Free The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick

skepticism was only a step from heresy. Who would set limits on the marvels the world contains? No one but an infidel.
    So experiments had two linked drawbacks. To insist on making one’s own investigations was bad in itself, because it veered on impiety. In addition, looking for oneself meant second-guessing the value of eyewitness testimony. And for longer than anyone could remember, eyewitness testimony—whether it had to do with blood raining from the sky or the birth of half human/half animal monsters—had trumped all other forms of evidence. To accept such testimonials marked a person not as gullible or unsophisticated but as pious and thoughtful. To question such testimonials, on the other hand, the historians Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park remark, was “the hallmark of the narrow-minded and suspicious peasant, trapped in the bubble of his limited experience.”
    Augustine had laid out the argument many centuries before. “For God is certainly called Almighty for one reason only,” he had written. That reason was perfectly plain: “He has the power to create so many things which would be reckoned obviously impossible” if not for the eyewitnesses who could swear to their truth.
    The believers’ task, then, was to defer to authority and refrain from asking questions, literally to “take it on faith.” Augustine railed against the sin of curiosity with a fury and revulsion that, to modern ears, sound almost unhinged. Curiosity was, he wrote, a form of lust as despicable as any lusting of the flesh. The “lust to find out and know” was a perversion born of the same evil impulse that leads some people to peek at mutilated corpses or sneak into sideshows and stare at freaks. God intended that some mysteries remain beyond the bounds of human insight. Did not the Bible warn that “what the Lord keeps secret is no concern of yours; do not busy yourself with matters that are beyond you”?
    Augustine’s denunciation of curiosity prevailed for a thousand years. To seek to unravel nature’s mysteries was to aspire to see the world with perfect clarity, and such insight was reserved for God alone. Pride was the great danger. “Knowledge puffeth up,” Corinthians declared, and humankind had a duty to bear that rebuke constantly in mind. When the early scientists finally presumed to challenge that age-old dogma, traditionally minded thinkers sputtered in fury. No testimony was good enough for these maddening newcomers. “If the wisest men in the world tell them that they see it or know it; if the workers of miracles, Christ and his apostles, tell them that they see it; if God himself tells them that He sees it,” one theologian thundered, “yet all this does not satisfy them unless they may see it themselves.”
    So the Royal Society’s emphasis on experiments was a startling innovation. And experiments had still another feature that made them suspect. Experiments were by definition artificial. How could anyone draw universal, valid conclusions from special, manufactured circumstances? The problem with the new scientists’ approach wasn’t so much that they insisted on looking at nature rather than at books; the problem was that, not content with looking at the world, they insisted on manipulating it.
    Premodern thinkers had studied the natural world closely. Astrologers scrutinized the night sky; botanists and doctors took notes on every plant that grew. But that had been a matter of observing and arranging rather than devising new questions to ask. The investigator’s task had always been seen as akin to that of a librarian or a museum curator. For millennia, in one historian’s words, an intellectual’s “first duty” had been “absorbing, classifying, and preserving the known rather than exploring pastures new.”
    The new scientists, a less patient bunch, preferred the creed of their