Seeing Further (4 page)

‘There follow topsy-turvy without any order experiments of all sorts,’ wrote Goethe more than a century later, ‘news of happenings on earth and in the heavens.’ Goethe bore the Royal Society no small resentment, which he nursed by devotedly reading its history, as set down by both Thomas Sprat and Thomas Birch. He translated many pages of extracts, and he complained: ‘Everybody communicates what happens to be at hand, phenomena
of Naturlehre,
objects
of Naturgeschichte,
technical operations, everything appearing topsy-turvy without order. Many things quite insignificant, others interesting only in outward appearance, others merely curious, are accepted and given a place.’

Opposite:
Engravings of Boyle’s air pumps. The top left engraving is from the backpiece to
New Experiments: Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects,
by Robert Boyle, 1660.

It was not until late in 1671 that the members heard about a young Lincolnshire man, Isaac Newton, who had invented a new kind of telescope at least ten times more powerful, inch for inch, than any in existence. He had not sent it to them. He had made it in 1668 or 1669 in Cambridge, where he had just become the new Professor of Mathematics, but kept it mostly to himself. Cambridge being some distance from London, more than two years passed before the news, and then the telescope, reached the Royal Society. As they could see, it was not just a serious scientific advance but a technology with military application. They studied it and showed it to the King. Henry Oldenburg wrote to the twenty-nine-year-old on their behalf. ‘Sir,’ he began, ‘Your Ingenuity is the occasion of this addresse by a hand unknown to you … ’ In short order they elected him a member, though none had yet met him.

For some time Newton had been reading the Society’s reports and taking careful note. News of a fiery mountain: ‘Batavia one afternone was covered with a black dust heavyer than gold which is thought came from an hill on Java Major supposed to burne.’ Lunar influence: ‘Oysters & Crabs are fat at the new moone & leane at the full.’ Now he wrote to Oldenburg at the only address he knew –
‘Mr Henry Oldenburge at his house about the middle of the old Palmail in St Jamses Fields in Westminster’
– and said he had news of his own. He advertised it enthusiastically: ‘… in my Judgment the oddest if not the most considerable detection which hath hitherto been made in the operations of Nature.’

The meeting of 8 February 1672 began as usual with the reading out of letters newly arrived. First came a conjecture from John Wallis that the Moon’s varying distance to the Earth, its perigee and apogee, might ‘much influence the rising and falling of the mercury in the barometer’. He hoped that members of the Society who had barometers would investigate. It was another idea destined for the dustbin.

Next, Tommaso Cornelio wrote from Naples, in Italian, to refute common stories told of the odd effects of the bite of the tarantula. His observations suggested that most such stories were fictitious. (Many, he added soon afterward, come from ‘young wanton girles who by some particular indisposition falling into this melancholly madness, perswade themselves
according to the vulgar prejudice, to have been stung by a Tarantula’.)

The third letter was more complicated: ‘Of Mr Isaac Newton from Cambridge, concerning his discovery of the nature of light, refractions, and colour …’ Sunlight, according to this letter, is not homogenous, but consists ‘of different rays’. These rays come in pure and indivisible colours. The Society’s note-taker wrote this down: ‘Some, in their own nature, are disposed to produce red, others green, others blue, others purple, &c.’ Newton made a further claim, even more counter-intuitive:

This was more interesting, if scarcely more believable, than the Odd Monstrous Calf. It was ordered that the author be solemnly thanked; also that Boyle, Hooke and the Bishop of Salisbury peruse and consider it and report back.

What followed is a story told many times. Newton’s experiment of sunlight refracted by two prisms – so ingeniously conceived, carefully performed, and exquisitely narrated – came to be seen as a landmark in the history of science. It established a great truth of nature. It created a template for the art of reasoning from observation to theory. It shines as a beacon from the past so brightly as to cast the rest of the Society’s contemporaneous activity into relative shadow.

But this is by definition hindsight. That week in February, thinking nothing of history, Hooke dashed off a critique in a matter of hours. He claimed that he, as Curator of Experiments, had already performed such experiments many hundreds of times. He assured the Society that light is a pulse in the ether and that a prism
adds
colour to whiteness. He infuriated Newton by wielding the word ‘hypothesis’ as a stiletto. Oldenburg published Newton’s entire letter in the
Philosophical Transactions,
and words of admiration began to come from all across Europe, but Newton was peevish and thin-skinned. He had thought the Royal Society would finally be the audience worthy of him: ‘For beleive me Sir,’ he had told Oldenburg, ‘I doe not onely esteem it a duty to concurre with them in the promotion of reall knowledg, but a great privelege that instead of exposing discourses to a prejudic’t & censorious multitude (by which means many truths have been bafled and lost) I may with freedom apply my self to so judicious & impartiall an Assembly.’ Newton’s dispute with Hooke grew into a lifelong enmity. His distaste for wrangling drove him away from the Society for years to come – years spent largely in the secretive study of alchemy and scripture. He did not publish about optics again until he was an old man and Hooke was dead and buried.

It all seemed so innocent at the time. The meeting of 15 February began with a reading of the minutes from the week before. Cornelio’s claim about tarantulas needed further discussion: ‘some of the members remarking, that it would be hard to accuse of fraud or error Ferdinand Imperato and other good authors, who had delivered from their own experience, so many mischievous effects of the bite of tarantula’s’. They asked Oldenburg to find out what Cornelio had to say in response to those famous men. Then Hooke said that his own observations contradicted Wallis’ idea about the closeness of the Moon causing a rise in the mercury of the barometer. Then Hooke presented his comments on Newton. ‘Nay,’ he said, ‘and even those very experiments, which he alledgeth, do seem to me to prove, that
white
is nothing but a pulse or motion, propagated through an homogeneous, uniform, and transparent medium: and that colour is nothing but the disturbance of that light …’

Above & Opposite:
Diagrams from letters from Isaac Newton to Henry Oldenburg discussing the doctrine of light and colour, 6 June 1672
(above),
and a prism diagram, 13 April 1672
(opposite).

The same phaenomenon,’ Hooke added, ‘will be solved by my hypothesis, as well as by his, without any manner of difficulty or straining.’ The next week he brought in a candle, to show that, besides the flame and smoke, a continuous stream rose up from it, distinct from the air. Soon after, he showed another phenomenon in a bubble of soapy water, ‘which had neither reflection nor refraction and yet was diaphanous’. He observed it carefully: colours swirling and changing; bubbles blown about by the air. ‘It is pretty hard to imagine,’ Hooke told them, ‘what curious net or invisible body it is, that should keep the form of the bubble, or what kind of magnetism it is, that should keep the film of water from falling down.’ Really, it was hard to know anything at all.

T
HOSE EARLY
F
ELLOWS OF THE
R
OYAL
S
OCIETY WERE EARNEST SEEKERS AFTER TRUTH AND PILLARS OF THE COMMUNITY
. T
HEY WERE ALSO, FOR SOME, FIGURES OF FUN AND – AS
M
ARGARET
A
TWOOD EXPLAINS – THE INSPIRATION FOR A MORE SINISTER ARCHETYPE.

In the late 1950s, when I was a university student, there were still B movies. They were inexpensively made and lurid in nature, and you could see them at cheap matinee double bills as a means of escaping from your studies. Alien invasions, mind-altering potions and scientific experiments gone awry featured largely.

Mad scientists were a staple of the B-film double bill. Presented with a clutch of white-coated men wielding test tubes, we viewers knew at once – being children of our times – that at least one of them would prove to be a cunning megalomaniac bent on taking over the world, all the while subjecting blondes to horrific experiments from which only the male lead could rescue them, though not before the mad scientist had revealed his true nature by gibbering and raving. Occasionally the scientists were lone heroes, fighting epidemics and defying superstitious mobs bent on opposing the truth by pulverising the scientist, but the more usual model was the lunatic. When the
scientists weren’t crazy, they were deluded: their well-meaning inventions were doomed to run out of control, creating havoc, tumult and piles of messy goo, until gunned down or exploded just before the end of the film.

Where did the mad scientist stock figure come from? How did the scientist – the imagined kind – become so very deluded and/or demented?

It wasn’t always like that. Once upon a time there weren’t any scientists, as such, in plays or fictions, because there wasn’t any science as such, or not science as we know it today. There were alchemists and dabblers in black magic – sometimes one and the same – and they were depicted, not as lunatics, but as charlatans bent on fleecing the unwary by promising to turn lead into gold, or else as wicked pact-makers with the Devil, hoping – like Dr Faustus – to gain worldly wealth, knowledge and power in exchange for their souls. The too-clever-by-half part of their characters may have descended from Plato’s Atlanteans or the builders of Babel – ambitious exceeders of the boundaries set for human being, usually by some god, and destroyed for their presumption. These alchemists and Faustian magicians certainly form part of the mad scientist’s ancestral lineage, but they aren’t crazy or deluded, just daring and immoral.

It’s a considerable leap from them to the excesses of the wild-eyed B-movie scientists. There must be a missing link somewhere, like the walking seal discovered just recently – though postulated by Charles Darwin as a link between a walking canid and a swimming seal. For the mad scientist missing link, I propose Jonathan Swift, acting in synergy with the Royal Society. Without the Royal Society, no
Gulliver’s Travels,
or not one with scientists in it; without
Gulliver’s Travels,
no mad scientists in books and films. So goes my theory.

I read Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
as a child, before I knew anything about the B-movie scientists. Nobody told me to read it; on the other hand, nobody told me not to. The edition I had was not a child’s version, of the kind that dwells on the cute little people and the funny giant people and the talking horses, but dodges any mention of nipples and urination, and downplays the excrement. These truncated versions also leave out most of Part Three – the floating island of Laputa, the Grand Academy of Lagado with its five hundred scientific experiments, the immortal Struldbrugs of Luggnagg – as being incomprehensible to young minds. My edition was unabridged, and I didn’t skip any of it, Part Three included. I read the whole thing.

I thought it was pretty good. I didn’t yet know that
Gulliver’s Travels
was satirical, that Mr Swift’s tongue had been rammed very firmly into his cheek while writing it, and that even the name ‘Gulliver’, so close to ‘gullible’, was a tip-off. I believed the letters printed at the beginning – the one from Mr Gulliver himself, complaining about the shoddy way in which his book had been published, and the one from his cousin Mr Sympson, so close to ‘simpleton’, I later realised – testifying to the truthfulness of Mr Gulliver. I did understand that someone called Mr Swift had had something to do with this book, but I didn’t think he’d just made all of it up. In early eighteenth-century terms, the book was a ‘bite’ – a tall tale presented as the straight-faced truth in order to sucker the listener into believing it – and I got bitten.

Thus I first read this book in a practical and straightforward way, much in the way it is written. For instance, when Mr Gulliver pissed on the fire in the royal Lilliputian palace in order to put it out, I didn’t find this either a potentially seditious poke at the pretensions of royalty and the unfairness of courts or a hilarious vulgarism. Rather, having been trained myself in the time-honoured woodsman’s ways of putting out campfires, I thought Mr Gulliver had displayed an admirable presence of mind.

The miniature people and the giants did hint to me of fairy tales, but
Part Three – the floating island and the scientific establishment – didn’t seem to me all that far-fetched. I was then living in what was still the golden or bug-eyed monster age of science fiction – the late forties – so I took spaceships for granted. This was before the disappointing news had come in – No intelligent life on Mars – and also before I’d read H.G. Wells’
The War of the Worlds,
in the light of which any life intelligent enough to build spaceships and come to Earth would be so much smarter than us that we’d be viewed by them as ambulatory kebabs. So I considered it entirely possible that, once I’d grown up, I might fly through space and meet some extraterrestrials, who then as now were considered to be bald, with very large eyes and heads.