BooksOfTheMoon

I’ve owned this book for the best part of twenty years, but at some point it ended up being moved from my “to read” pile to the main bookshelves, at which point I forgot about it. I only realised I hadn’t read it when I was browsing the shelves recently. I also have no memory of buying this book, and my edition has no hints of what it’s about on the back cover (possibly one reason I kept ignoring it all those years ago, when I couldn’t just google it), but it turns out it’s a history of the scientific revolution that went hand in hand with the Enlightenment in Britain and across Europe in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century.

Jardine uses the Royal Society, its members and associates as her touchstone for the discoveries and inventions of this period. She talks about contributions from Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and many others, in diverse fields. She covers the creation of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich; the importance of accurate clocks; telescopes and microscopes; and several other topics, that tend to become interrelated by the people involved. Hooke, in particular, is a recurring character, turning his hand to everything from clockmaking to microscopy to blood transfusion.

One thing that the book makes very clear is the level of cross-pollination of knowledge across Europe at the time. Henry Oldenburg, in particular, seems to have acted as a clearing house for knowledge, being secretary of the Royal Society. He received and sent correspondence across the continent, passing papers between people he thought would be interested, even when the corresponding polities were at war with each other, thus ensuring that the knowledge was spread around, and enabling new connections to be made that enable further discovery and invention.

The writing is lucid and easy to follow, something that I was relieved about after reading the introduction, which was denser and, to my mind, more deliberately academic. Jardine doesn’t focus much on the personalities behind the scientists — instead concentrating on the discoveries themselves and the relationships between them, although there are some cases when the personalities overshadow everything else. There are very few women mentioned in the book, possibly inevitable due to the period under discussion, although in saying that, I think there has been much more scholarship reviewing these discoveries and the contributions of women since this book was written.

An interesting book telling a fascinating story, and one that has an important message for today: science is international, and operates best in a spirit of cooperation, where people and ideas can flow freely through borders. Something that builders of walls and those stirring xenophobia would do well to remember.