The Darwin College Lecture Series

The chapters in this book originate from lectures given as part of the 2010 Darwin College Lecture Series on the subject of risk. This series constitutes one of Cambridge University's largest and longest-running set of public lectures. Begun in 1986, the Darwin College Lecture Series has, each year, focused on a single theme and invited eminent speakers from around the world to reflect on what that theme means in their field. Over the last twenty-five years the chosen themes have ranged from survival to serendipity, conflict, power, structure, sound, evidence, evolution, the fragile environment, predicting the future, time and identity, reflecting many of the key issues that affect our local and global societies, as well as celebrating important milestones in our history. ‘Origins’ was the subject of the first Darwin College Lecture Series in 1986. ‘Time’ was chosen to commemorate the 2000 millennium series, and in 2009, the title of the series was ‘Darwin’, celebrating the anniversary of Charles Darwin by looking at his ideas and influence.

The cornerstones of the Darwin College Lecture Series, and the books which accompany them, are their interdisciplinary approach and target audience. In the book following the first Darwin College Lecture Series in 1986, D. H. Mellor, Vice-Master of Darwin College, put it like this:

Our fascination with the revolutionary heliocentric hypothesis of Copernicus, carried forward by Galileo and Kepler, has led us to overlook the revolutionary discoveries tumbling out of other scientific investigations in the seventeenth century. The Copernican revolution has an additional fascination because it seems to pit a great scientific hero, Galileo, against an oppressive religious structure. But the Church outside of Italy controlled neither the press, the dissemination of telescopes, nor the exploration of nature. Neither could it suppress the anatomical or microscopic study of nature and the human body.

In this way, the workings of the omnipresent European ethos of science was operative in many fields in England and from Scandinavia to Italy on the Continent. It can be seen in medicine and in the broad range of microscopic studies that gave birth to microbial studies. This was made possible by the invention of the microscope, both single- and compound-lens versions. Likewise, significant empirical advances were made in the field of hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical studies. All these came out of the ubiquitous scientific curiosity that we saw earlier in the Europe-wide fascination with the telescope. That curiosity had been bred in the universities and both preceded the scientific revolution and served to keep it going.

The Jesuit Mission in China

The earliest certain transmission of the telescope to Asia occurred in 1613, when a Dutch sea captain brought it to Japan. The question of whether the representatives of the king of Siam took a spyglass back to Thailand in 1610 when they returned is still unanswered, as their ship was wrecked in a storm somewhere along the coast of Indonesia. Nevertheless, telescopes were taken to Thailand by the Jesuits soon thereafter. As we shall see later, the British ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, brought a telescope to the Mughal court of Jahangir in 1615. In the same year, however, Chinese scholars could read a preliminary account of Galileo's celestial discoveries written and translated into Chinese by a Portuguese Jesuit. By 1619, a “Keplerian” astronomical telescope arrived in China with a new batch of missionaries. The Jesuit scientists Johannes Schreck (known among Jesuits as Terrentius) and Johann Adam Schall had arrived in China with firsthand experience using the Dutch or Galilean telescopes in Europe at the moment of Galileo's discoveries. But the Jesuit mission in China had already been launched before Matteo Ricci arrived in 1583.

For more than three decades, Ricci and his followers had been laying the groundwork for bringing European science and astronomy to China. That task, as it turned out, was far more complicated than anyone imagined. It was more complex than transmitting the telescope and related parts of Western astronomy to other parts of the world. Long-distance spying, as could be done with the Dutch invention, would surely raise issues in the Muslim world as well as in China. But China's intellectual walls were anchored in unique and highly articulated ancient patterns of thought that were always ready to be recovered and reimposed.

When the early models of the spyglass appeared in Holland, Europeans quickly recognized the importance of the new device for both military reconnaissance and celestial exploration. Shortly thereafter, missionaries, sea captains, and traders began taking the telescope around the world, first across Europe and then to Asia. In 1615, the British ambassador Sir Thomas Roe presented a telescope to the Mughal court of Jahangir. This occurred in the same year as Chinese scholars could read a preliminary account of Galileo's discoveries written in Chinese.

Mughal India

When Europeans began exploring India in the late sixteenth century, and more extensively in the early seventeenth century, they were stunned by the amount of wealth that was in the hands of the rulers of Mughal India. As one British official put it, Sultan Jahangir was “the greatest and richest master of precious stones that inhabits the whole earth.” Others noted the great disparity of wealth and power between Jahangir and “Christian kings,” saying that it was so great as to be “incredible.”

Until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the rise of globalization, societies and civilizations of the past were deeply rooted in their local cultures and traditions. This was especially so with regard to their practices of socialization and education. The educational traditions of Europe stood far from those of the Muslim Middle East and from those of China and Mughal India. Educational practices are always deeply embedded in religious and philosophical traditions, and those traditions in China, India, and Europe were considerably different.

Although Islam spread in many areas that had once been Christian, Islamic philosophy and institutional practices stand in contrast to Christian conceptions. Christianity from the outset had been deeply influenced by Greek philosophy and Hellenic culture that still survived at the time of Christ. On the other hand, when Islam arose, Hellenic culture had virtually disappeared. Furthermore, the Arabian peninsula had never been significantly penetrated by either Greek or Roman culture. Consequently, the metaphysical and philosophical foundations of the two civilizations were markedly different. Even though there was an impressive translation movement of the eighth and ninth centuries that brought a huge stock of Greek philosophy into Arab areas, differences in attitudes to the natural philosophy of Plato and Aristotle remained.

In the 1630s, when the official debate over Galileo's provocative defense of the Copernican system was starting to heat up again, physical inquiry began shifting its focus to another part of the natural world. It concerned hydraulics, the limitations of siphons and suction pumps to lift water, and the idea that the air of our atmosphere has weight. If true, that idea would have momentous implications for human life. Within seventy years, Europeans would be pioneering the effort to harness that principle of nature as a new source of energy. First steam power and soon thereafter electric power would follow.

Such technological advances could only be harvested by advances in basic science itself. Furthermore, each of these inquiries was rooted in ancient conceptions that had been studied continuously from the time of Aristotle. In the early 1600s, Italy was a leader in hydraulics and in the construction of mechanical devices for lifting water. Some of these mechanical devices were also used to power machines for the grinding and processing of other materials. Vittorio Zonca (b. ca. 1580) had published a book in 1607 with dozens of illustrations of such devices, some powered by water, some by beasts, and some by human agents. It went through many editions. Consequently, Rome had a band of hydraulics experts in the 1630s experimenting with various hydraulic devices. They found the question of why water can be raised hydraulically only ten meters needing an explanation. This problem was mysteriously linked to the question of a vacuum.

During the year following the publication of the Starry Messenger, Galileo was thrown into a maelstrom of argument, debate, and more discoveries. Those without principled reasons for opposing Galileo's discoveries were enchanted and began to imagine all kinds of new things. An English astronomer, Sir William Lower, who had been a student of Thomas Harriot's, reacted enthusiastically to Galileo's news. He wrote to Harriot on June 21, 1610, “We are here…on fire with these things.” For him, Galileo's discoveries were more startling than Magellan's trip around the world. He and Harriot both wondered whether the planets Saturn and Mars might have hitherto unseen moons revolving around them. They were right: both do have satellites, but they would not be found for many years.

Becoming Mathematician and Philosopher

Galileo now pressed forward with his plan to become mathematician and philosopher to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. With his new book of discoveries in hand and his improved occhiale, Galileo had much with which to impress the grand duke.

Before we look at the new synthesis of astronomy, the science of mechanics, and other forces, we should recall the scientific context outside Europe, especially in the Muslim world, regarding astronomy and the science of motion.

Earlier, in Chapter 5, I outlined developments in optics, astronomy, and the science of motion in the Muslim world up to the end of the seventeenth century. We saw that when the telescope arrived in Mughal India (1615), in the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1630), and the broader Middle East, there was no response triggering an upsurge in astronomical activity. No new telescopes were designed, no new observatories were built, and no new astronomical observations were compiled using the telescope.

Those who think about the long cycles of science and civilizations and the question of why the Western world succeeded as it did may need to anchor their speculations in several mundane facts. When the scientific revolution occurred in the seventeenth century, the United States of America did not yet exist. In 1609, when Galileo made his revolutionary telescopic discoveries, a hardy band of English settlers attempted to establish the Popham Colony on the forbidding coast of Maine. Owing to the harsh winters of New England, the ill-fated colony was gone a year later.

In 1776, when the thirteen colonies banded together to form the United States, the inhabitants of those often wilderness regions numbered perhaps six million. China and India at the time counted more than 100 million subjects each, dwarfing the population of the struggling American colonies. No one would have predicted that the educational, political, and economic institutions being fashioned in those embryonic United States would propel it to become the dominant power in the twentieth century.

The Revolutionary Grand Synthesis

The achievement of the modern scientific revolution, most elegantly put forth in the work of Sir Isaac Newton, was the outcome of a joint European adventure. It brought together extraordinary advances in optics, astronomy, and the science of motion, all governed by the law of universal gravitation. Whether we consider Newton's new unified system of terrestrial and celestial physics of 1687, or his even grander vision of that system augmented by particle attractions, magnetic, electric, and other forces acting “at a great distance,” the result is undeniably revolutionary.

The seventeenth century also witnessed great strides in pneumatics and electrical studies: advances in the former field would bring the steam engine, whereas those in the latter would bring electrification and an unimaginable new source of energy: electric power. It is difficult to imagine the Industrial Revolution without steam power and our modern digital world without electricity and its harnessing. Neither could any other part of the world get us there without first discovering and harnessing electric forces.

The seventeenth century was one of the most dynamic and eventful centuries in the history of the modern world. It can be called the great divide that separated Western Europe developmentally from the rest of the world for the next three and a half centuries. During the 100 years of the seventeenth century, the scientific revolution in Europe produced an enormous flow of discoveries that transformed scientific thought. These discoveries occurred in astronomy, optics, the science of motion, mathematics, and the newly created field of physics. The Newtonian synthesis brought forth for the first time an integrated celestial and terrestrial physics within the framework of universal gravitation. Advances were also made in hydraulics and pneumatics, medicine, microscopy, and the study of human and animal anatomy. Not least of all, big steps were taken toward the discovery of electricity.

Given this extraordinary pattern of discovery, it is easy to ask why all this did not happen elsewhere. Simply put, why the West? Why did the Western world take off and become the dominant scientific, economic, and political power on this planet? Why did the great civilizations of China, India, and the Muslim Middle East, with their long records of growth and accomplishment, fall behind? Today, the prevailing view is that whatever happened culturally and developmentally in the West must have taken place elsewhere because people are basically the same in all places. The sociologist and medieval historian Benjamin Nelson called this idea uniformitarianism.

Across the world in 1600, the night sky was a spectacular array of bright stars. Before the invention of electricity and other forms of lighting, to step out into the air on a clear night was to enter into a wonderland of starry objects filling the sky in all directions. This was as true in Europe or North America as it was in India, Africa, or China. The sky was filled with thousands of fixed stars that appeared to be attached to a blue background that rotated daily around the earth. Against that tapestry, the five planets – Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn – followed their regular paths, tracked by their proximity to constellations among the fixed stars.

In the lucidity of this unpolluted sky, the nighttime observer was likely to see shooting stars that had their own mystical significance. Even today, if one goes outside the dense urban areas of our planet, where most people live, that dazzling vista can be seen. In the rural parts of our world, for example, in northern Maine or other parts of New England, or southern France, in the mountains and villages north of Aix-en-Provence, or in rural Tunisia, among many other places, the vast array of stellar objects visible to the naked eye suddenly comes into view. For today's urban dwellers, this is a wondrous experience.