Free The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick Page B

a new clock mechanism or found the ideal shape for an arch, but often they concealed the details in a cipher, to be decoded only if someone else challenged the claim. The new call for full disclosure meant an about-face.
    Hooke fought the call for openness with all his might, and he was not alone. Such resistance was practical as well as philosophical. Unlike Boyle, a man of enormous wealth, Hooke had a living to earn. He needed not simply to demonstrate his inventions but to patent them so he could turn a profit. For decades Hooke argued that the Royal Society ought to recast itself as a tiny army, like the conquistadors who had taken over Mexico. (He reserved the role of Cortez for himself.) Secrecy was vital, censorship of discoveries essential. “Nothing considerable in that kind can be obtained without secrecy,” Hooke warned, “because else others not qualified . . . will share of the benefit.”
    Hooke lost that battle, but his doubts highlight just how radical the new approach was. In the past, scholars and intellectuals had always made a point of setting themselves apart from the common herd, and they had invoked biblical authority to justify themselves. “Do not throw your pearls before swine,” they intoned endlessly, “lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you.” Like other priesthoods, intellectuals had long luxuriated in arcane rites and obscure vocabulary. The new scientists could have taken the same line. That would have seemed a natural step and an endorsement of a deeply entrenched and hugely powerful doctrine—true knowledge was too deep to put in ordinary words and too dangerous to trust to ordinary mortals.
    Astonishingly, they did just the opposite. Rather than set themselves up as the newest mystic brotherhood, the new scientists spearheaded an attack on exclusivity. This marked just as sharp a break with the past as the attack on secrecy. In the era when science was born, carrying out experiments and building instruments still looked suspiciously like manual labor. That was not a way to win admirers. In the past, the discovery of truth had always been a task reserved for philosophers. Now technicians and tinkerers wanted to horn in. 12
    The renown that the Royal Society eventually won makes it easy to forget just how shaky its triumph was. The very sweep of its innovations made its survival doubtful. In its early decades, the Society never managed to establish itself as a safe, permanent feature of the intellectual landscape. More than once it nearly went under, beset by financial woes or bad leadership or personality clashes. For that reason, for long stretches it will nearly vanish from our story.
    On this question of practicality, Hooke could scarcely have made his distaste for the old ways more clear. Universities might still believe that educating their students meant equipping them to compose odes in Greek and epigrams in Latin. Hooke favored a different mission. Even across the centuries his voice drips with scorn. The aim of science was “to improve the knowledge of natural things and all useful Arts . . . not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Morals, Politics, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick.”
    The disdain was aimed not at learning but at endless talking. (Hooke was the furthest thing from a philistine. Architect, scientist, inventor—“England’s Leonardo,” in one biographer’s phrase—he had set out as a young man to become an artist. ) 13 But Hooke and his restless allies had work to do, and they were in a hurry to get started. They sought to carry out their investigations “not by a glorious pomp of words,” one early manifesto declared, “but by the silent, effectual, and unanswerable arguments of real productions.”
    This was a battle cry, too, though again we might miss its significance. The rejection of “glorious” phrasemaking was a deliberate provocation. The