takes us deeply into the structures and behaviours of atoms and molecules, and, at the risk of insulting the intelligence of the reader, it is perhaps fair to say that there are a few sections of the book that call for rather more effort from a lay audience than I have asked previously. If you have never before set eyes on a molecular structure, for example, you may find your eyes glazing around pages 169–172, and you should feel no guilt at passing quietly over them.
The immense generosity of several chemists has helped me to assemble the material and to iron out some of the most glaring errors. I am deeply grateful to Jeffrey Bada, Neil Bartlett, Albert Eschenmoser, Leo Paquette, Horst Prinzbach, Matthias Schädel and Claude Wintner for their assistance and comments.
While writing the book, I have had a sense that Oliver Sacks’ inspiring enthusiasm for chemistry and its history has somehow been in the air, and in gratitude for his encouragement, support and friendship over the past several years I would like to dedicate this book to him.
Philip Ball
London, February 2005
INTRODUCTION
What is an Experiment? What is Beauty?
Some experiments, it must be said, are best left alone. ‘I was desirous’, Francis Bacon wrote from his sickbed in 1626, ‘to try an experiment or two touching the conservation and induration of bodies; as for the experiment it succeeded excellently well.’ An ailing old man of sixty-five, Bacon bought a chicken from a woman in Highgate, a village near London, and filled it full of snow during one of the fierce winters of what we now call the Little Ice Age. This exercise in refrigeration may have worked well enough, but Bacon caught a severe chill and was taken to bed at the house of the Earl of Arundel, where his condition developed into pneumonia. He died within a month.
The irony is that this was one of the few experiments that Bacon, often designated the father of experimental science, actually performed himself. Yet he was a tireless advocate of the experimental method as a way of procuring sound scientific knowledge. ‘Our hope of further progress in the sciences’, he wrote in his greatest treatise on scientific method, the Novum Organum,
will then only be well founded, when numerous experiments shall be received and collected into natural history, which, though of no use in themselves, assist materially in the discovery of causes and axioms; which experiments we have termed enlightening, to distinguish them from those which are profitable. They possess this wonderful property and nature, that they never deceive or fail you; for being used only to discover the natural cause of some object, whatever be the result, they equally satisfy your aim by deciding the question.
This sounds very much like the traditional formulation of the scientist as someone who devises an experiment to discover something about how the world works, from which more general laws of nature may be deduced. And that is indeed a fair description of the project Bacon envisaged. He rightly complained that, previously, science had lacked any systematic means of gathering reliable knowledge. Instead, it had been pursued (he implied) in a piecemeal fashion by men who sat around thinking up idle dogma based on uncritical acceptance of every report and rumour they heard, or alternatively who carried out ‘experiments’ with no particular rationale in mind and with little heed to the lessons they might learn. The alchemists, for instance, experimented haphazardly with the sole aim of making gold and getting rich. Thus, said Bacon,
those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical. No one has yet been found possessed of sufficient firmness and severity to resolve upon and undertake the task of entirely abolishing common theories and notions, and applying the mind afresh, when thus cleared and levelled, to particular researches; hence our human reasoning is a mere farrago and crude mass made up of a great deal of credulity and accident, and puerile notions it originally contradicted.
And these shortcomings, Bacon felt, existed because no one did decent experiments: ‘Nothing is rightly inquired into, or verified, noted, weighed, or measured . . . . We must not only search for, and procure a greater number of experiments, but also introduce a completely different method, order, and progress of continuing and promoting experience.’
This method was what Bacon aimed to set out in his Novum Organum or ‘New Organon’. The Greek word organon means an instrument or engine: Bacon’s new engine was the device that would churn out a new philosophical understanding of the world, and it is characteristic of Bacon that he should choose a metaphor from applied science to describe his project. The Novum Organum was published in 1620 as a part of a still greater enterprise, The Great Instauration, which Bacon intended to be a more or less encyclopaedic account of science as it was then known, coupled with his dream of a new scientific method and a description of the fruits that this approach had already yielded. All Bacon managed to produce of the six volumes intended for his magnus opus, before he was laid low by a frozen chicken, was the introductory material (also published in 1620 under the umbrella title The Great Instauration), the second part (which constituted the Novum Organum), and a mere sketch of the third volume, A Preparative Towards a Natural and Experimental History.
Yet Bacon’s vision of an institutional body dedicated to the systematic pursuit of scientific knowledge provided the template for the Royal Society, granted its charter by Charles II in 1665, which brought together (even if it did not exactly unite) such great scientists of the early Enlightenment as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley. It is tempting now to regard Francis Bacon as the progenitor of the modern concept of a scientific experiment, wherein accurate and ingenious instruments and devices are deployed so as to reveal the secret workings of the universe.
While that picture has some validity, it isn’t quite what Bacon had in mind. His sights were set on a somewhat different destination – for he did not consider the knowledge garnered from experiments to be the ultimate end in itself. Rather, in his famous formulation, knowledge delivers power. The reason why humankind should seek out scientific knowledge is not simply to know it but to apply it to achieve mastery over nature. Those who merely wove knowledge into intricate, abstract theories, said Bacon, were like spiders spinning their webs. On the other hand, those who seek worldly profit through blind empirical blundering were like ants which ‘only heap up and use their store.’ The true scientist, he said, should be like the bee, which ‘extracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts’. In Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), a vision of a utopian society governed by a cadre of scientist-priests who work in a quasi-mystical research institution called Salomon’s House, this knowledge produces some truly wondrous inventions:
We have some degrees of flying in the air; we have ships and boats for going under water, and brooking of seas; also swimming girdles and supporters. We have divers curious clocks, and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions.
All of this starts to sound rather less hard-headed and more fantastic than we might expect from a man who is ostensibly banishing old superstitions and drawing up a blueprint for a new and reliable scientific method. But that is not surprising; for as science historian John Henry has argued, Francis Bacon’s vision of an experimental science drew not so much on the model we would now associate with scientific Enlightenment rationalism, but on the older tradition of natural magic. Experimental science was born out of this magical legacy – a truth acknowledged in the very title of the definitive, multi-volume survey compiled in the 1940s by American historian Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science.
Until we understand this, we will not truly comprehend the experimental tradition in the sciences – and it will be the harder to see how a book like the present one fits into it. To many scientists, a ‘beautiful experiment’ is one that is perfectly and elegantly designed to yield an insight about the way the world works. That
