Free The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick Page A

predecessor Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare and the first great advocate of experimentation. 10 Nature must be “put to the torture,” Bacon had declared. No doubt the image came quickly to mind in an age that coerced confessions by stretching prisoners on the rack or crushing their fingers in thumbscrews.
    For the boisterous men of the Royal Society, spying on nature from behind a curtain was entirely too passive. Experiments had the great advantage that they let you do something. Preferably something dangerous. Hooke eventually managed to build a vacuum chamber so large that he could climb inside. Then, while the members of the Royal Society looked on with fascination, he gave the signal to pump the air out. The pump malfunctioned before Hooke could suffocate, but he did manage to render himself dizzy and temporarily deaf.

Chapter Eleven
To the Barricades!
    The brilliant, frenetic Robert Hooke was a natural performer who took for granted that the best way to entertain an audience was to place himself in front of it. But the Royal Society experiments, which Hooke was charged with organizing, had a purpose beyond theatrics. The experiments also served as a call to arms against the old ways. The first rallying cry, as we have seen, was “Out of the library, into the laboratory.” The second crucial message was “In plain sight.” Ideas would be tested in the open, in front of witnesses. If an insight seemed genuine, other experimenters could test it for themselves.
    This was an innovation. Until the mid-1600s everyone had always taken for granted that a person who made a discovery should keep the knowledge to himself, as secret as a treasure map, rather than give his fortune away by revealing it to the world. A plea from a mathematician named Girolamo Cardano, written about a century before the Royal Society’s birth, highlighted the old attitude. Cardano wanted another mathematician to share a formula with him. “I swear to you by God’s Holy Gospels and as a true man of honor, not only never to publish your discoveries, if you teach me them,” Cardano begged, “but I also promise you, and I pledge my faith as a true Christian, to note them down in code, so that after my death no one will be able to understand them. ” 11
    The Royal Society pushed for a radically new approach: knowledge would advance more quickly if new findings were discussed openly and published for all to read. Thinkers would inspire one another, and ideas would breed and multiply. Robert Boyle made the most forceful argument against secrecy. A thinker who concealed his discoveries was worse than a miser who hoarded his gold, Boyle maintained, because the miser had no choice but to cling to his treasure. To give it away was to lose it. Thinkers had no such excuse, because ideas were not like gold but “like torches, that in the lighting of others do not waste themselves.” With ideas as with flames, in fact, to share meant to create light.
    Boyle insisted that this was ancient wisdom. “Our Saviour assureth us that it is more blessed to give than to receive,” he reminded his fellow scientists, but this was a hard lesson to absorb. It remains hard today. To have found a secret that others are still scrabbling around for is to have a very special kind of private property. Modern physicists all know, and identify with, the story of Fritz Houtermans. In 1929 Houtermans wrote up a pioneering paper on fusion in the sun. The night he finished the work, he and his girlfriend went for a stroll. She commented on how beautiful the stars were. Houtermans puffed out his chest. “I’ve known since yesterday why it is that they shine.”
    And no one else did. That was the point. Before the Royal Society proposed changing the rules, scientists had tried to have it both ways—they announced their discoveries, which let the world know they had solved a stubborn equation or designed