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The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Richard Holmes’s dazzling portrait of the most exciting period in British history is a groundbreaking achievement.The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook’s first Endeavour voyage, who stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769 fully expecting to have located Paradise. Back in Britain, the same Romantic revolution that had inspired Banks was spurring other great thinkers on to their own voyages of discovery – astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical – which together made up this ‘age of wonder’. In this compelling group biography, Richard Holmes tells the stories of the Romantic period’s celebrated innovators and their great scientific discoveries: from telescopic sight to the miner’s lamp, and from the first balloon flight to African exploration.Breathtaking in its originality and storytelling energy, this is a radical vision of the meeting places of science and art, and an extraordinary evocation of an era of exploration and wonder.
The Age of
Wonder
How the Romantic Generation discoveredthe Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes
Copyright (#ulink_b90c7c49-642e-551a-8f44-b87a27e90864)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperPress in 2008
Copyright © Richard Holmes 2008
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007149537
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007349883
Version: 2017-08-14
To Jon Cook at Radio Flatlands
Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more
often and persistently I reflect upon them: the starry heaven above me and the
moral law within me…I see them in front of me and unite them immediately
with the consciousness of my own existence.
IMMANUEL KANT, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
He thought about himself, and the whole Earth,
Of Man the wonderful, and of the Stars,
And how the deuce they ever could have birth;
And then he thought of Earthquakes, and of Wars,
How many miles the Moon might have in girth,
Of Air-balloons, and of the many bars
To perfect Knowledge of the boundless Skies;
And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes.
BYRON, Don Juan (1819), Canto 1, stanza 92
Those to whom the harmonious doors
Of Science have unbarred celestial stores…
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ‘Lines Additional to an Evening Walk’ (1794)
Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of
science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are
complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer.
HUMPHRY DAVY, lecture (1810)
I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, letter (1800)
…Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with wond’ring eyes
He stared at the Pacific…
JOHN KEATS, ms of sonnet (1816)
To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling…
a soap bubble…an apple…a pebble…He walks in the midst of wonders.
JOHN HERSCHEL, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830)
Yes, there is a march of Science, but who shall beat the drums of its retreat?
CHARLES LAMB, shortly before his death (1834)
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#uf10b9a6c-8bdf-58fe-bf06-8dc49c151234)
Title Page (#uf9478acd-908f-52ef-a3da-60f5450a43d8)
Copyright (#ud826f9c9-903d-59c3-85a7-4699130b5046)
Dedication (#u5e70d9a5-fe75-5884-84b3-89473f83fb66)
Epigraph (#u9253f675-bf5f-564f-af21-e63da512b3fb)
Prologue (#udb77f190-3bb0-5a0d-a2c2-212cb1a500f0)
1. Joseph Banks in Paradise (#u3361de1e-8399-5ccc-adb6-6bb1ab008605)
2. Herschel on the Moon (#u8df92bdb-b0d1-5b21-ac0d-7ad134b7a9d3)
3. Balloonists in Heaven (#litres_trial_promo)
4. Herschel Among the Stars (#litres_trial_promo)
5. Mungo Park in Africa (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Davy on the Gas (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Dr Frankenstein and the Soul (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Davy and the Lamp (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Sorcerer and Apprentice (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Young Scientists (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Cast List (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
References (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_9f574a4a-1891-5851-adb5-23b37795f870)
1
In my first chemistry class, at the age of fourteen, I successfully precipitated a single crystal of mineral salts. This elementary experiment was done by heating a solution of copper sulphate (I think) over a Bunsen burner, and leaving it to cool overnight. The next morning there it lay at the bottom of my carefully labelled test tube: a single beautiful crystal, the size of a flattened Fox’s Glacier Mint, a miniature ziggurat with a faint blue opalescence, propped up against the inside of the glass (too big to lie flat), monumental and mysterious to my eyes. No one else’s test tube held anything but a few feeble grains. I was triumphant, my scientific future assured.
But it turned out that the chemistry master did not believe me. The crystal was too big to be true. He said (not at all unkindly) that I had obviously faked it, and slipped a piece of coloured glass into the test tube instead. It was quite a good joke. I implored him, ‘Oh, test it, sir; just test it!’ But he refused, and moved on to other matters. In that moment of helpless disappointment I think I first glimpsed exactly what real science should be. To add to it, years later I learned the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in Verba-‘Nothing upon Another’s Word’. I have never forgotten this incident, and have often related it to scientific friends. They nod sympathetically, though they tend to add that I did not (as a matter of chemical fact) precipitate a crystal at all-what I did was to seed one, a rather different process. No doubt this is so. But the eventual consequence, after many years of cooling, has certainly been to precipitate this book.
2
The Age of Wonder is a relay race of scientific stories, and they link together to explore a larger historical narrative. This is my account of the second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, and produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science.
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Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so. In effect there is Romantic science in the same sense that there is Romantic poetry, and often for the same enduring reasons.
The first scientific revolution, of the seventeenth century, is familiarly associated with the names of Newton, Hooke, Locke and Descartes, and the almost simultaneous foundations of the Royal Society in London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Its existence has long been accepted, and the biographies of its leading figures are well known.
(#ulink_6e16aa50-fed2-5e64-8510-4a23779cc2fe) But this second revolution was something different. The first person who referred to a ‘second scientific revolution’ was probably the poet Coleridge in his Philosophical Lectures of 1819.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was inspired primarily by a sudden series of breakthroughs in the fields of astronomy and chemistry. It was a movement that grew out of eighteenth-century Enlightenment rationalism, but largely transformed it, by bringing a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work. It was driven by a common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery.
It was also a movement of transition. It flourished for a relatively brief time, perhaps two generations, but produced long-lasting consequences-raising hopes and questions-that are still with us today. Romantic science can be dated roughly, and certainly symbolically, between two celebrated voyages of exploration. These were Captain James Cook’s first round-the-world expedition aboard the Endeavour, begun in 1768, and Charles Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos islands aboard the Beagle, begun in 1831. This is the time I have called the Age of Wonder, and with any luck we have not yet quite outgrown it.
The idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science. That is how William Wordsworth brilliantly transformed the great Enlightenment image of Sir Isaac Newton into a Romantic one. While a university student in the 1780s Wordsworth had often contemplated the full-size marble statue of Newton, with his severely close-cropped hair, that still dominates the stone-flagged entrance hall to the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. As Wordsworth originally put it, he could see, a few yards from his bedroom window, over the brick wall of St John’s College,
The Antechapel, where the Statue stood
Of Newton, with his Prism and silent Face.
Sometime after 1805, Wordsworth animated this static figure, so monumentally fixed in his assured religious setting. Newton became a haunted and restless Romantic traveller amidst the stars:
And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The Antechapel where the Statue stood
Of Newton, with his prism and his silent face,
