The men of the scientific revolution

The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World. By Edward Dolnick. Harper; 400 pages; $27.99. Buy from Amazon.com

THE 1600s were not, on the face of it, an obvious candidate for the description of the “age of genius”. It was a world in which everyone was God-fearing and when everything from floods to comets was seen as the inscrutable (and unchallengeable) will of a jealous, stern deity.

Yet it was from this unpromising soil that the modern, scientific world-view bloomed. Edward Dolnick's project is to chronicle the thinkers and the discoveries that made it possible. The result is at once a biography of men such as Gottfried Liebniz, Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler, a layman's description of the significance of their work and an evocative piece of cultural history. It is the story of humanity's (or at any rate Europe's) liberation from a pious fatalism that saw every fire and plague as divine punishment for some mortal transgression or other.

The crowning achievement of the age—Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica—is among the most influential books ever written; those with the mathematical fortitude to make sense of its deliberately obscure diagrams are struck dumb with admiration. The equations derived by the eccentric genius are still used to design cars, build bridges and send spacecraft into the cosmos.

But the legacy of the age is more than just a set of useful theories. The intuition of men like Newton and Kepler that, beneath the apparent chaos of everyday life, the universe is a regular, ordered machine that can be described with a few simple equations proved—amazingly—to be correct. It is this idea of universality that is the true legacy of the scientific revolution. That the same simple rules describe the fall of an apple, the flight of a cannonball and the movements of the heavens is hugely heartening, for it suggests that despite its fearsome complexity, the universe is something that can be comprehended by mortal minds. That, in turn, opens the way to the modern notion of progress. After all, what is comprehensible can be tinkered with and, in time, improved.

The standard account tells us that the new science broke the stranglehold that the church and a few of its favoured pagan thinkers (chiefly Aristotle) had exerted for centuries on Western thought. That is broadly true, but as Mr Dolnick demonstrates, the reality was a good deal more complicated. The proto-scientists did not spring into being as paid-up believers in modern materialism and rationality. Newton divided his time between pursuits that today we would recognise as science and older, much more arcane disciplines such as alchemy and an obsessive search for numerological codes in the Bible. As John Maynard Keynes, a British economist, observed after buying a trove of Newton's papers, these men were not the first of the scientists, but the last of the sorcerers.

Indeed, for many of the fledgling scientists, their conviction that the universe was an orderly place sprang from their religious belief. Newton intended his great system of the world as a tribute to a dazzlingly deft geometer-god. When others took it to suggest that, once the universal clockwork was wound up there would be no further need for divine intervention to keep the planets in their orbits, he was dismayed. Like many revolutionaries, he perhaps did not comprehend the full extent of what he had helped to unleash.