The Origins of Modern Science

by Herbert Butterfield, 1957

It's always fascinating to be reminded of where our modern thinking came from and how much it evolved. You can't really understand something unless you know where it came from. And you can't appreciate where you are if you don't know how bad things used to be. 

• First, on Astrology: After reading through the first parts of this book, I have this thought - Astrology is so stupid that even the church fought against it for being nuts, and later, a kind of Streisand Effect; because the church, as the ultimate unquestioned authority of its time, denounced it, people were convinced there must be secrets in there, because "they don't want you to know". It really is like the first snake oil.
• Next, on the Complete Population Level Mental Damage of Alchemy: It's like the equivalent to an entire population being subjected to heavy metal poisoning. Until 1689, under Henry IV, there was a law that you couldn't multiply gold or silver (because they thought it might be possible; and this reminds me of the AI bubble of the 2020's because people really think it can do the craziest things). 
• Finally, on Phlogiston Theory: "The entire view was based upon one of those fundamental conclusions of common sense observation which (like Aristotle's view of motion) may set the whole of men's thinking on the wrong track and block scientific progress for thousands of years". And they twisted their heads so far around in trying to make it work that they came up with the idea that phlogiston had negative weight, to explain why an object weighed more by losing it. And let this echo with today's use of Dark Energy in astronomy. But there's more, "Furthermore, the last two decades of the eighteenth century give one of the most spectacular proofs in history of the fact that able men who had the truth under their very noses, and possessed all the ingredients for the solution of the problem - the very men who had actually made the strategic discoveries - were incapacitated by the phlogiston theory from realising the implications of their own work. Although it is true in the history of thought that false ideas or half-truths sometimes act as convoying agency - leading the enquirer to a sounder form of generalisation, and then dropping out of the story when they have fulfilled their purpose - it is still not clear".

• On the history of the heart, because of studying animals that bled out, they thought the left side blood vessels were filled with air. 
• On Misinformation, and a bit of Stigler's Law - still regarding the heart, "The mind of Fabricus was so shaped to the teaching of Galen, however, that he missed the whole point of his own discovery, and produced an explanation which left the large question exactly whee it had stood before."

• What precipitates the paradigm shift? Not necessarily a social revolution, or even a technological revolution, but some plain old chance. "One of these occurrences was the appearance of a new star in 1572 - an event which one historian of science appears to me to be correct in describing as a greater shock to European thought than the publication of the Copernican hypothesis itself. ... In 1577, a new comet appeared ... Quite apart from any attack which Copernicus had made upon the system, the foundations of the Ptolemaic universe were beginning to shake."
• Here's another: Although it turns out to have been wrong, as far back as Kepler, and influenced by Gilbert's theory of magnetism, gravity was seen as being more like attraction than a "falling back to the earth".
• And: By 1665, most of the ingredients in Newton's gravitational theory were in existence, though scattered in the writings of different scientists in such a way that no man held them in combination (and this is how it happens, not one man at a time, but one day at a time).

• Hindu algebra and Greek geometry coming together was the single greatest step in the progress of the exact sciences. 

• Before science proper, people would *think* through their experiments, and were called "natural philosophers". Not until they had tools to measure their initial conditions and results, did they begin to investigate experimental evidence to support their theory. ... Before, it was enough to think it through very carefully.

• This part is great. Butterfield, the author, uses as an illustration of the Scientific Revolution a series of eulogies presented by French writer Fontenelle, also secretary of the Academic des Science 1699-1741. He finds a pattern among the scientists' biographies. "It would appear from Fontanelle's biographies that those who joined the movement often sprang from bourgeois families and remarkably often they are the sons of avocats [lawyers], as he himself happened to be. Repeatedly it appears that they had originally been intended for the Church and that their fathers had insisted on giving them an education in theology. But over and over again the same pattern occurs in these biographies - the youth finds the prevailing educational methods irksome, finds that he is being given an education in mere words and not in real things. And then, on repeated occasions, the identical fairy story takes place". And he goes on to describe a series of scientists who were exposed to some theorem or philosophy, changing their life forever ... like older stories of Christian conversions.

• Whereas "reason" had once been a thing that required to be disciplined by a long and intensive training, the very meaning of the word began to change - now any man could say that he had it, especially if his mind was unspoiled by education and traditional "Reason", in fact, came to signify much more what we today should call common sense.