Reading is sexy IX
[image is A Young Woman Reading by Peter the Younger (1594-1647) via Guarda chi legge]
42. You might recall that I began Lisa Jardine's On a Grander Scale- The Outstanding Life of Sir Christopher Wren because I opened her biography of Robert Hooke, only to find the Preface basically told me she would skip anything already covered in the biography of Wren. Initially I felt for an academic book by a historian of science, it was immensely readable. By the end I had some quibbles;
a) I am an academic. I read footnotes. I can't help it; I'm just wired that way. I can cope with footnotes in French, but is it fair to all? Some of us academics are scientists, not historians, and thus, no longer required to read things in anything but English. And, with all admiration to credjeep, most of us can't read Latin or Greek and thus, I think she could at least provide a gloss.
b) Actually, I was looking for some more science and opinion. Where does Wren's science fit in with his contemporaries' research? Where was he right? wrong? and where has he not received credit? That goes DOUBLE for Hooke. Wren's life was turbulent, through the reigns of the deposed Charles I, the interregnum, James II, William & Mary, and Anne, and of course the great fire of London. His tremendous range of skills and interests straddling arts and science which did make fascinating read. But this was more of a biography than history of science.
43. The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London also by Lisa Jardine. See comment above. Hooke in particular, has been shafted by history, largely because he had no offspring to write his hagiography (à la Christopher Wren, Jr.), and would today be recognized as having various drug dependencies. See, not only did he discover F= -kx (which, by the way is hardly mentioned in the book and as a physicist and a geophysicist I find that scandalous since I could go on ad naseum about simple harmonic motion- but I won't), write his famous Microscopia with beautiful illustrations of the tiny, do all of Boyle's experimental work on vacuum pumps, make astronomical observations, devise clever spring-based clocks to try and solve the longitude problem, measure and rebuild most of London with his good friend Wren, but he treated himself regularly as an experimental specimen. He self-diagnosed and treated his ailments (many of which were self-induced side effects of the drugs he self-proscribed) at a time before addiction had been discovered (the anecdote about Sir Edmond Halley, of comet fame, excitedly presenting a paper to the Royal Society when he accidentally got stoned on opium- previously just a sleeping pill in diluted amounts- was rather amusing). So, the chronically sleep-deprived, over-worked Hooke, became increasingly cantankerous and suspicious and managed to fight with Newton (not hard, Newton was a bastard), Christiaan Huygens (of wavefront and astronomical fame), John Flamesteed and other fonding members of the Royal Society. From a document quoted by Jardine (in a footnote!) it seems obvious to me that Hooke clearly published that gravitation followed an inverse-square law, long before Newton devised his Universal Law of Gravitation, but Newton purposely removed any reference to Hooke in the Principia (because, as I said, he was a bastard) when Hooke got too uppity about it. People ridiculed Hooke as if he made inflated claims without basis; his claims always had basis, but sometimes were inflated as he never managed to finish everything and his mathematics weren't quite on a par with Newton's. But what gets me is that the same text clearly states "Newton's" 3rd Law (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) long before Newton did, and Jardine fails to even mention this. I don't understand. Further at one point she casually says mentions a confusion about parabolas being cubic, which today, grade 9 students ought to be able to disprove, but I can not fathom how Newton could invent calculus (*note: moreorless simultaneously with his other nemesis Leibniz) could think that a cubic makes a parabola? So, overall, these two are very complete, readable portraits of lives lived, but somewhat lacking in scientific detail. I, for one, who gladly have sacrificed all the detail of how frequently Hooke purged himself for medical purposes, or even the racy suggestions of an elicit affair with his niece, for some more detail form him lab book! [Though this was the first time I learned that Boyle swore off matrimony when Charles II impregnated his sister-in-law. I did enjoy learning about Lady Ranelaugh, Boyle's sister, who did play a role in early science of the Royal Society]. I have a photo I took of the plaque in Oxford at the lab where Hooke and Boyle worked - I am that much of a nerd, and for once, Blockhead was being thoughtful when I came to visit. It reads:
In a house on this site
between 1655 and 1668 lived
ROBERT BOYLE
Here he discovered BOYLE'S LAW
and made experiments with an
AIR PUMP designed by his assistant
ROBERT HOOKE
Inventor Scientist and Architect
who made a MICROSCOPE
and thereby first identified
the LIVING CELL
But I must say, all this feuding amongst scientists at the begging of the Royal Society makes me sad- as if it were inherent in the process. I see no reason why feuding is necessary to science. I'm will not make any sexist assumptions and say it had something to do with the skewed gender distribution (though the thought occasionally crossed my mind). In these books, it seemed to me it was more the class structure which was the problem (but that's for someone else to write their thesis on).
44. A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle. I'd had just about enough of Restauration London. So I went looking for a novel and landed in early twentieth century Dublin slums. At first, I began to wonder, why does Doyle have a reputation for humour- this was misery. But ultimately it was a very engaging and occasionally funny book. I'd recommend it.
45. I've started I am a strange loop by Douglas Hofstader. This one is meant for a popular audience so I think I'll enjoy it.
I thought to myself, wouldn't it be nice to actually read 50 books this year? I was loathe to have a numerical goal, but I'm at 45 so it could happen. Though I keep reading these heavy tomes. All my to-read pile books are history of science; I just want some fun novels. Perhaps I shall have to ***shudder*** enter a store in December? I have even got an idea for KateC now. My pile is growing:
