Skip to main content

Boyle: between God and Science – Michael Hunter ***

I was really looking forward to this book as Robert Boyle is one of the least written about of the important people in the history of science, and before picking up Michael Hunter’s book I knew very little about him. I now know a lot more – but not always the things I wanted to know.
There are broadly three types of biography of a scientist. There’s the detailed historian’s biography, poring over every little document and providing an intensely detailed description of the individual’s life. The sort of biography that would make a great reference source, but frankly isn’t bedtime reading. Then there’s the populist biography, with all the rip-roaring personal details, but not enough about the science. Finally there’s the true popular science biography, which should combine the essentials about the person’s life – enough to get a feeling that you know the person without getting bored – with an exploration of the science this individual was responsible for. After all, what’s the point of reading a biography of a scientist, if you don’t find out about the science? It might as well be a biography of a shoemaker. (Nothing personal about shoemakers, here.)
Sadly, though it is, I am sure, a superbly researched tome, Hunter’s biography sits squarely in the first category. You can get a feel for the writer’s enthusiasm for all the minutiae and documentation on which it is based – which is fine – but the writing never captures the imagination. I don’t care about Robert Boyle as a result of this – it could just as well be an extremely long (beautifully documented) laundry list.
But the reason this book is, for me, an abject failure is that it skips over the science. Boyle is, of course, famous for Boyle’s Law, the gas law that tells us pressure times volume is constant. If you don’t concentrate hard you could miss Hunter’s reference to this altogether, it is so summarily covered, with no feeling for the context of the discovery and its implications. To give another example (there are many), we are given some details of an experiment that Boyle makes with nitre – but no attempt is made to even say what nitre is, let alone whether the experiment has any modern significance. We are just given a description of what was undertaken in Boyle’s own terminology. This isn’t good enough.
I’m not saying that I didn’t learn a lot from this book – I did. I vaguely knew that Boyle was Anglo-Irish, not in the sense of being half English and half Irish, but in the period sense of being of an English family with (extensive) landholdings in Ireland. But I didn’t know how rich he was, or about his life of celibacy, his relationship with the Royal Society, his extensive theological writings or his time spent in Oxford. Similarly I knew that Boyle stood at the crossroads where chemistry veered away from alchemy, but didn’t realize that (like Newton) his interest in alchemy was not an early concern to be discarded as he learned more, but rather something he got deeper into when his chemical ideas where already matured.
So, if you need to read up on Boyle, this is certainly a book worth consulting. But don’t expect either good writing on the science, or an enjoyable, readable text. Michael Hunter is a pure historian, not a historian of science, and an academic one at that. This isn’t a bad thing per se – but doesn’t make him the ideal choice if what you want is a popular scientific biography.

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more