Simon Schaffer

‘This incomparable author having at length been prevailed upon to appear in public, has in this treatise given a most notable instance of the extent of the powers of the mind.’ This is how the very first review of the Principia began, in summer 1687: from the start, you were forced to admire Newton’s modesty, and his genius. The reviewer, the young astronomer Edmond Halley,...

The Second Law of Thermodynamics has an oddly talismanic status in the public life of physics. Flanders and Swann wrote a song about it; C.P. Snow lectured on it. Whether it refers to the impossibility in a sealed system of letting heat flow from a cooler to a hotter body, or to the tendency of the universe to run down to more chaotic and disorderly states, it forms a key element in the magnificent edifice of the science of heat and energy constructed in the closing decades of the 19th century. Snow apparently thought it fairly easy to describe, and in a strange version of the humiliation game reckoned that to confess ignorance of the Second Law was like an admission that one had never read Shakespeare. His literary dinner companions’ response was suitably thermodynamic – ‘cold and negative’ – convincing him that they were all fatally and stupidly antiscientific.’‘

Late 20th-century sciences are publicised through hands-on exhibitions, press conferences, chat shows and interactive CD-Roms. The Victorians had a different system and, as usual, painstakingly classified it. There was the conversazione and the soirée; the grand lecture and the subscription dinner; the amateur society and the private club; above all, there were periodicals and public museums. Whether at the Crystal Palace, the Athenaeum or the local working men’s college, disseminating science was as much a moral as a material issue, since understanding the Creation might yield principles of ethics as well as mastery of nature.

‘Why do we hear so much of Dr Priestley?’ asked Dr Johnson rather sternly in the course of a chemistry lecture he attended in Salisbury. Joseph Priestley was the pre-eminent public intellectual of late 18th-century England. In theology and politics, chemistry and prophecy, this seemingly dour and absurdly productive Yorkshire visionary inspired intense admiration and loathing in roughly equal measure. William Hazlitt, no mean polemicist himself, judged Priestley ‘the best controversialist in his day, and one of the best in the language’. Youthful intellectuals of the Revolutionary epoch such as Coleridge saw him as their ‘patriot and sage’. Priestley’s prudent flight to Pennsylvania in 1794, in the wake of the burning of his home, his laboratory, his books and his effigy, was interpreted as one more sign of the evils and hopes of troubled times presaging the imminent millennium. Jefferson thought his was ‘one of the few lives precious to mankind for the continuance of which every thinking man is solicitous’.‘

The curious Lilliputians guessed Gulliver’s pocket-watch must be ‘the God that he worships’, because ‘he assured us he seldom did anything without consulting it.’ The giant King of Brobdingnag had a different perspective: Gulliver must ‘be a piece of Clockwork (which is in that country arrived to a very great perfection)’. Any acute 18th-century reader of Swift would easily make sense of these timely jokes. Britain was then rapidly establishing world leadership in precision horology and its citizens increasingly seemed driven by the workings of the clock. Time management became a way of judging others – busy bourgeois, dawdling plebeians, languorous natives. Time discipline was imposed on workshops. Fine jewelling to reduce friction and ingenious machines to cut gears helped to make clocks of stunning accuracy. Pocket watches began to tell seconds, and, to assist the genteel Newmarket punters, even fractions of a second. Fashionable theologians preached that the Creation itself was best understood as godly clockwork.’