[.ca] Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution (ISBN 0385720017)

From Amazon.com:
Even Einstein had to eat. We seem to forget that scientists live in the same world as the rest of us, and that their work is informed by everything they encounter day to day. Lisa Jardine explores this interconnectedness in the context of the late 17th-century scientific revolution in Ingenious Pursuits, a well-planned journey back in time that delivers precious insight into the lives of those who laid the groundwork for cloning, nuclear weapons, and Internet commerce. Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, and Gian Domenico Cassini are just a few of the multitalented explorers that Jardine profiles through diaries, letters, and scientific records. Taking the time to fully flesh out the lives of these adventurous spirits, she shows the reader that science began as a natural curiosity about the material world, inspired by diverse interests: art, religion, medicine, engineering, and more. Political meddling in science is nothing new; even 300 years ago rulers competed for knowledge and the status that came from scientific achievement. Jardine expands on this premise to see the colonial expansion of the time as a driving force behind research, responsible for the contemporary explosions in cartography, botany, and optics. While Ingenious Pursuits stays for the most part in the 17th century, it does remind us of our own interwoven scientific and social threads, and that perhaps the next revolutionary breakthrough will come about as much because of telemarketers as National Science Foundation grants. --Rob Lightner

thorough yet aimless; detailed yet unclear:
This is a tough book to finish because it isn't clear where the story is. The research is thorough, as you might expect from an author who is "Professor of Renaissance Studies". But the book touches on all kinds of scientific advances and technology that would be interesting if explained. Jardine mentions the introduction of the ruby bearing for chronometers. But she doesn't explain or illustrate the jewelled watch movement. By contrast I've watched Gerry Sussman, an MIT EECS professor, hold an audience spellbound with a clear explanation of what the 17 jewels in a 17-jewel watch movement do. Next time Jardine writes about science, I hope that she collaborates with an engineer or scientist and an illustrator.

Weaves together the science and history of the time:
"Ingenious Pursuits" follows the scientific community of Britain through the second half of the 1600's, with a little spillover into the early 1700's. Jardine has pulled off quite a feat here: she weaves together the interconnected stories of medicine, physics, astronomy, cartography, anatomy, chemistry, biology and botany, along with a clear look at the society in which the key figures moved. Most histories of this period that deal with science at all fall into a couple of easily defined categories. They may take a single thread and follow it: there are many accounts of the discovery of calculus, for example, that discuss Fermat, Descartes, Leibniz and Newton. These books shed only a tangential light on the social background and say little or nothing about the state of the rest of science. Other books may neglect the details of the science in order to convey the society; or may provide biographies of individual figures. Jardine points out one of the dangers in this last approach: Robert Boyle's first biographer decided to focus primarily on his contributions to chemistry, and actually destroyed much source material related to other interests of his. Jardine's approach here is to give a chapter to each of several fields, and trace the history of the field over fifty or sixty years. The first chapter, for example, covers astronomy, including the identification of Halley's comet and the founding of the Greenwich Observatory. Once the players are introduced, the reader finds them recurring over and over again in subsequent chapters; this is what unifies the book. By the end of the book the effect is that Hooke, Boyle, Newton, Halley, Flamsteed, Oldenburg and the rest are so familiar that the stories are strongly coloured by the personalities and politics involved, adding another interesting layer to an already fascinating history. The Royal Society, which was founded in 1660, was of course a key player in all of this, and Jardine gives a good sense of both the gentlemanly biasses of the group (and the times) and the political complications of its work. For example, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, despite having an able mind and a great interest in science, was restricted by her gender from scientific life outside her salon; and it was also clear that only "gentlemen" could really participate. On the political side, Oldenburg, the first secretary of the R.S., got in trouble because of his voluminous correspondence with scientists on the continent in countries with which England was periodically at war. Jardine includes a very useful short chapter of capsule biographies of key figures at the end of the book. One thing she does not include that would have been useful is a chronology, either in timeline form or just as a list. This would be handy as a skeleton for the information in the book. The only other omission I regret is that, as another reviewer here has noted, there is not always a great deal of detail about the science itself. This is a result of Jardine's focus: she talks about the airpump experiments, for example, rather than how the airpump itself worked. These are minor shortcomings, however, and I strongly recommend the book.

Interesting bits and pieces, yet lacks cohesion:
Jardine's book offers many interesting facts and details of the day-to-day lives of those that made significant contributions to modern astronomy, medicine, architecture, and other fields. Among her characters are Newton, Flamsteed, Hooke, Boyle and Harvey. What is lacking is an overall sense of cohesion throughout the book. Jardine seems to have tried to take a more human approach to these scientific developments and developers by focusing on their personal lives, correspondence, and social interactions. While certainly valuable, these details provide only one small aspect of the scientific revolution and ignore the inventions themselves in favor of the circumstances surrounding them. The reader is unable to experience the excitement and mystery of discovery and invention which must have played an equally powerful part in motivating these "Ingenious Pursuits". For those looking for a wide variety of historical tidbits surrounding the scientific revolution, this book may be for you. For those, however, with a more substantial interest in the scientific developments of the mid- to late-seventeenth century, keep looking.

A fascinating book about the flowering of science:
This is a somewhat episodic historic of a critical period in the scientific revolution, when the Royal Society was in full flower with Newton, Halley, Hooke, Flamsteed, and other luminaries ushering in the era of scientific discovery that led to our science (and society) today. Each chapter focuses on a different topic: planetary astronomy, measurement, chemistry, microscopy, etc. This is a distinctive approach with both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that each chapter is a focused little history, easy to follow and to understand. The disadvantage is that incidents that bear in more than one area tend to be discussed repetitively, which becomes a little confusing at times. However, perhaps this helps to emphasis Jardine's thesis: that this was an era when the men of intellect did not categorize themselves into branches of science, or even between science and art. So Hooke, Newton, and some others appear in many chapters in many areas of inquiry. All in all, it's a very readable and interesting book with numerous illustrations, though strangely some of the illustrations appear both as black-and-white illustrations with the text and as inserted color plates. It's not clear what the point of that is. Still, a fascinating and readable book about the flowering of science.

A Different Look at the Scientific Revolution:
This is a fantastic book that makes great usage of first-hand quotes, pictures and other original source information to provide a look at the interactions between the great scientists of 1600's and 1700's that was the Scientific Revolution. Ms. Jardine doesn't simply provide a history of a single organization, although she spends a lot of time with the Royal Society of London, or a single individual, although Hooke and Newton figure prominently, or a defining event, although the Great Fire in London is brought up on multiple occasions. Ms. Jardine doesn't focus on any one area, but instead provides the reader with the flavor of the Scientific Revolution, instilling an understanding of the way that these great minds interacted, and how they worked both with and against one another in the race for discovery. In the end the author winds the reader through a description of how astronomy, medicine, taxonomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics and a multitude of other fields all intertwined to create the scientific revolution. It was the actions of the scientists as travelers, architects, authors and even guinea pigs that set the stage for the growth in our understanding of the natural world. Ms. Jardine tells us these tales in an unassuming manner, without putting forth a thesis, thereby allowing the reader to create their own thoughts on the matter. For the epilogue, she tells a similar story of Watson & Crick's discovery of DNA, thereby showing that the same round-about manner of discovery and development is an important element of modern science. This is a good book that looks at this important period of time in a manner just different enough from other existing books to make it very much worth reading. I highly recommend it.