The word “scientist” was coined at the third annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Cambridge in 1833. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was among the attendees. At issue was what to call someone who works in the “real sciences.” Up to that point, “natural philosopher” was the preferred term for someone who attempted to learn and manipulate the laws of nature. Things were happening in Europe during the last decades of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century to make this new term necessary. Exceptional minds had always been able to see hidden realities, but now, during the so-called Romantic Age, science became a method, a profession, a systematic assault on the natural world. For the first time, it was understood that matter consisted of elements which could be identified. This was chemistry. The study of rocks revealed billions of years of earth history. This was geology. And the study of the sky revealed that space was essentially limitless and contained enormous collections of stars that we now call galaxies. This was astronomy.
Richard Holmes is known for writing biographies of poets from the Romantic age such as Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I’d read several of his books and found him a congenial, well informed, and sympathetic presenter of these lives. I’m not really intrepid enough to read much poetry on my own, so sometimes I read biographies of poets as a way to immerse myself in the sensibilities of poets—and then maybe even go on and read a few of their poems.
In The Age of Wonder, Holmes reviews the history of British science from 1770 to 1830 through the lives of some of the leading natural philosophers of the day; most especially through two: astronomer William Herschel and chemist Humphry Davy. These names would only have provoked the faintest glimmer of recognition before I read this book. They were giants in their time but these names do not resonate like Isaac Newton or Galileo Galilei. There are many possible reasons for this, but one is that Herscel and Davy were not lone, exceptional geniuses, but rather members of a vanguard in the development of science, the foremost among many. Their lives are fascinating and complex but they were public men who cannot be separated from the fabric of their time.
Herschel was an astronomer who built his own telescopes and searched and mapped the skies relentlessly for decades. He was the first to really understand the sky in three dimensions and to grasp the overall structure of the universe. Along the way he discovered numerous comets and the planet Uranus, which he originally named Georgium Sidus in honor of the reigning monarch. Humphry Davy was a chemist, but more than that he was the personification of the idea of a “scientist” before the term existed. He experimented with inhaling gases and had a brief but intense flirtation with nitrous oxide that could almost have made him the Timothy Leary of his day. He became a charismatic celebrity who gave very popular lectures on new trends in science, and his very interest in a field, be it the isolation and identification of new elements or the development of batteries and the field of “electro-chemistry,” helped to speed its development. Davy’s greatest triumph was not only a scientific coup but a public relations coup as well. After a series of mine explosions in the north Midlands, Davy was asked to bring his skill on the problem and did so by inventing a new kind of mining lamp that would not interact with the methane gas in the mines. Davy discovered that a metal mesh around a lamp’s flame would prevent explosions. He was hailed as a national hero. The personification of science triumphant.
Davy’s fame did go to his head somewhat. In later years he was much disliked by younger colleagues who resented his unwillingness to share credit and acknowledge the contributions of others, among them his assistant Michael Faraday, who went on to succeed Davy as the preeminent public scientist of his day.
Almost two hundred years later, science has taken us to places that Herschel and Davy could not have imagined. Science has been weaponized and can create plagues and send “drones” to kill people from thousands of miles away. In The Age of Wonder, science poses a different threat, which is the increasing marginalization of God in the affairs of man. Some still hoped that science could find some evidence of the divine—an animating fluid that bridged the gap between chemistry and electricity on one side and mind and soul on the other. This was the debate that led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1815. Would the secret of life fall so easily to science? And what is life without divine guidance?
I wonder if maybe the period that Holmes describes was the first time in the history of civilization that it was possible to consider one’s self an atheist. The first time it was possible to expect there to be a physical, materialist explanation for everything one could experience. Of course once atheism and materialism exist, then so does fundamentalism which is, among other things, a refusal to accept materialist explanations for everything we experience. As I write this, newspapers are full of news about the discovery of an elementary particle called the “god particle,” which also goes by the name of the Higgs boson. I’m sure there are millions of people—especially in America—who think this discovery proves the existence of God.
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