The Fellowship: Gilbert, Bacon, Harvey, Wren, Newton, and the Story of a Scentific Revolution

The beginnings of organized science by these mainly British pathfinders has certainly led to amazing things. Yet these men, drawn mainly from the leisure class, were very much like us today, which this very readable book describes with detail and a context that is not obvious to denizens of the twenty-first century. When knowledge as an instrument of human improvement was not encouraged, the achievements of these men is nothing short of remarkable. And yet, they were petty, vindictive, vain, selfish, ambitious, credulous, with all the baggage that these traits entail. Perhaps the greatest of them, Isaac Newton, was also the worst: His brilliant grounding of modern science, as we understand it, to mathematics is in sharp contrast to his being knighted as part of a shoddy political gambit long after he stopped his productive work. As a collection of alpha males, with super egos and childish battles, they were able to organize an institution for the good of us all in spite of themselves. This book is an excellent record of how they all stood on the shoulders of giants.

It is an interesting study of the development of scientific method. The idea that you get data from the experimentation, then you derive a theory and then you test your theory. It shows how a group of English scientist in the seventeen century developed this new approach to scientific methods mainly centred around the development of Newtonian physics although it does discuss several other scientific disciplines. One question that I am still puzzled and not answered in this book is why did these early scientist feel that mathematics even before it started to give answers, provided the key to what became Newtonian physics.

This was really an interesting book all about the roots of western science and all the people who started it all in the first place by founding the Royal Society in London. The group of scientists that are described are very real, some of them likeable and some of them less so! But the other thing I liked about this book was that it gave me a real feel for an age, a time of enlightenment not just in science but in EVERYTHING! If you're interested in the Enlightenment from any point of view, literary or scientific, I'd say that The Fellowship would be well worth adding to your list.