The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 6: Science gets organized

Experiments

One thing that the Royal Society was particularly interested in was experiments. This was part of a long term development whereby experiments acquired a more central role in scientific thought and practice. Few experiments had been carried out during the middle ages and Renaissance. This began to change in the early seventeenth century.

Francis Bacon frequently used the term experiment and was later identified as the founder of experimental science. However, Bacon was more interested in closely observing nature than in making experiments. The modern scientific meaning of "experiment" – the creation of an artificial situation to study scientific principles held to apply in all situations – emerged only gradually.

Galileo frequently employed experimental arguments in his writings, but it is still debated by scholars which of these highly abstract experiments he had actually performed and which were "thought experiments." Galileo’s emphasis on mathematical abstraction and considering motion under ideal conditions was not congenial to a thoroughgoing experimentalism.

The first work that systematically related experiments to natural philosophy was the English physician William Gilbert’s On the Magnet (1600), although many of his experiments were not new. On the Magnet was followed by an early seventeenth-century boom in dramatic experiments, carried out in many fields, and by supporters of all the major natural-philosophical traditions.

The Aristotelian William Harvey experimented by tying off the veins in his arm with ligatures to ascertain the circulation of the blood and Galileo’s disciple Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647) went beyond his master as an experimentalist, carrying out the famous "Torricellian Experiment."

Torricelli took a glass tube about two yards long and sealed at one end, and filled it with mercury. He covered the open end with a finger, and inserted the tube, open end downward, in a container of mercury. The mercury in the tube sank to a level about thirty inches higher than the mercury in the container thereby demonstrating the pressure of the air that sustained the column of mercury. This also providing experimental evidence for the existence of a vacuum, in the gap between the top of the column and the top of the tube. Oster’s document 7.2 describes a follow-up experiment carried out by Blaise Pascal.

Not all seventeenth-century natural philosophers were enthusiastic experimenters. Rene Descartes was dubious of the value of experiment in achieving certainty. For him, experiment had to be subordinated to theory, and true certainty – the goal of natural philosophy – could be attained only by reason. There were Cartesian experimentalists but Cartesian experiments were usually performed to demonstrate truths already arrived at through reason rather than to find new knowledge.

The most convinced experimentalists of the late seventeenth century were the natural philosophers of the Royal Society, who often referred to what they were doing as "experimental philosophy." They enjoyed the services of the most gifted designer and conductor of experiments, Robert Hooke. As Curator of Experiments, Hooke had the grueling task of providing several experiments, preferably entertaining ones, for each of the Society’s meetings.

Hooke’s own discussions of the method of natural philosophical investigation–"Philosophical Algebra"–incorporated experimentalism into the Baconian tradition. The English developed the genre of the experimental account to enable those who did not themselves witness the experiment to become "virtual witnesses."

Since experiments, particularly ones requiring such expensive and finicky devices as air-pumps, could not be replicated on demand, it was necessary that experimental narratives convince readers of the truth of the experiment. This meant a great deal of detail, careful descriptions of procedure, and a specific narrative of an event at a particular place and time.

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