The Clockwork Universe (33 page)

77
To preserve severed heads
: Beer,
Milton
, p. 302.

78
traitors' heads impaled on spikes
: The account of London Bridge (and the reference to Thomas More) comes from Picard,
Restoration London
, p. 23. See also Aubrey,
Brief Lives
, “Sir Thomas More,” and Paul Hentzner,
Travels in England During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth
, available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hentzner/paul/travels/chapter1.html.

79
“Whatever others think”
: Pepys's diary entry for February 17, 1663.

79
Newton veered toward vegetarianism
: Steven Shapin, “Vegetable Love,”
New Yorker
, January 22, 2007, reviewing
The Bloodless Revolution
:
A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times
, by Tristram Stuart.

80
“The result was a melody”
: Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman,
Instruments and the Imagination
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 73, 247.

80
“that traditional nursery rhymes portray”
: Keith Thomas,
Man and the Natural World
, p. 147.

80
With a dog tied
: Tinniswood,
His Invention So Fertile
, p. 1.

80
Boyle subjected his pet setter
: Ibid., p. 34.

80fn
The word
disease
:
Moote and Moote,
The Great Plague
, p. 141.

81
Boyle wrote a paper
: Robert Boyle, “Trial proposed to be made for the Improvement of the Experiment of Transfusing Blood out of one Live Animal into Another,”
Philosophical Transactions
, February 11, 1666, available at http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/1/1-22/385.

81
“a foreign Ambassador”
: The ambassador intended to test the effects of a substance called Crocus metallorum, sometimes used as a medicine to induce vomiting.

81
The servant spoiled
: Tinniswood,
His Invention So Fertile
, p. 37.

82
“The first died upon the place”
: Pepys's diary, November 14 and 16, 1666.

Chapter 14. Of Mites and Men

83
he set up a borrowed telescope
: Claire Tomalin,
Samuel Pepys
, p. 248.

83
he raced out to buy a microscope
: Pepys's diary, August 13, 1664.

83
he struggled through Boyle's
: Pepys's diary, June 4, 1667.

83
“a most excellent book”
: Pepys's diary, June 10, 1667.

83fn
Like James Thurber
: Thurber described his attempts to master the microscope in
My Life and Hard Times.

84
his “jesters”
: Michael Hunter,
Science and Society in Restoration England
, p. 131. See also Pepys's diary, February 1, 1664
.

84
“Ingenious men and have found out”
: Hunter,
Science and Society in Restoration England
, pp. 91–92.

84
“I shall not dare to think”
: Hunter,
Science and Society in Restoration England
, pp. 91–92.

84
“Should those Heroes go on”
: Manuel,
A Portrait of Isaac Newton
, p. 130, quoting Joseph Glanvill. Glanvill's remark is from his
Vanity of Dogmatizing
, written in 1661.

86
Gimcrack studied the moon
: Claude Lloyd, “Shadwell and the Virtuosi.” The Shadwell quotes come from Lloyd's essay.

86
Hooke went to see the play
: Shapin, “Rough Trade.”

86
Samuel Butler lampooned
: In his poem
Hudibras
, part 2, canto 3.

87
Swift visited the Royal Society
: Nicolson and Mohler, “The Scientific Background of Swift's
Voyage to Laputa
,” p. 320.

87
“softening Marble for Pillows”
: Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver's Travels
, part 3, ch. 5
.

87
“one Man shall do the Work”
: Ibid., part 3, ch. 4.

88
“a Shoulder of Mutton”
: Ibid., part 3, ch. 2.

88
Albert Einstein and his wife
: Marcia Bartusiak, “Einstein and Beyond,”
National Geographic
, May 2005, available at http://science.nationalgeo graphic.com/science/space/universe/beyond-einstein.html.

89
“All the books of Moses”
: John Redwood,
Reason
,
Ridicule
,
and Religion
, p. 119, and Roy Porter,
The Creation of the Modern World
, p. 130.

89
“Is there anything more Absurd”
: Hunter,
Science and Society in Restoration England
, p. 175.

Chapter 15. A Play Without An Audience

91fn
The moon gave the Greeks
: Jurgen Renn, ed.,
Galileo in Context
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 198.

92fn
The stars will not look
: Albert Boime, “Van Gogh's
Starry Night
: A History of Matter and a Matter of History, ”
Arts Magazine
, December 1984, available at http://www.albertboime.com/Articles.cfm. Donald Olson, a Texas State University astronomer, has carried out similar work, notably a study of Edvard Munch's
The Scream.

93
“The falling body moved more jubilantly”
: Herbert Butterfield,
The Origins of Modern Science
, p. 6.

93
“a book written in mathematical characters”
: The passage is from Galileo's
Assayer
(1623), available at http://www.princeton.edu/∼hos/h291/assayer.htm.

94fn
Galileo's intellectual offspring
: Richard Feynman
, The Character of Physical Law
, p. 58.

94
“the actuality of a potentiality”
: Quoted in Joe Sachs, “Aristotle: Motion and Its Place in Nature,” at http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-mot/. The remark is quoted in slightly different form in Oded Balaban, “The Modern Misunderstanding of Aristotle's Theory of Motion,” at http://tinyurl.com/y24yvwo.

94
“If the ears
,
the tongue”
: Galileo,
The Assayer.

95
“communicate in the language”
: Charles Coulston Gillispie,
The Edge of Objectivity
, p. 43.

95
“Do not all charms fly”
: John Keats,
Lamia
, part 2.

95
“When I heard the learn'd astronomer”
: Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer.”

96
“Shut up and calculate”
: The remark is nearly always attributed to Feynman, it seems to have been coined by the physicist David Mermin. See David Mermin, “Could Feynman Have Said This?,”
Physics Today
, May 2004, p.10, available at http://tinyurl.com/yz5qxhp.

96
People do not “know a thing”
: Steven Nadler, “Doctrines of explanation in late scholasticism and in the mechanical philosophy,” in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
.

96
“not a necessary part”
: Kline,
Mathematics
:
The Loss of Certainty
, p. 47, quoting Galileo,
Two New Sciences.

Chapter 16. All in Pieces

97
“It is not only the heavens”
: Richard Westfall, “Newton and the Scientific Revolution,” in Stayer, ed.,
Newton's Dream
, p. 10.

98
seventeenth-century Italy feared science
: Some recent scholars have argued that this notion is out of date. “The older Italian historiography tended to present late seventeenth-century science as sucked back in time by the black hole of Galileo's trial,” writes Mario Biagioli, but “recent work has shown that such a simple explanation will not do.” See Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich
,
eds.,
The Scientific Revolution in National Context
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 12.

98
“for at the slightest jar”
: Thomas Kuhn,
The Copernican Revolution
, p. 190, quoting Jean Bodin.

99
“Worst of all”
: Ibid., p. 193.

99
“Sense pleads for Ptolemy”
: Kline,
Mathematics in Western Culture
, p. 117.

101
With no other rationale
: Richard Westfall, “Newton and the Scientific Revolution,” pp. 6–7.

101
“If the moon
,
the planets”
: Arthur Koestler,
The Sleepwalkers
, p. 498.

102
“The Sun is lost”
: John Donne, “An Anatomy of the World.”

Chapter 17. Never Seen Until this Moment

105
“on or about December 1910”
: Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction.” Woolf had in mind how writers like James Joyce portrayed their characters' inner lives.

105
“The Mathematical Professor at Padua”
: Nicolson, “The ‘New Astronomy' and English Imagination,” p. 35.

106
He had known “all the stars”
: Kitty Ferguson,
Tycho and Kepler
, p. 46.

106
“the greatest wonder”
: Ibid., p. 47.

107
a standing-room-only crowd
: Nicolson, “The Telescope and Imagination,” p. 8.

107
On the morning of September 3
,
1609
: New-York Historical Society Collections, 2nd ser. (1841), vol. 1, pp. 71–74. This is from an excerpt online at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5829.

108
The breakthrough that made the telescope:
Albert Van Helden, ed., in his “Introduction” to
Sidereal Nuncius
(The Sidereal Messenger)
,
by Galileo Galilei (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 2–3.

108
They took turns peering
: Ibid., p. 6.

108
“Many of the nobles”
: Nicolson, “The Telescope and Imagination,” p. 12.

108
“to discover at a much greater distance”
: Van Helden, “Introduction,” p. 7.

109
It
revealed
true features
: Shapin,
The Scientific Revolution
, p. 72. I owe to Shapin these observations about the telescope having had to prove its trustworthiness. Shapin also cites a variety of other factors that made the telescope hard to use and hard to evaluate.

109
Galileo continued to improve
: Van Helden, “Introduction,” p. 9.

109
“absolute novelty”
: The quotes from Galileo in this paragraph and in the next several sentences come from Nicolson, “The Telescope and Imagination,” pp. 14–15.

111
Why could not the Earth itself?
: Kuhn,
The Copernican Revolution
, p. 222.

111
What could be “more splendid”
: Lovejoy,
The Great Chain of Being
, p. 126.

111
“When the heavens were a little”
: Ibid., p. 133.

112
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces”
: Ibid., p. 127.

112
Man occupied “the filth and mire”
: Ibid., p. 102. E. M. W. Tillyard, in
The Elizabethan World Picture
, writes that “the earth in the Ptolemaic system was the cesspool of the universe” (p. 39).

113
Galileo's adversary Cardinal Bellarmine
: Karen Armstrong,
A History of God
, p. 290.

Chapter 18. Flies as Big as a Lamb

114
He put his own saliva
: On September 17, 1683, Leeuwenhoek described his teeth-cleaning routine and the “animalcules” he found in his mouth. Excerpts from that letter, and much other material related to Leeuwenhoek's discoveries, can be found at http://ucmp.berkely.edu/history/leeuwen hoek.htm.

115
“exceedingly small animals”
: Marjorie Nicolson
,
“The Microscope and English Imagination,” p. 167.

115
And he had witnesses
: Ibid., p. 167.

115
the first person ever to see sperm cells
:
The Collected Letters of Antoni van Leeu- wenhoek
, edited by a Committee of Dutch Scientists (Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1941), vol. 2, pp. 283–95. This letter was written in November 1677 to William Brouncker, president of the Royal Society.

116
“His Majesty seeing the little animals"
: Clara Pinto-Correia,
The Ovary of Eve
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 69.

116
“limbs with joints
,
veins in these limbs”
: Nicolson, “The Microscope and English Imagination,” p. 210.

117
“Were men and beast made”
: Michael White,
Isaac Newton
:
The Last Sorcerer
, p. 149, quoting a notebook entry of Newton's headed “Of God.”

117
“large Hollows and Roughnesses”
: Robert Hooke,
Micrographia.
See http://www.roberthooke.org.uk/rest5a.htm.