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SOURCES OF INNOVATION

A set of pages on technology, science, research, development, history and
education.


PREVIOUS PAGES

Four pages preserved from steve-joseph.staff.shef.ac.uk


TECHNICS

The study or science of an art or of arts in general, especially the mechanical
or industrial arts.


STARTING POINTS

> Common sense is science exactly in so far as it fulfils the ideal of common
> sense; that is, sees facts as they are, or, at any rate, without the
> distortion of prejudice, and reasons from them in accordance with the dictates
> of sound judgement. And science is simply common sense at its best; that is,
> rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.1

Science teaching at my school lived up to Huxley's advertisement: in an
academically ambitious environment the sciences, and particularly the physical
sciences, presented the most rigorous and demanding courses. Another
characteristic of the science courses was the identification of figures in their
history that were held in great respect. For example:

> The high point of the Scientific Revolution was Isaac Newton's discovery of
> the law of universal gravitation: All objects attract each other with a force
> directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely
> proportional to the square of their separation. By subsuming under a single
> mathematical law the chief physical phenomena of the observable universe
> Newton demonstrated that terrestrial physics and celestial physics are one and
> the same. In one stroke the concept of universal gravitation revealed the
> physical significance of Johannes Kepler's three laws of planetary motion,
> solved the thorny problem of the origin of the tides and accounted for Galileo
> Galilei's curious and unexplained observation that the descent of a
> free-falling object is independent of its weight.2

These figures were an inspiration and a role model to an aspiring scientist such
as myself. When the book by Michael White “Isaac Newton, the Last Sorcerer”
appeared in 1998, the title was intriguing: would this cast the shadow of
superstition on this great genius and lessen the respect in which he is held?
The answer was no: according to White the genius remained, with the addition of
an unusual source of inspiration. Until I read in a footnote on page 185

> Newton believed that light is made up of invisible particles; Hooke supported
> the view that it is composed of waves. This argument is still not completely
> resolved, but modern science suggests that light has a dual nature: that it is
> both wavelike and corpuscular, depending upon the experimental circumstances.

Now I was taught at school that although Newton rejected the wave theory of
light, on the basis that light travels in straight lines whereas waves spread
out, this was not bad science because the evidence of the wave nature of light
was not available to him at the time. But here is White somehow trying to
validate Newton's viewpoint because it turned out to be right in the end: surely
the soundness of the treatment of the available evidence is the important thing.
But then, was my teaching at school sound? I realised that I had gone on to
perform a classic experiment on the wave nature of light called Newton's Rings.
The contradiction was not pointed out to me. So neither White, nor my own
training, were reliable sources for the assessment of the origins of the great
framework of science.

I was even more concerned to read on page 198 a passage from Hooke's Cutlerian
Lecture Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth, 1674.

> I shall explain a system of the world, differing in many particulars from any
> yet known, answering in all things to the common rules of mechanical motions.
> This depends upon 3 suppositions; first, that all celestial bodies have an
> attractive of gravitating power towards their own centres, whereby they
> attract not only their own parts, and keep them from flying from them, as we
> observe the Earth to do, but that they do also attract all the other celestial
> bodies that are within the sphere of their activity, and consequently that not
> only the Sun and the Moon have a influence upon the body and motion of the
> Earth, and the Earth upon them, but that Mercury also, Venus, Mars, Saturn and
> Jupiter, by their attractive powers have a considerable influence upon its
> motion, as, in the same manner, the corresponding attractive power of the
> Earth has a considerable influence upon every one of their motions also. The
> second supposition is this, that all bodies, that are put into direct and
> simple motion will continue to move forwards in a straight line, until they
> are by some other effectual powers deflected and bent into a motion describing
> a circle, ellipsis, or some other uncompounded curve line. The third
> supposition is, that these attractive powers are ‘so much the more powerful in
> operating, by how much nearer the body wrought upon is to their own centres

It turns out that “Isaac Newton's discovery” which was, according to Cohen, “the
concept of universal gravitation” and “that terrestrial physics and celestial
physics are one and the same” had been clearly stated and published over ten
years prior to its being revealed by Newton.

Further, if you have learned Newton's laws of motion, you will recognise the
first of them in the above passage. White's response to the passage is to
dismiss Hooke's efforts as guesses, and contrast them with Newton's empirical
science and revolutionary description of universal gravitation, in a way that is
transparently biased against Hooke. Surely Newton has been credited with more
than he deserves. Science may be “rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless
to fallacy in logic”, but these standards are not always met when observations
and logic are employed in the study of the development of science itself.


ACTIONS ARISING

This peculiar affair of bias and mistaken credit raised two lines of enquiry:
What, behind it all, was going on with mechanics in the 17th century, and what
was the rest of Hooke's life and work about?

On the first question I found that a concern like my own about the
misinformation of generations of students had been eloquently expressed by
Robert Weinstock in Problem in two unknowns: Robert Hooke and a worm in Newton’s
apple in The Physics Teacher in 1992. Weinstock summarises the affair by saying
that Newton's greatest achievement was in public relations. The second question
was answered by the biography of Hooke by 'Espinasse, which introduces his
Micrographia and Cutlerian lectures, but deferred to Bronowski's assessment of
Hooke as being yesterday's man in science and mechanics.

At the time I was getting informed about these things, there was a call for
papers for the conference to mark the tercentenary of the death of Robert Hooke
in 2003 at The Royal Society of London. The issues of gravity and celestial
mechanics were receiving expert attention from specialists, so it was unlikely I
could contribute much on that topic at this stage. My reading had shown that
there had been assessments of Hooke's other work which dismissed it as riddled
with elementary errors. It was evident that the authors of these assessments had
rushed to condemn on the basis of only an elementary understanding of the
subjects that Hooke studied. I contributed a paper Assessment of the Scientific
Value of Hooke’s Work to the London conference, and subsequently adapted it to
form Chapter 6 of the conference book3 . The assessment is also presented here.

One thing that turned up in the research was from Newton's Opticks: toward the
end there is an investigation into the way that light bends around obstacles,
which concludes (page 339)

> When I made the foregoing Observations, I design'd to repeat most of them with
> more care and exactness, and to make some new ones for determining the manner
> how the Rays of Light are bent in their passage by Bodies, for making the
> Fringes of Colours with the dark lines between them. But I was then
> interrupted, and cannot now think of taking these things into farther
> Consideration. And since I have not finish'd this part of my Design, I shall
> conclude with proposing only some Queries, in order to a farther search to be
> made by others.

These are just the phenomena that confirm the wave nature of light; Newton had
the decisive evidence, but did not engage with it.

Since the 2003 conference there have been several biographies of Hooke, and a
flood of academic studies on him. Hooke is no longer the person whose main claim
to fame is that he had disputes with the eminent Isaac Newton. The popular
biographies by Stephen Inwood and Lisa Jardine have thoroughly debunked Michael
White's attempted assassination of Hooke's character. In 2009 Robert D.
Purrington could write "In any event, the last two decades have seen Robert
Hooke rise from almost total obscurity to the point that he is nearly
fashionable, something that would have been unimaginable not so very long ago."6
A particularly vigorous assertion of the significance of Hooke's work appeared
in 2017 (Gribbin and Gribbin5).

There is a web site dedicated to Hooke, hookiana.uk, which is a cornucopia of
resources, although it does not seem to reference Hooke's contribution to
celestial mechanics. The popular biographies convey that this contribution was
insignificant: Inwood (despite citing opinion to the contrary) writes as though
Newton had all the concepts he needed anyway7, and Jardine (née Bronowski)
retains the view that Hooke was yesterday's man8. For these authors the problem
was just a mathematical one, which Hooke could not solve. The degree of
acknowledgment due to Hooke is still the subject of some debate, but all the
four relevant Wikipedia pages (Principia, de Motu, Universal gravitation, Hooke)
end with the quote from a mathematician

> "One must not think that this idea ... of Hooke diminishes Newton's glory",
> Clairaut wrote; "The example of Hooke" serves "to show what a distance there
> is between a truth that is glimpsed and a truth that is demonstrated".

It seems that despite all the efforts there have been to change the prevalent
view of the origins of celestial mechanics they have not been entirely
effective. The Wikipedia content includes numerous references, but there remains
the issue of whether these references ultimately support that content. This
issue is taken up here, where more substantial material and commentary is
presented.

A conclusion of the essay on assessment is that

> A view arises from the present study that might be more widely applicable.
> Science appears as technology carried out with greater depth. Thus technology
> is first to achieve a dim understanding, and science is first to achieve a
> full one. Chronologically and causally, technology gets there first, and
> drives discovery forwards. Technology has to make do and mend, until science
> clarifies and organises. These strands remain distinguishable even in the
> close integration of the modern era. This view retains the need to defend
> resources for science to go deep, but does not support the notion of science
> for its own sake.

> This view calls into question how physical science is presented, both to
> specialists and others. The laws of motion, for example, are learned right at
> the beginning of a physics course although historically they were not
> formulated until long after mechanical devices were being designed that were
> far too complex to be analysed by using them. Elementary science students are
> baffled and disheartened by the “laws first” textbook presentations and find
> it inimical to clear thinking and inspiration. It appears that the current
> syllabus is without pedagogical, conceptual or historical justification. It is
> still the common basis for the assessment of scientific value in historical
> studies.

I pursued this view in another essay Early modern scientific and technical
activities: sorting out “science” and “technology” which is available here. This
includes a detailed study of the history of the development of mechanical
clocks, and particularly the place of scientific work in it. According to the
essay

> This history, in which a centuries old conventional mechanism is
> revolutionised, by the advent of an early scientist who applied an advanced
> mathematical analysis to the problem, is considered a clear example of the
> distinctively different qualities of science and technology, and of the impact
> of science on technology.

The scientist in question was Christian Huygens, who calculated how to make it
possible for the pendulum of a clock to keep the same time at large angles of
swing as it does at small angles.

The detailed study reveals that the development of the pendulum clock was not
aided by Huygens' mathematical advances, but was the product of technical
innovation in a technical environment. Indeed, as far as the outcome of the
mathematics was concerned:

> It’s immediate effect on technical development seems to have been rather
> negative, in that it was accompanied by the erroneous removal from
> consideration of the drive in the analysis of timekeeping. This view has
> endured: the education of present day scientists and engineers conveys that
> the length of the pendulum determines timekeeping, and it is only specialist
> horologists who know otherwise.

It turned out that even the specialists had not quantified the effect of the
drive on pendulum timekeeping and verified it experimentally. This led me to an
investigation which is reported as Mechanics of the escapement driven pendulum
in Horological Science Newsletter4. The results are also presented here. They
show that for the seventeenth century pendulum clock the effect of changes in
the drive is about ten times that of the resulting increased angle of swing of
the pendulum.


DRAWING TO A CONCLUSION

All the above investigations into specific problems generated rather general
statements about “science” and “technology”, how people learn about them and how
they are presented publicly. These general statements call for more
substantiation than is provided from looking at a few particular problems,
however important they might be in their own right. This is provided in a set of
web pages introduced here, which look at the nature of what we call science and
technology, and how they are taught in four countries. The pages also look in
detail at the history of perhaps the most important technical development in
which the role of science is widely asserted: the advent of steam power.


REFERENCES

1The Crayfish: An Introduction to the Study of Zoology. by Thomas Henry Huxley;
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58924/pg58924-images.html

2I B Cohen ‘Newton’s Discovery of Gravity’, Scientific American, Vol. 244, No.
3, March 1981, pp. 169

3Robert Hooke - Tercentennial Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)

4Horological Science Newsletter 2007-4 p.2
http://www.hsn161.com/HSN/hsnfind.php?sqlType=title&id_author=96

5Out of the Shadow of a Giant: Hooke, Halley & the Birth of Science. John
Gribbin and Mary Gribbin. 318 pp. Yale U. P., New Haven, CT, 2017.

6Robert D. Purrington, The First Professional Scientist: Robert Hooke and the
Royal Society of London, Science Networks, Historical Studies, Volume 39 2009
page xiii

7Stephen Inwood, The Man Who Knew Too Much: the strange inventive life of Robert
Hooke, 1635-1703, Macmillan 2002, pages 293, 296, 297

8Lisa Jardine The curious life of Robert Hooke : the man who measured London.
London : HarperCollins, 2003, page 319