On Bacon, Hobbes, and Newton, and the Selfishness of Writing Well

The Invention of Clarity

In the European early modern period (c.1500–1750), everything was changing. The period saw the Protestant Reformation, the introduction of representative democracy, the secularization of political power, and the origins of the sovereign nation-state. It saw globalization of trade in goods and ideas, but also the subjugation of much of the world under European colonization.

Science was transforming itself right alongside religion, politics, and global economies. European curiosity cabinets (Figure 1.1) were bulging with specimens returned from overseas exploration and trade: stones, creatures, and artifacts begging to be explained by new ideas in natural science and anthropology. Chemistry took its first steps away from alchemy and toward systematic, rational discovery. Astronomy and physics were revolutionized by painstaking observations and new instruments, and by increasing openness of thought about the data these yielded. Finally, the invention and application of the calculus put mathematics at the center of all the sciences.

But while the content of human knowledge was exploding, another, more important change was taking place. The development of modern scientific methods, professional scientists, scientific societies, learned journals, and (in case you were wondering about the point of this historical excursion) modern-style scientific writing changed the way people acquired and communicated knowledge. In a sense, this was when scientists learned to write — or more particularly, to write with the explicit goal of making their ideas available to a broad scientific community.

Writing to communicate with the scientific community was a big change. Medieval "scientists" (alchemists, for instance) generally thought of themselves as solitary workers who would penetrate nature's secrets for their own gain. Thus, if they wrote their findings down at all it was to claim priority or to make notes for their own use — and what they wrote was deliberately obscure, even written in code, cryptic symbols, or anagrams, to protect their secrets from their rivals. One of the first proponents of change was Francis Bacon, who criticized this secrecy and argued instead in his 1609 essay De Sapientia Veterum that "perfection of the sciences is to be looked for not from the swiftness or ability of any one inquirer, but from a succession." In the posthumously published New Atlantis (1627), Bacon described a fictitious research institute–cum–scientific society he called "Salomon's House" — and he clearly intended his utopian novel to be a proposal for how science should work. In Salomon's House research progressed because scientists communicated and collaborated with one another. (Bacon might well have been inspired by Islamic science of the 8th and 9th centuries, which flourished, collaboratively, under the Abbasid caliphs Harun al-Rashid and Abu al-Mamun [Lyons 2009].)

Bacon's concept of Salomon's House inspired the creation of the Royal Society of London in 1660. Its founders extended his ideas about communication among collaborating scientists to communication with a broad scientific community and even with the curious public. One of those founders was Robert Boyle, who essentially invented a new form of writing: the scientific report, which described the methods and results of an experiment (Pérez-Ramos 1996). Another was Thomas Hobbes, who wrote in the preface to his 1655 work De Corpore, "I distinguish the most common notions by accurate definition, for the avoiding of confusion and obscurity" (xiii) — a goal that seems routine today, but would have been outrageously unconventional in Hobbes's time. The founding of the Society brought with it the first modern scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which printed scientific reports of the kind pioneered by Boyle, written in the clear language advocated by Hobbes. Just a dozen years later, Thomas Sprat described the organization's rhetorical philosophy as

a constant resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style ... a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear sense, a native easiness: bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants, before that of wits, or scholars. (Sprat 1667, 113).

All this may seem obvious from our modern vantage point, but the transition from medieval secrecy through Bacon and Hobbes to the "clear sense [and] native easiness" of Sprat's Royal Society was revolutionary. Without this tectonic shift in how science was reported, modern science couldn't be done. The inventions of the calculus, the telescope, the microscope, and the inductive method (all between 1590 and 1630) were certainly important, but they're all outweighed in importance by the idea of describing one's scientific thinking clearly, for all to read.

Of course, no revolution lacks holdouts, and the revolution in scientific communication had a curious one: the famously cranky Isaac Newton, for whom publication remained largely about ensuring credit for his work. For example, he drafted his On Analysis by Infinite Series in 1669 in response to Nicholas Mercator's Logorithmotechnia, which Newton worried would undermine his claim of first discovery for some key insights underlying the calculus. Despite pressure from colleagues, Newton allowed only limited circulation of the manuscript within the Royal Society; not until 1711 would he agree to open publication. More famously, he deliberately made his masterwork Principia Mathematica — and especially its third volume, De mundi systemate — difficult...