scientific revolution. Herbert Butterfield called attention in 1948 to the tremendous intellectual change he saw taking place during the 17th cent., when the modern scientific world-view was propounded by Francis
Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and their disciples. This change was reflected in institutions, notably the
Royal Society and the Paris Academy of Sciences, and in publications—especially journals. It meant a break with the servile attitude to Aristotelian philosophy, and also with Platonic toying with
magic. The science which had made the running was astronomy: the heavens had been demystified, and the power of mathematics demonstrated. Bacon's view that experiments must be fruitful made science seem a matter of organized common sense, accessible not only to a highly educated élite but to craftsmen: having been something for a few soloists, science now acquired a chorus.
Butterfield's thesis went with the self-image of the great thinkers of the 17th cent., and made history and philosophy of science fashionable. It has been criticized by medievalists who have seen little new in the New Philosophy; by historians of medicine, where magical and Aristotelian ideas (in Paracelsus, and in William
Harvey) went with progress; and by students of
astrology,
alchemy, and apocalyptic, who have shown how important these were to people we think of as ‘modern’. Research into rhetoric has indicated how important that was for virtuosi anxious to promote their world-view: the plain style, sometimes verbose, was chosen deliberately to carry conviction. To be too ready to see modernity among the fellows of the Royal Society was to write Whig history.
Butterfield had seen one revolution: but it might be that, like the French, science has had several. Thomas Kuhn in 1962 came to see things this way. A science came into being when a mass of facts was ordered by someone, whose work became paradigmatic and led to a period of normal science, which has something in common with painting by numbers or solving puzzles. It is dogmatic, and deals with questions difficult to answer; but there comes a time for questions difficult to ask, when anomalies have blurred the picture, and a revolution and new paradigm are needed. This will be incommensurable with the old one, and the change is like a religious conversion, a leap of faith; the revolutionary has to work to make converts, and the middle-aged will probably refuse to shift. Thus we have revolutions associated with Galileo, Isaac
Newton, Charles
Darwin, and perhaps Michael
Faraday or J. J.
Thomson.
A. L. Lavoisier succeeded before his death in the Terror in 1794 in changing the language of chemistry in accordance with his new theory of combustion. His great book came out in 1789, and he was self-consciously bringing about an intellectual revolution, using that frightening word—which previously had evoked feelings of a return to the good old days. He and his contemporaries were Kuhnians before Kuhn, though no doubt he believed that like Newton his paradigm would last for ever, and that only one revolution per science was required. Nineteenth-cent. chemists had a great respect for tradition, and liked to look back through their ‘fathers in science’ to Lavoisier's time; but there were other claimants for his title, including Humphry
Davy with electrochemistry, John
Dalton with his testable atomic theory, and Marcellin Berthelot with chemical synthesis.
Studies of the 19th cent. indicate how many elements of modern science we owe to that epoch rather than to an earlier period, and may make us wonder if it was not the Age of Science, or the period when science began to revolutionize everyday life. Formal courses in physical sciences began with the revolutionary École Polytechnique, where the teachers also undertook research, and were then taken up in the German universities. At Giessen, Justus Liebig began laboratory instruction and then independent research for the PhD degree from 1825; and his pupil A. W. Hofmann came to Britain in 1845 at Prince
Albert's instigation to start the Royal College of Chemistry, subsequently part of Imperial College, London. Science was no longer a matter of informal apprenticeship.
The Royal Society was joined in 1831 by the more open and democratic
British Association for the Advancement of Science, promoting public awareness and local pride. It had earlier been joined by specialized societies, dedicated to natural history, geology, and astronomy; and later to chemistry, statistics, and physics. John
Herschel decided not to specialize, but for most people this was not possible. Education began to divide the scientists (a word coined by William
Whewell in 1833) from humanists; and as the former divided into chemists and physicists, and then further into organic or physical chemists, so the latter began taking degrees in history or English. Scientific societies with narrower and narrower scope were founded, with journals addressed to experts only.
Science also became a profession. Davy was one of the first in Britain to make his way by research and lecturing in a great London institution; with an expanding educational system, this became more possible as the 19th cent. went on. The earliest scientific societies (outside medicine) had been learned ones; but during the 19th cent., as science at last really became useful, they were joined by societies promoting the interests of qualified engineers and applied scientists.
Exponential growth also became evident in the 19th cent., so the question whether there was one scientific revolution or many, or evolution, is open. Clearly, science has been developing in ways that Bacon could only have dreamed of, and it has transformed the way we see the world. Whereas Bacon and Galileo hoped that science would bring certainty, where the church and the ancients had failed as authorities, and T. H.
Huxley thought that science had never done anybody any harm, we are now sadder and wiser.
David Knight
Bibliography
Butterfield, H. , The Origins of Modern Science (1949);
Cohen, I. B. , Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1985);
Knight, D. M. , A Companion to the Physical Sciences (1989);
Lindberg, D. C., and Westman, R. S. (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990);
Shea, W. R. (ed.), Revolutions in Science: Their Meaning and Relevance (Canton, Mass., 1988).
