The Philosophical Breakfast Club (64 page)

His obituary in the
Times
lauded Babbage as “one of the most active and original of original thinkers.”
⁸⁸
Yet none of his obituary writers could
restrain themselves from mentioning the gaping disparity between his great abilities and his great failures. “He nobly upheld the character of a discoverer and inventor,” one praised him. “His very failures arose from no want of industry or ability, but from excess of resolution that his aims should be at the very highest.”
⁸⁹
The last member of the Philosophical Breakfast Club had died, fifty-nine years after their momentous breakfasts began.

B
Y THE END OF THEIR LIVES, THE MEMBERS OF THE
P
HILOSOPHICAL
Breakfast Club had seen the plans of their student days come to fruition. They had succeeded—even beyond their most optimistic dreams—in setting science on a completely different course. By doing so, they helped shape the modern world, in which science plays a starring role. The former image of the natural philosopher—an amateur, often a clergyman, collecting fossils or performing experiments in his spare hours—had been utterly transformed into that of the
scientist:
a professional who had been trained at the university and graduated with a degree in science, who belonged to scientific organizations and read scientific journals, and who could apply for grants to support his work. And soon he could even be a she, as women, having gotten their feet in the door of the British Association, made further inroads into the scientific profession. The British Association began admitting women as full members, starting with a Miss Bowlby of Cheltenham, in 1853, and eventually the Royal Society and the scientific societies of other nations began to do so as well.
¹
This new professional could hope for a paid position as a professor of a scientific field at the universities, or as a researcher in one of the new laboratories, such as the Cavendish, which had begun construction at Cambridge in the year of the death of the last members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club.

It was a reluctance to embrace this professionalization that had caused many natural philosophers to reject the title “scientist.” For some time, many scientific men still felt, like Coleridge, that the amateur status of “natural philosophers” endowed their endeavors with greater nobility, and more independence; even Herschel, alone of the Philosophical Breakfast Club members, inclined toward this view for most of his life. The new magazine
Nature
used the new name right from its first year of publication, in 1869, hoping it would catch on. In one of its first issues a
writer praised “the persevering efforts of scientists.”
²
Yet the name was not commonly employed in Britain until early in the twentieth century. It was accepted sooner in America, which was always more open to new things. Indeed, the term became closely associated with American scientists, and by 1874 its English roots were forgotten, the president of the Philological Society in England referring to “scientist” as “an American barbarous trisyllable.”
³
But the professionalization of the scientist happened, even against the wishes of some of the practitioners of the profession. In 1887,
Nature
grandly announced that scientists had finally realized that “they too are members of a great profession.”
⁴

The members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club did not just transform the man of science into a professional scientist. They also transformed the activity of science itself. From Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell’s conviction that science required perfect accuracy in calculation, a perfection that could only be achieved by a new machine created at staggering cost, we can see the roots of modern-day science’s obsession with measurement, counting, and precision. To aid in attaining such precision, new technologies were added to the scientific toolkit, many of them invented or inspired by these men themselves: new instruments for making accurate observations, such as photometers, anemometers, tide predictors, photoheliographs; a new technology for accurately capturing and communicating observations, photography; and updated mathematical techniques for computing results out of large groups of observations, including the Continental calculus, analytical mathematics, and statistics.

From the Philosophical Breakfast Club’s shared belief that “truth cannot conflict with truth,” the modern view that scientific truth need not be held hostage to religion was derived. In 1874 John Tyndall, Faraday’s successor at the Royal Institution, went even further than Herschel and Whewell would have liked, drawing a clear line of separation between the two realms; in a speech he delivered to the British Association meeting in Belfast praising Darwin’s work, Tyndall concluded that “religious sentiment” should not be permitted even to “intrude on the region of
knowledge
, over which it holds no command.”
⁵

During the lives of the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, they saw the scientist’s very subject itself shift slightly: it was still the natural world, of course, but with an eye to making practical improvements in the lives of the people, following Bacon’s exhortation that “knowledge is power,” that this power should be used for “the relief of man’s estate.” It
was no longer only the manufacturers and industrialists who concerned themselves with making useful objects; the scientist, too, began to believe that he or she must also aim research toward the public good, even if the immediate practical value of a particular scientific investigation was not always apparent. And scientists, and those interested in what scientists do, began to concern themselves with describing and defining proper scientific method; this method was very often seen as the evidence-based, inductive method of Bacon, and not something like Ricardo’s purely hypothetical, deductive method in economics. A whole discipline studying the methods scientists have used in the past, and are using today, as well as the discoveries made with those methods—the history and philosophy of science—can be said to have emerged as a robust subject of study in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because of the Philosophical Breakfast Club.

The scientist now looked for international cooperation in large-scale research projects, even as international competition sometimes sped up the pace of progress. He or she studied science at the university, worked in laboratories, joined scientific associations, read and published articles in scientific journals, and could make a living doing it. By the time Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell had died, the “scientist,” and science itself, were very much configured along the lines they had drawn at their philosophical breakfasts at Cambridge.

J
AMES
C
LERK
M
AXWELL
, born the same year as the British Association, in 1831, epitomized this new professional “scientist.” After studying at the University of Edinburgh, Maxwell arrived at Cambridge in 1850 with a letter of introduction to Whewell from Forbes, who told the Master of Trinity that the young man “is not a little uncouth in manners, but withal one of the most original young men I have ever met with.”
⁶
He graduated from Trinity as second wrangler, and tied for first in the Smith’s Prize competition. Maxwell received a fellowship from Trinity, but soon left when he was appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen. Later he became Professor of Natural Philosophy at King’s College, London, returning to Cambridge in 1871 as the first Cavendish Professor of Physics, where he oversaw the construction of a new facility for conducting scientific experiments: the Cavendish Laboratory. Maxwell was trained in mathematics and physics at Edinburgh and
Cambridge, and spent the rest of his life employed as a scientist, earning a living by conducting scientific research, managing a laboratory, and teaching the next generation of young scientists.

Maxwell played an active role in the scientific professional organizations. A paper on “Oval Curves” that he wrote at age fourteen was the first of many presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh—it had to be read by Forbes, as Maxwell was deemed too young for the podium. Immediately after graduating from Cambridge, in 1855, he presented his groundbreaking paper “Faraday’s Lines of Force” to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. He was a member of the British Association, serving as its president in 1870. Maxwell also became a fellow of the Royal Society of London, which awarded him its Rumford Medal for his work showing that any given color sensation may be produced by combinations of rays taken from three parts of the spectrum, that is, from three so-called primary colors; and for experiments that seemed to confirm the hypothesis that color blindness was due to the viewer’s insensitivity to one of the three primary colors.

Like the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Maxwell kept an eye open for practical results of his researches, especially those that could improve the lives of others. In one of his groundbreaking papers on the causes of color blindness, Maxwell reported that after he completed his experiments, he made one of his experimental subjects “a pair of spectacles, with one eye-glass red and the other green.” The subject, “Mr. X.,” was intending to wear them in order to gain the habit of discriminating red from green by the different effects on his eyes. “Though he can never acquire a sensation of red,” Maxwell explained, “he may then [be able to] discern for himself what things are red, and the mental process may become so familiar to him as to act unconsciously like a new sense.”
⁷

Maxwell’s work in physics followed the philosophical guidelines set by the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, a model that continues to shape scientific research today. Influenced very much by Whewell’s philosophy of science—as Maxwell himself admitted—and also by Herschel’s and Babbage’s, he performed a grand bit of consilience-making.
⁸
Maxwell synthesized all observations, experiments, and equations of electricity, magnetism, and optics into a single theory, electromagnetic field theory. It was the first modern “theory of everything” in physics.

In 1831, while moving a magnetic loop near a battery, Michael Faraday
had realized that a changing magnetic field caused an electrical current. Known as
electromagnetic induction
, this discovery became the cornerstone of modern technology, underlying the operation of most electrical mechanisms, including the generator and the transformer. Faraday went on to explore further the connection between electricity and magnetism, finding that they were actually two manifestations of a single “electromagnetic” force. Whewell, who was then corresponding with Faraday, giving him terms for his new discoveries, recommended that he investigate the connection between magnetism and light. Faraday did so, and discovered that light shining through a transparent medium, such as glass, could be affected by the presence of a magnetic field. This suggested that there was some strong connection between magnetism and light, though Faraday himself never proved what this connection was.

Around 1862, while lecturing at King’s College, Maxwell calculated that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is approximately that of the speed of light. He considered this to be more than just a coincidence, and commented, “We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.”
⁹
Working on the problem further, Maxwell showed that the calculations predicted the existence of waves of oscillating electric and magnetic fields traveling through empty space at a speed that could also be predicted from simple electrical experiments. Using the data available at the time, Maxwell predicted a velocity of 310,740,000 miles per second. In a letter to Faraday around this time, Maxwell noted that predictive success (as the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club had also stressed) would help establish the truth of his theory.
¹⁰
In his 1864 paper “A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field,” Maxwell reported, “The agreement of the results seems to show that light and magnetism are affections of the same substance, and that light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws.”
¹¹
He later published his results, expressed by the famous “Maxwell equations,” in his masterful work,
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
, in 1873.

This incredible accomplishment was the second great unification in physics, after Newton’s universal gravitation law. From that moment on, all other classic laws or equations of these disciplines became simplified cases of Maxwell’s equations. It was, as Whewell would have said, had he
still been alive, an “epoch” in the history of physics. The scientific ideal of consilience, so well applied by Maxwell, has continued to play a leading role in physics into the twenty-first century. Modern physicists have joined Maxwell’s electromagnetic force and Newton’s gravitational force with two others, the “weak” and the “strong” forces, the forces that keep atoms together. Physicists now claim that everything that happens in the universe can be explained by one or more of these four forces.

Yet it is not enough for some. Many physicists today seek to further unify these four forces into one, a true theory of everything—a goal directly related to the criterion of consilience. Einstein was driven to derive a unified field theory that would show gravity and electromagnetism to be manifestations of one underlying principle. Einstein’s dream is the holy grail of modern physics. String theory is seen by some as the way to find it. As described by Brian Greene in
The Elegant Universe
, from one principle—that everything at its most microscopic level consists of vibrating strings in different combinations—“string theory” provides a single explanatory framework capable of encompassing all forces and all matter. If scientists reach this grail, they will have brought to its logical consequence the Philosophical Breakfast Club’s dreams of unifying the natural world.