Steven Shapin is Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard. His next book will be Never Pure, a collection of his papers on the history and sociology of science.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
22 February 2001
On Simon Forman
4 September 1980
Newton and God’s Truth
20 July 2006
Defoe
14 November 2002
The Duchess of Marlborough
21 February 2002
On Christopher Wren
19 July 2001
On Daniel Defoe
5 April 2001
On Jane Barker
RELATED CATEGORIES
Science, technology and mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, 1600-1699, 1660-1699, 1700-1799, 1700-1749, Biography and memoirs, Biography, Europe, Western Europe, UK
Vol. 20 No. 13 · 2 July 1998
pages 12-13 | 3284 words
Sailing Scientist
Steven Shapin
- Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas by Alan Cook
Oxford, 540 pp, £29.50, December 1997, ISBN 0 19 850031 9
Joined for all time on the title-page of the Book that Made the Modern World are Isaac Newton (who wrote the Principia Mathematica) and Samuel Pepys (who, as President of the Royal Society, licensed it to be printed). It is one of the oddest couples in the history of thought: the man who, as a late 17th-century Cambridge student was heard to say, had ‘writt a book that neither he nor any body else understands’ and one of the multitude who understood scarcely a word of it; the wholly other and the all-too-human; the virgin ascetic who accused John Locke of trying to ‘embroil’ him with women, and the supreme London boulevardier whose consuming passions included Château Haut-Brion, the theatre and serial embroilments with women.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 20 No. 15 · 30 July 1998
From Nicholas Jardine
Semi-popular but ‘inexcusably dull’ and accessible only to scientific specialists, defiantly ‘old-fashioned’ in its perfunctory dismissal of social constructivism, the work of a scientist rather than a professional historian: such are the terms in which Steven Shapin (LRB, 2 July) castigates Alan Cook’s Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas. Reviewers who pontificate from professional high ground should be a bit more careful. Cook’s book addresses the scientifically literate public. Unlike the semi-popular biographies with which Shapin unfavourably compares it, Cook’s work presents important archival discoveries which add significantly to our knowledge of Halley’s life and social circumstances and his wide-ranging contributions to the sciences. As evidence of inaccessibility to all but ‘professional astronomers or geophysicists’, Shapin cites Cook’s mentions of ‘collimation’, ‘nutation’, ‘libration’ and ‘the Coriolis force’. GCSE science students know what the Coriolis force is; and the others, far from being advanced technical terms, were well established in Halley’s time and can readily be looked up in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. As for dullness, well, it’s a matter of taste. Cook is chary of the fruity tales of low life and high living spread about by Halley’s enemies; and his Halley is indeed on the dry side. Shapin is less fastidious, and the Halley he sketches is exceedingly moist.
As for Cook’s alleged dismissal of social constructivism, Shapin is disingenuous. The issue is not, as he implies, whether ‘passions and personality’ have a role in the establishment of scientific facts. Shapin is generally acknowledged as an architect of the social constructivist approach to the history of the sciences, and he well knows that this involves more than platitudes about the need for energy, sociability and sound judgment of people in the collaborative enterprises of the sciences. Thus Leviathan and the Air Pump, which he co-authored, concludes that ‘as we come to recognise the conventional and artefactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in the position to realise that it is ourselves and not reality that are responsible for what we know.’ Such is the provocative claim from which Cook distances himself when he remarks in his preface that ‘the "construction" of science is not a subjective undertaking; it must agree with the empirical structure of the world around us.’ Shapin counters this moderate empiricism by associating Cook’s good-natured and scholarly book with ‘the Science Wars that are threatening to poison our cultural conversations’. Insensitivity to the contents of the sciences, macho images of scientists, misplaced professional élitism, insolent reviewing – these, I think, rank higher among the real enemies of conversation about the sciences.
Nicholas Jardine
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge
