a beach hut in Hove (conveniently 10 minutes walk from the cricket ground). "Real" holidays usually involve travelling in France. I also play at Astronomy - the Sussex University astronomy group let me go along to their seminars and keep up to date with latest ideas. This is definitely not work; but the last piece of research I ever did was in a team that measured the age of the Universe, which seemed a good note on which to end.
