Edward Dolnick. The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World. New York: Harper Collins, 2011. 400 pages.
In THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE, Edward Dolnick gives the reader a sense of the world that the scientific greats of the early modern period inhabited, and lets us see that there was more than dry formulae to their lives. Some of the giants Dolnick examines are household names–Galileo, Kepler, Newton. Others, like Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz, are not, so even those who have a decent understanding of where modern science came from (i.e., remember a bit from college) will learn something. Most, but not all, of those Dolnick discusses were members of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Sciences, a body that mixed sometimes-idle curiosity about the way the world worked with true scientific genius. At times almost liked an academic department, at times merely a forum for interested gentlemen to indulge in show-and-tell, the patchwork nature of the group exemplifies the dawning discipline of science.
The book alternates between describing the mental world of the “band of geniuses” who redefined reality and the physical one, which was far grimier than we can to remember. Though they pointed the way to modernity, they really inhabited a world built primarily on superstition and supposition, not all of it entirely logical. Combined with detailed but accessible to the layman descriptions of the experiments and logical constructions that helped Newton and the others unlock the mysteries of motion and gravity.
Divided into short chapters, THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE is a surprisingly nimble read, considering the weighty (pun intended) subjects it covers. It’s not exactly breezy–no work describing the birth of calculus could be–but it zips along pretty well. Dolnick is able to make problems that bedeviled philosophers for centuries, like Zeno’s paradox, comprehensible to the modern reader. Sprinkled with a liberal helping of detail about the everyday London of the day, it’s a great introduction-or re-introduction–to reading about scientific thought.