Peter Dear has produced a sophisticated and engaging synoptic study of the history of modern science. It argues that despite this history’s catalog of achievements across a spectrum of inquiries since the seventeenth century, these achievements possessed an overall coherence. This coherence rested upon theoretical transfers among universities, societies, and publications that “enabled the continuity of science, allowing scientists to see themselves as part of a progressive tradition” (305). By the middle of the twentieth century, this tradition of reductive study, experiment, conclusion, and application had attained such encompassing intellectual authority that it established cultural frameworks for comprehending nature and its operations among people all over the globe. Mathematization, communication of electricity by currents, atomic composition of matter, natural selection and adaptive change, plate tectonics: such ideas as these became the fixed and finely calibrated lenses through which we view and experience the world. Scientific naturalism has thus bestowed on us “the world as we know it.” The book’s objective is to explain the conceptual derivations of our inheritance.
And who better to explain them than Dear, Magister magnus of his field, whose acclaimed survey account of the Scientific Revolution drew so many of us, including this reviewer, to the topic (Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge in Transition, 1500–1700, 3rd ed., 2019)? The writing here is just as crisp, the rendering of difficult concepts in natural philosophy just as accessible, the march of steps forward (and backward) just as carefully connected to one another. In fact, this volume figures as an essential companion to the survey account of early modern foundations. Together, they provide an unsurpassed general introduction to the most consequential achievements of Western science—which, given its hegemony, is to say science as such—since Copernicus.
Dear wants us to comprehend that “the world as we know it” is a product of the nineteenth century. However, the first third of the book addresses developments in the eighteenth century. This extended background establishes not only the gaining popularity of Baconian experiment but the Himalayan influence of Newton in the scientific enterprise, above all in his particulate conception of matter, his rational mechanics, and his emphasis on laws. By Dear’s telling, it is difficult if not impossible to appreciate an insight of note that did not depend in some measure on the Newtonian heritage of learning: the action-at-a-distance electrical examinations of Franklin, Priestley, and Coulomb; Laplace’s deterministic binomial distributions as error curves; the intimate coordination of mixed mathematics and probability theory that laid the basis for physics as a discipline. Stephen Hales and Joseph Black drew inspiration for their study of gases from Newton’s queries. The Newtonian problem of demonstrating the existence of stellar gravity provoked Immanuel Kant’s fascinating foray into cosmology. Even the chemical revolution under luminaries like Stahl and Lavoisier, whose laboratory work on combustion burned Aristotle’s elemental system to ashes, took as its point of departure the notion that chemical experience could not be understood by Newtonian universal matter theory. It is not uninteresting to mention also the influence of Newton’s religious convictions. Because they jibed with his scientific ideas of an ordered universe, these convictions enhanced rather than diminished the reputation of science by suggesting that one did not have to choose between the two methods of explaining the natural world. “Newtonian natural philosophy was,” to this extent, “a conservative, or traditional, endeavor” (25), and thus worthy of the prestige it enjoyed among creation-by-design believers, whether they understood Newton’s mathematical calculations of this design or not.
While the study features the genealogies of scientific ideas—the section on Darwin’s debt to Cuvier is particularly well composed—it also attends to the culture of science in which these genealogies unfolded. According to Dear, this culture depended upon learned societies and their publications, especially serial publications. But after 1800, nothing mattered more than the rise of the German research university, whose stress on seminar training, degrees, and state support turned science into a professional activity not only in Germany but everywhere the model was adopted. The organization of science in this style led to its “mass production” (123), above all in physics. Helmholtz, Hertz, Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, and other Central European titans worked in this environment, whose increasing need for specialized equipment and thus for state and even philanthropic investments on a lavish scale created the material conditions for Big Science in the twentieth-century United States. The nineteenth century was therefore a crucial epoch in the history of science, and not only for the intellectual content its leading figures supplied to our knowledge of the world. These figures also set forth the practices and institutional relations on which the credibility of scientific claims in broader publics ultimately depended. “The days of private gentlemen with their own laboratories were gone, and science had taken on the social and institutional structure with which we are nowadays familiar” (131).
Dear dwells on scientific respectability in his conclusion, where he makes the book’s most provocative remarks. Renowned practitioners in the history of modern science may very well have given us explanations of “the world as we know it.” But according to a critique of materialism that goes far beyond the oft-cited laments of the materialist Karl Marx, these “priests” (123) of nature and their acolytes have much to answer for: eugenics, weapons of unprecedented lethality and mass destruction, social predictions upon history’s “laws” that produced the vast secularist slaughter of unwanted individuals and their communities, species extinction, soil erosion, ocean pollution, the devastation of local cultures, the disqualification of whole categories of learning, such as religious faith and wisdom, as candidates for knowledge, and so on. To his credit, and in line with Charles Gillispie, Dear recognizes the bite of this critique, regretting, for example, the rhetorical traction that moral relativists derived from Einstein’s relativity theory. But here, Dear leaves us with an unresolved dilemma of evaluation when it comes to the long-term outcomes of the scientific enterprise. Science as honest knowledge is one thing; its utilitarian manipulation, forever “prey to corrupting interests,” is another (311). “The world as we know it,” Dear concludes, is mediated by these different interpretations of modern science. Which interpretation of science as a human project is correct? Captivating conversations, to say nothing of undergraduate papers, spring from a question like this, whose answer would have to take seriously the honest knowledge Dear explains so well in this ranging and penetrating book.
