SERVANTS OF NATURE EB

Lewis Pyenson, Susan Sheets-Pyenson

• Publisher: Fontana Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780006862178
• eBook ISBN: 9780007394401
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

'Highly readable, subtle and thought-provoking scientific history' Scotsman

In this penetrating work, Pyenson and Pyenson identify that major advances in science stem from changes in three distinct areas of society: the social institutions that promote science, the sensibilities of scientists themselves and the goal of the scientific enterprise. Servants of Nature begins by examining the institutions that have shaped science: the academies of Ancient Greece, universities, the growth of museums of science, technology and natural history, botanical and zoological gardens, and the advent of modern specialized research laboratories. It is equally comprehensive when it analyses changing scientific sensibilities — for example, the relationship between religion and science, or the interplay between the growth of democracy and the growth of scientific knowledge.The final section of this book is on the changing nature of the scientific enterprise and considers how the goals of science have evolved. It is an indispensable account of how science, perhaps above all other human endeavours, has shaped, and been shaped by, the world we inhabit today.

I

INSTITUTIONS

1

Teaching: Before the Scientific Revolution

Well into middle age the man awoke with a nightmare about honours examinations at his undergraduate college. For years the nightmare took the same form. He was unprepared for the material. Other students streamed towards the classrooms, confident that they had mastered Heine and Heisenberg, Proust and politics, evolution and revolution. He was all at sea, barely familiar with the course syllabi. Before intimations of mortality replaced the fear of inadequacy in the man’s sleeping consciousness, the examination dream evolved a more complicated and quite preposterous plot: though the man held a doctorate, he was returning to complete an undergraduate college degree.

Most people have experienced an anxiety dream about school. The reason is clear: schooling is an unnatural and traumatic event. Children are confided to a stranger for instruction in abstractions. They are required to commit great quantities of facts to memory, largely by the intermediary of the written word. It comes as no surprise that some creative minds have questioned the value of traditional schooling, with its emphasis on examinations. Albert Einstein (1879–1955), in one of his earliest popular writings, found little to commend the traditional German secondary school-leaving examination, the Abitur. The examination was injurious to mental health precisely because it gave rise to nightmares. Furthermore, a good deal of time in the last year of secondary school was wasted in preparing students for the test.¹ Einstein himself never submitted to the Abitur, although he once failed the entrance examination for the Zurich polytechnical institute, and his lover failed the final examinations there.

Einstein studied in Germany and Switzerland, and he may even have attended school briefly in Italy. He could have affirmed that many nations have a hierarchy of schools where citizens are obliged to receive state-sanctioned training. Knowledge may be imparted anywhere, and skills may be acquired on the job, but an academic institution carries an ethos and acts as a crucible for culture. Most important is teaching manners – the essential, outward features of daily life that distinguish civilization from barbarism. Some academic institutions even instruct about what to say at a cocktail reception, which utensil to pick up first at a dinner party, and how to act au courant of the latest intellectual fad. With the eclipse of gentry, priests, and community healers, academic graduates have increasingly been called to officiate in matters large and small.

Whence this prestige attached to the resources controlled by a self-perpetuating guild? The vast majority of academic diplomas no longer lead directly to a post in the workaday world. Today they do not provide evidence, except indirectly, of having mastered the skills required to succeed in business or public affairs. And in an age of sliding-fee structures, social class and family wealth are no longer associated with the crest of a particular institution.

Schools generally are conservative social institutions, and prestige radiates from their traditions, customs, and rituals. They divide the day into class hours and the year into semesters, the calendar of events culminating in colourful ceremonies at which diplomas are conferred. These rituals of formal schooling, which express a way of ordering the world, have entered into the consciousness of a large part of the world’s peoples.

School rituals deriving from religious or moral outlooks vary from place to place. Yet all schools subscribe to one common idea. They hold that knowledge may be acquired through diligent study. There are other kinds of knowledge deriving from religious or artistic inspiration. But schools hold that most things can be learned. The central notion here concerns a distillation of tradition. Learning about knowledge, largely from books, is what has been called science for a thousand years.

In schools, a master imparts knowledge to acolytes, who may eventually create something new beyond their lessons. Whether scholastic lessons are abstract or practical, esoteric or mundane, schools prepare students for a place in society. That place is generally keyed to facility with the written word, which has been the most secure means of transmitting knowledge from one generation to another. In fact, it is not unreasonable to imagine that schools invented writing, and hence that schools are the prime mover of history – the science of knowing the past by its documentation.

In this chapter and the next one we examine how schools of higher learning have been involved with scientific tradition and change. We shall see that academia has both promoted scientific innovation and also stifled it. One of the challenges facing universities in the new millennium will be to implement new ways of breathing relevance into the accomplishments and promises of the past.

The Mediterranean world

What we know about science education in antiquity derives from a variety of documents: a few hundred clay tablets from several sites in Mesopotamia; a few treatises written on papyrus; and diverse histories and texts recopied and reprinted in Chinese, Greek, Arabic and Latin. To this must be added inscriptions on stone, masonry, coins, and pottery, precious castings and carvings, and the accumulated wisdom of archaeology. Because our knowledge of the distant past derives from fragmentary sources, it has sometimes been said that the study of antiquity appeals to people who like mastering a small, fixed syllabus. The sources, however, are much more abundant than commonly imagined.

Clay tablets allow us to conclude that schools existed in Mesopotamia, and that they coincided with the earliest representations of the Sumerian language about 3100 BC. Among the documents of Old Sumerian, which existed until about 2500 BC, are school exercises – lists of signs and words. At the time of the Semitic invasion of Mesopotamia, about 1700 BC, we find a compendium of celestial omens called the Enuma Anu Enlil. These omens concern the moon’s eclipses, halos, and conjunctions with fixed stars; solar eclipses; weather and earthquakes; and planetary stations. They held special importance for those who believed in astrology, a system of correspondences constructed between celestial phenomena and terrestrial events. The celestial phenomena must have been catalogued over centuries and at diverse places by trained observers. These circumstances suggest an early social pairing of priestly and scholastic functions.

Many of the Sumerian calculations we possess treat practical measuring problems, often involving land area. (In modern terms they reduce to complicated algebraic equations, often cubic or even quadratic expressions.) The problems are sometimes formulated with what we may call malice of forethought (correct answers are integral numbers), and sometimes they have absurd proportions (lengths stretching more than a thousand kilometres or food for an impossibly large army). We have problem sets both with and without solutions, and some solutions feature elementary mistakes. We must conclude that the corpus relates to instruction in schools. The techniques were no doubt useful for keeping track of state assets, but it seems more reasonable to imagine that this specialized knowledge served better to discipline young minds.

The presence of codifying abstruse calculations (whatever their ostensible, practical referent) implies the existence of schools, even if we cannot say much about scholastic organization. Egyptian mathematics, for example, is based on unit fractions – fractions where the numerator is always one. It is possible to speculate about the origin of such a convention (in terms of family structure, inheritance practices, land tenure and taxes), but there can be no disagreement about the ultimate impracticality of the convention for advanced mathematics. Among the few surviving compendia of Egyptian mathematics, we find calculations dividing the contents of a jug of beer into minuscule parts, obviously a school exercise by its lack of utility.

A new kind of teaching emerged in the fifth century BC, and it left its mark on learning in all cultures with access to the Mediterranean world. The innovation related to a group of Greek teachers known as Sophists. They were private professional pedagogues (like later-day itinerant lecturers) who operated in a free-market economy. They would teach by contract whatever people wanted to learn. Their syllabuses suited individual tastes, and their pitch seems to have been a mixture of affable cultivation and practical skills designed to propel a citizen forward in his city.

Their innovations notwithstanding, Socrates (ca.470–399 BC) and Plato (ca.427–347 BC) were teachers in the Sophist tradition, even though they distinguished themselves by their strong claim to methodological precision and systematization of knowledge. Plato’s Academy occupied a large athletic facility long used by teachers like him. Aristotle (384–322 BC), who might have succeeded Plato, created his own school at another athletic facility, the Lyceum. Aristotle’s chosen successor Theophrastus (372–287 BC) produced written anthologies of his pre-Socratic predecessors in addition to general manuals and new works. He purchased land near the Lyceum and donated it in perpetuity to his colleagues for a school, although the Lyceum’s library left Athens for Anatolia as a result of an ideological schism. Later the library returned to Athens and eventually found its way to Rome (as spoils of conquest), where it received wide notice. Permanency of place and syllabus, coupled with the international and public nature of instruction, produced a search for certainty rather than, as with the Sophists, mere expediency.

The Academy and the Lyceum were institutions of higher learning. They departed from the smorgasbord of Sophist offerings whose heritage we find, today, in undergraduate liberal-arts curricula. Young people associated with these schools absorbed particular truths as well as the spirit of the place, and then contributed to the discourse; it pleased some men (we have no clear record of women scholars) to stay on for part or all of a lifetime. The excitement of scholarly discussion and the presence of libraries, where knowledge was collected and stored, made such a choice attractive. We possess no diplomas from antiquity because the world of Greek learning was so small as not to require them. A quick conversation would be enough to establish a person’s credentials.

State funding ensured the contemplative life of these colleges, which continued in some form for many hundreds of years. At least at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, academic contemplation related directly to political involvement. Because the end of all learning was to train better citizens, scholars often applied themselves to statecraft. The goal was to produce someone like Henry Kissinger or, more optimistically, Woodrow Wilson, each of whom was a distinguished academic before entering politics.

The Big Three – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – closed the Greek golden age. In the far-ranging conquests and the subsequent Hellenizing process initiated by Alexander the Macedonian, these and other thinkers of contemporary renown received tremendous exposure. What distinguishes the sequence of the Big Three is not speculative moral or political philosophy, but rather a tradition of collective enquiry into nature. They also sought explanations rooted in experience and capable of standing up under sustained, reasoned debate. Whatever the philosophical colour of knowledge-seekers in Hellenistic times (the philosophies came in dozens of hues), their accomplishments depended on libraries and secular centres of higher learning.

Institutions with a teaching function began to take shape, emphasizing the search for knowledge of nature, with the result that the contentious ethical-political side receded into the background. A pupil of Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus, Demetrius Phalerius (ca.345–293 BC), deposed as dictator of Athens, went to the Egypt of one of Alexander’s generals turned potentates, Ptolemy I Soter; there Ptolemy, acting on Demetrius’s advice, founded the institute for advanced study known as the Museum of Alexandria. The name suggests a secular temple for receiving inspiration by the muses, the nine avatars of arts and letters (including astronomy) in classical antiquity. Though under the direction of a priest (until Rome imposed a supervisor) and with their material needs overseen by curatorial staff, the Museum’s fellows were free to study what they liked. They lived sumptuously at the king’s expense. They had outdoor galleries and lecture theatres for learned discussions, and they ate in a large dining hall. Attached to the Museum were a botanical garden and what became the largest library of Mediterranean antiquity, the Serapeum. The prestige of the Museum made it a magnet for scientists throughout Hellenistic and Roman times – Euclid (fl. ca.295 BC), Apollonius of Perga (fl. ca.200 BC), Aristarchus (ca.310–230 BC), Eratosthenes (ca.276–ca.195BC), Archimedes (ca.287–212 BC), and Hero (fl. AD 62) all resided in Alexandria for longer or shorter periods. Museum fellows could and did take on pupils – the grammarians Dionysius Thrax of Alexandria (fl. AD 40) and Apion (fl. AD 30) are traditionally held to have studied there under Didymus (b. 63 BC). Scholars generally found it a safe haven from political storms. The Museum was the nerve centre of a cultural community that we would find today in places like the Cambridges.

The Museum inspired copies at the administrative centres of Antioch, Ephesus, Smyrna, Seleucia, and Rhodes. The Attalids of Pergamum in Anatolia (in modern Turkey) imitated the Alexandrian example by creating a medical school and magnificent library, an environment of learning that centuries later nurtured the Pergamum native, the famous physician Galen (ca.129–ca.200). A second-century contemporary of Galen’s, the great thinker Claudius Ptolemy (ca.100–ca.170, not related to the royal family) held a professorship at the Alexandrian Museum, part of the small number of chairs in philosophy that Egypt’s nonresident monarchs, the Romans, had financed. After AD 200, however, the Museum began to lose some of its intellectual centrality, despite the extraordinary achievements of Ptolemy. Galen’s writings suggest as much, because he visited the Museum and wrote disparagingly about its physicians. Alexandria’s Museum – with its hundreds of thousands of rolls of books and its heritage in speculative philosophy, with its tradition of high-table meals and sparkling dinner conversation – is a distant mirror of twentieth-century universities. It is difficult to say how much was left of the library and its intellectual circle when Caliph Umar, following a tradition of book burnings stretching from the pre-Socratics through the early Christian zealots, ordered a perhaps largely symbolic purification by fire in AD 646.

Although the ancient museums appear much like the best of our universities today, their line to the present is broken. The medieval arts and philosophy faculties in Europe were not exactly corporations for generating new knowledge; indeed, they owe more to secondary-school instruction in antiquity than they do to the academies and museums. In their final form the seven liberal arts (the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics or music; and the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic), which formed the base of medieval university instruction, may be traced to schools of the first century BC. By the imperial Roman period, however, in the schools that retailed these liberal arts, literary studies overwhelmed natural sciences. Like their European successors, Hellenistic and Roman engineers, surveyors, and sailors learned their craft apprentice-style.

The schools of higher learning at Athens, Rome, and elsewhere (or rather, the collection of professors of grammar, rhetoric, law, and medicine at these locations) continued into the sixth century AD, when they were extinguished by Christian fanaticism or barbarian neglect. But the classical tradition nevertheless survived for a thousand years, in Constantinople. Between 425 and 1453, diverse classically inspired schools provided the administrative elite of Byzantium.

The warriors of the Fourth Crusade turned their attention to the conquest of Byzantium. They sacked Constantinople in 1204 and then set about to conquer the outlying provinces. The first Latin emperor of Byzantium, Baldwin I, asked Pope Innocent III to send professors from the University of Paris to found a Latin institute in Constantinople. Innocent agreed to the plan. Also in the thirteenth century, Paris founded a Collegium Constantinopolitanum, designed to lodge and train a score of Byzantine clerics. When Michael Paleologus recaptured Constantinople in 1261, he revived higher learning by appointing George Acropolita (1217–1282, a politician, general, and historian, whom he had freed from prison) to the chair of Aristotelian philosophy. Acropolita also served as ambassador to Rome, effecting a reconciliation of sorts between the eastern and western churches. Twelfth-century Europeans knew about classical learning thanks to hundreds of years of translation from Arabic, but Aristotle entered the fledgling European universities on the tide of Greek learning that issued from Byzantium. It is possible that the notion of European faculties of higher learning – variously guaranteed by church and state – derives from Byzantine precedent.

Eastern cultures

Learned colleges appeared in oth...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Science and Its Past
• Part I: Institutions
• Part II: Enterprises
• Part III: Sensibilities
• Further Reading
• Index
• About the Author
• Notes
• The Fontana History of Science Series
• About the Publisher