The Beginnings of Modern Science in England

At my Men's Book Club meeting last evening we discussed Laura J.Snyder's The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World (2011). The four friends referenced in the book's subtitle were William Whewell, John Herschel (son of the famous astronomer William Herschel), Charles Babbage (sometimes credited with inventing digital computers), and Richard Jones (perhaps the least well known of the group, but an influence on economics and the use of historical and statistical data). The most remarkable member of the group was William Whewell (pronounced Who-ell, or HEW-el, depending on which authority one follows), son of a Lancaster carpenter and joiner. When the boy Whewell showed early promise he was taken up by a curate who was also headmaster of the local grammar school and encouraged to turn his energy to education rather than carpentry. With a series of benefactors and a generous and supportive family, young William eventually went off to attend Trinity College, Cambridge, where he would remain as student, fellow, and eventually Master for the rest of his life. Whewell turned out to be the sort of polymath who would achieve fame in nearly every field of science as well as in theology and moral philosophy. It was fitting that he took as his personal intellectual hero the earlier English polymath, Francis Bacon, who had also been a student at Trinity College, and who had also encouraged a revolution in science and scientific methods in the early seventeenth century.

Snyder's book is an excellent group biography. She ranges over the adult lives of her four principal characters, describing many of their accomplishments as well as their personal challenges, but also introduces a large cast of supporting characters ranging from other men of science, such as Charles Darwin, to the poets Wordsworth and Tennyson and, significantly, Ada, Lady Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron. Snyder points out that it was Ada, herself a mathematical prodigy, who saw the greater potential of Babbage's famous Analytical Engine and is sometimes credited with inventing computer programming. But while the story often seems to digress into various byways, Snyder keeps her focus on the emergence in the early to mid nineteenth century of the professional man of science. In fact, it was Whewell who first introduced the term scientist (comparable to artist); but more than terminology it was the changes he introduced into the science curriculum at Cambridge that would have lasting significance for the teaching, study, and practice of science from that time forward. 

If there is any criticism to level at the book, it is that Snyder might have written more about other figures in other countries who where also responsible for the revolution in scientific thought and method throughout the world in the nineteenth century, and even earlier to some extent. But that was not the book she set out to write. Hers is the story of four remarkable men who met each other for Sunday breakfasts when they were at university; who proceeded to feast and discuss, among other things, Bacon's notions concerning inductive reasoning; and who then had the good fortune to remain life-long friends and the determination to change the way Englishmen would practice science from their time forward. It's a fascinating story and a good read. From time to time it is worthwhile to remember that knowledge is always changing, and that systematic scientific thinking has only begun to emerge as a dominant way of seeing how we fit in the world rather recently. Even the men in the breakfast club did not live to see that dominance, but they did much to set the process in motion.