The debates between Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, and Robert Boyle, inventor of the air pump, were some of the first challenges of institutionalized science (called ‘natural philosophy’ at the time). Boyle and the Royal Society won one of the most decisive victories in the history of philosophy. Hobbes is still remembered as a political and moral philosopher, but his natural philosophy was completely rejected and forgotten. Hobbes’s arguments had not even been translated out of Latin before 1985.

Shapin & Schaffer decided to take Hobbes’s side of the debate. They pretend impartially in the introduction, but consistently favor Hobbes in the text, and the last sentence of the conclusion is “Hobbes was right.”

Why should we care about the losing side of an old debate about natural philosophy?

It is interesting to see what challenges science faced in its early days and what it defined itself in opposition to. We can use these debates to help understand science and its role in society today.

Why shouldn’t we just read Hobbes directly then?

When you read only a few great authors of the past, you get a distorted view of intellectual history. It looks like there were only a few sides of the debates. Modern scholars have read much more than you could in their eras of expertise. I might have read Hobbes and Boyle, but not Torricelli or Linus or More. By reading modern scholarship, you can see how much more complex and sophisticated the debates were.

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Prerequisites: I tried to make this accessible even if you don’t know about Hobbes or air pumps or the 1600s.

Originally Written: March 2022.

Confidence Level: Not my ideas.

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Political Context

The debates between Boyle and Hobbes occurred between the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 and Hobbes’s death in 1679. This is during the Restoration after the English Civil War.

The English Civil War was fought between 1642-1653, although fighting had begun in Scotland in 1639. There were multiple conflicts within this war: between the king & parliament, between England, Scotland, & Ireland, and about religion after the Reformation. The major religious factions were the Puritans / Presbyterians (very Reformed), the Anglicans (slightly Reformed), and the Catholics (not Reformed). There were also numerous smaller sects, like the Quakers, Anabaptists, Fifth Monarchists, and Adamite nudists.

The New Model Army of the Puritan parliamentary party was eventually able to defeat the government, execute the king, and force the king’s son into exile in France. The general of this army, Oliver Cromwell, declared himself Lord Protector of the Commonwealth and ruled from 1653 until his death in 1658.

By 1660, the parliament had decided that they’d had enough revolution. They invited the king’s son to return to the throne. He called new parliamentary elections, which returned a pro-monarchy Anglican majority. This was the Restoration.

The English Civil War was seen as an epistemological crisis as much as a political crisis: people fought because they disagreed about what Truth was. This was especially true in religion. Lots of people had been able to read the Bible after King James had it translated in 1611, and they kept on interpreting it the wrong way.

The Restoration would have liked to impose Anglicanism on everyone, but it wasn’t powerful or stable enough to do that. Different regions had different religious majorities (Presbyterianism in Scotland and Catholicism in Ireland) and even the Anglican clergy wasn’t that reliable. The principled defense of religious liberty was yet to come (by Locke in 1689), but for now, toleration was practiced as a necessity.

People were very concerned about how to determine Truth and how we could get everyone to agree on it.

Hobbes & Boyle were both interested in solving this problem for natural philosophy. Hobbes had spent the English Civil War in exile, where he tutored the future king in mathematics. This made him an influential and formidable figure in the new regime. Boyle had stayed in the British Isles, trying to do chemical experiments and trying to find a group of people he could safely discuss them with. Boyle was one of the founding members of the Royal Society of London, a new group committed to investigating nature through experiment. Hobbes was 71 years old when the Restoration occurred in 1660, while Boyle was only 33.

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Scientific Context

Rationalism & Empiricism

One of the big debates in natural philosophy was between rationalism and empiricism. Today, these terms are often used differently,^[1]For example, the Less Wrong community calls themselves rationalists, although they are empiricists. so I want to clarify what they meant in the 1660s.

In rationalism, Truth flows from the top down, while in empiricism, Truth flows from the bottom up.

Rationalism starts by listing a few key axioms: core fundamental truths that should be self-evident. These truths are then used to derive everything else.

The paradigmatic example of rationalism is geometry. Euclid starts with five axioms, four of which are definitions, and uses them to derive the rest of two-dimensional geometry. Reading Euclid was a core part of every education, so people were very familiar with how this process could be used successfully.

Empiricism starts from a collection of observations. You then look for patterns in these observations. These patterns are used to make predictions, which are repeatedly tested.

The scholastic philosophers who had always dominated the universities were rationalists. They followed in the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and were closely tied to organized religion. Other rationalists of that era, with different axioms, included Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes. Boyle & the Royal Society were empiricists, which was less common at that time but gaining in popularity.

Torricellian Phenomenon

Natural philosophy was wracked with scandalous disputes during the mid-1600s. The most important of these disputes for Hobbes & Boyle was the Torricellian Phenomenon.

Take a completely full vial of mercury and cover it with your finger so it has no bubbles.^[2]Don’t actually do this. Mercury is poisonous. But this is what they did. Stick the vial upside-down in a bowl of mercury and remove your finger. Mercury falls part of the way down, but not entirely, leaving a space above the mercury in the vial.

What is this Torricellian space?

Aristotle had said that nature abhors a vacuum (horror vacui). His argument is that, if there was nothing between two objects, then the two objects must be touching. But the Torricellian space sure looks like a vacuum. The mercury falls and there’s no way for anything else to get in.

Why does the mercury only fall partially down?

There is still some mercury in the vial above the level of the mercury in the bowl. If nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum, then what keeps the mercury in the vial?

The Torricellian space might be a vacuum. Or it might contain air. Or an ethereal substance that pervades everything. Or the more ethereal part of air. The height of the mercury might be determined by how much air or ether can pass through the mercury like smoke through water. Or it might be determined by the weight of the atmosphere. Or horror vacui might partially hold: the amount that nature abhors a vacuum must be balanced by the weight of the remaining mercury.

Every combination of these views existed. It did not look like the debate was making progress towards a resolution.

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Boyle’s Air Pump

Boyle decided to approach this problem by designing a new experiment. His main goal was to make a void-in-a-void. What happens if you do Torricelli’s experiment in a vacuum?

So Boyle (and Hooke and others) designed an air pump.

The pump consisted of two main parts: a glass receiver and a mostly brass pump.

The receiver was a glass sphere that had to be as large as possible, so there’s more room for experiment, while still being sturdy enough to not crack even when the air inside was removed. This pushed the limits of what contemporary glass blowers could do and made the experiment expensive.

The pump consisted of two concentric cylinders (like a piston). It had two holes that you could open and close: one where the pump connected to the receiver ($\mathcal{S}$) and one in the side of the outer cylinder near the top ($\mathcal{R}$). Start with $\mathcal{S}$ open and $\mathcal{R}$ closed. Use the hand crank to pull the inner cylinder down, drawing some of the air from the receiver into the cylinder. Close $\mathcal{S}$ and open $\mathcal{R}$. Crank in the other direction until the inner cylinder is back where it started and all of the air in the cylinder is pushed out into the atmosphere. Close $\mathcal{R}$ and open $\mathcal{S}$. Repeat.

Various different sealants and lubricants were used to prevent air from leaking between the components and getting back into the receiver. Eventually, Boyle added a pipe between the pump and the receiver and put the pump underwater to keep air from getting in.

Boyle then placed Torricelli’s experiment in the glass receiver of his air pump. When he first sealed the pump, the mercury remained unchanged. When the pumping started, the level of the mercury began to fall. It slowly fell as the pump was operated until the level of the mercury was only an inch above the mercury in the bowl. Further pumping could not make the mercury fall farther. Allowing air back into the receiver by opening both holes at once caused the mercury to rise back up again.

From this and similar experiments, Boyle concluded: (1) The external air is important to understanding the Torricellian phenomenon. (2) It’s not just the weight of the air. When the receiver is closed but before it’s evacuated, there isn’t enough air in the receiver to support the weight of the mercury. Instead, there must be some spring to the air compressed by its weight. Boyle called the weight and spring of the air its “pressure”. I’m using double quotes to indicate that Boyle was using this word in a new way. (3) As the air is removed, there is less pressure pushing down on the mercury in the bowl to support the weight of the mercury in the tube, so the mercury falls. (4) This pump leaks a little, so there’s always a little pressure, so we can’t get the mercury to go all the way down to the same level as the mercury in the bowl.

Boyle did not conclude whether the Torricellian space was a vacuum. He declared that this question was “metaphysical”. Since experiment couldn’t answer it, he declared that the question is beyond physics, or “metaphysics”. Boyle even claimed he had never read any of the rationalist systems people were using in the debate. He would use the term “vacuum” to refer to what was inside of his air pump, regardless of whether it was Aristotle’s metaphysical vacuum.

Another experiment Boyle tried involved cohering marble disks. Take two disks made out of marble and make the surfaces as smooth as possible. When you touch them together, they stick.

This was used as another example of horror vacui: air couldn’t rush in from the the sides instantaneously, so a vacuum might form when you pulled them apart. Instead, they stuck together until you pulled hard enough to warp the disks, which allowed air to come in from the sides gradually.

Boyle thought that this was due to air pressure instead of horror vacui, so he tried the experiment in his air pump. This proved to be difficult. The first problem was that the marble disks would separate due to the cranking, while the receiver was still mostly full. With some effort, they made smoother marbles and a less rattly crank. But then the marble disks wouldn’t separate. Boyle acknowledged that this was a failed experiment and suggested that maybe the leakage was enough to explain it. Several years and pump redesigns later, Boyle was able to make this experiment work, but only if he hung extra weight from the lower disk.

Shapin & Schaffer would never tell you the ‘correct’ modern answer because they’re presenting the debates as they were understood then. I have no such qualms. There is an attractive force between the marble disks that Boyle didn’t know about. Many natural philosophers of that time even rejected the idea of natural attraction, believing that all motion was the result of either contact forces (like collisions) or circular inertia.^[3]I’m using ‘circular inertia’ to mean: an object in motion will stay in motion in a circle unless acted on by an outside force. This was Galileo’s idea of inertia (before … Continue reading

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The Royal Society

Boyle did not just want to do the experiment for himself. He wanted the experimental result to be a widely accepted “matter of fact”. A matter of fact is formed when many reputable men agree that something has happened.

The Royal Society was an institution to provide reliable witnesses for the members’ experiments. It was a group of honorable men^[4]Read: nobility. who believed in the experimental program. They had a shared space at Gresham College where they would perform experiments for each other. After the experiment, they would sign that they agreed on what they saw. They did not have to agree on the interpretation of the experiment and could discuss that freely. However, politics, religion, and metaphysics would be excluded from the experimental space.

The Royal Society had the right to its own printing press, even though the Restoration was restricting the number and independence of presses in the country. They developed their own experimental literary tradition. Experimental literature should have little rhetoric and lots of details, even if that made the writing verbose. The details should make the reader feel as though he were there and experiencing it himself. As many realistic pictures should be included as possible. Reports of failed experiments should not be omitted because they make the account more authentic. The experimenter should also be humble and not make claims beyond the results of the experiments.

This literary tradition allowed for even more witnesses. People should be able to use the text to recreate the experiment elsewhere and see it for themselves. Everyone who read the description and understood it could also become ‘virtual witnesses'^[5]Shapin & Schaffer’s term. of the experiment.

The Royal Society tried to make knowledge a public affair, directed by Nature. A matter of fact was formed as more and more reliable witnesses voluntarily agreed to have seen it.

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Hobbes’s Worldview

Leviathan

Hobbes is most famous for his political philosophy, especially his book Leviathan. Since it is relevant, I will briefly summarize it here.

In the state of nature, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This is so terrible that people form a society. The best way to avoid the state of nature is to concentrate all power in a single person. His power is not quite absolute: people can rightfully resist if he tries to kill them (just like in the state of nature) and he can’t command people’s thoughts (because people might lie to him). He has the right to command anyone to do anything else and people should obey him.

Any alternative power centers will lead to civil war and a return to the state of nature.

Physics

Hobbes was a rationalist. Geometry (and math more generally) has had the most success at getting people to agree. We should use it as the model for other fields.

The scholastics at the universities had been using rationalist techniques in natural philosophy for hundreds of years and people still didn’t agree. Why?

Hobbes says that it is because they are using the wrong axioms and defining words the wrong way. This leads to confusion, then to disagreement, then to civil war. Linguistic mistakes are the root of our problems.

The biggest linguistic problem for Hobbes was ‘immaterial spirits’. He thought that this is an absurdity: if something isn’t made of matter, then it doesn’t exist. People accused him of atheism for this, which he denied, but it’s not clear that he thought that of God as a material object in the universe either.^[6]Unlike Orson Pratt, who did. The biggest problem with immaterial spirits is that it caused people to ‘see double’. They think that there should be separate spiritual and material authorities: the church and the king. The church usurps some of the authority which should all belong to the king, and even claims the right to crown the king. This leads to competing power centers, which leads to civil war.

Natural philosophy should be founded on axioms. Everything else should be derived logically from these axioms. This is the only way that we can make sure everyone agrees. If there are disagreements about axioms or definitions, they should be determined by the king (who presumably would rule in favor of his old math tutor). Any independent authority carries the risk of civil war.

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Hobbes’s Criticisms of Boyle

Hobbes responded to Boyle’s New Experiments Physico-Mechanical (1660) with Dialogus physicus de natura aeris (1661).^[7]Boyle wrote in English, while Hobbes usually wrote in Latin. His title means Dialogue about the physics of the nature of the air. This is the book that was first translated by Shapin & Schaffer in 1985.

One of the challenges of this debate was that Boyle’s and Hobbes’s physics were incommensurable. They not only disagreed on what is true; they also disagreed on how to determine if something is true.

On a certain occasion when Father Nicanor brought a checker set to the chestnut tree and invited him to a game, José Arcadio Buendía would not accept, because according to him he could never understand the sense of a contest in which the two adversaries have agreed upon the rules.

– inside front cover, quoting ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel García Márquez (1967).

Hobbes had numerous criticisms of Boyle:

• What you’re doing is not philosophy. Philosophy involves deriving effects from causes in a systematic way. You’re starting with effects, so you’ll never get people to agree with you necessarily.
• You’re using words wrong. Experimenters’ ‘hypotheses’ and ‘conjectures’ must really be statements about necessary causes. Moreover, since you call it a ‘vacuum’, you must be referring to an Aristotelian vacuum.
• I can explain everything you observed without assuming a vacuum.
• Experiments aren’t reliable. They’re nothing but ‘sense and memory’ and we know how reliable those are.
• In order to build a complicated piece of equipment, you have to first assume you know how it works. I think the air pump works in a different way.
• Your air pump leaks. How could you build a firm foundation of knowledge on something that leaks?
• If an experiment were reliable, you’d only have to do it once.
• You claim to be doing the experiments in public, but really, the Royal Society is a private club (and I’m not invited).
• Private clubs always have a master. You claim that everyone is freely agreeing to the results, but really, you’re all just doing what the master of the club wants.
• The Royal Society claims to be an independent source of Truth and so is a risk for civil war.

Hobbes’s influence with the king made him a significant threat to the Royal Society. Boyle had to respond.

Boyle separates Hobbes’s criticism into attacks on the Royal Society and attacks on Boyle’s ideas about physics. These should be dealt with differently. Hobbes rejected this distinction because he thought that Boyle was the master of the Royal Society.

Boyle responds to Hobbes’s physics directly. Hobbes’s systematic physics just doesn’t match the experimental facts. Boyle continued to improve his pump to make it leak less and to resolve his failed experiments, in part because of pressure from Hobbes.

The attacks on the Royal Society as a whole were more serious, although many were not well founded. A lot of Boyle’s response is just: No. That’s not what I said at all.

Boyle insisted on not talking about the true causes of things because they are unknowable. Two watches could show the same times and look identical on the outside, but have completely different internal mechanisms. So too could God (the watchmaker) use entirely different underlying true causes that result in all of the same observations. We should only talk about the observable physiology of nature and not the unknowable metaphysics.

The Royal Society is not a risk for civil war. Quite the opposite. Whenever multiple people are sincerely engaged in the search for Truth, there will be some questions and disagreements between them. The Royal Society shows how this discussion can occur without spiraling out of control. The more institutions there are where civil disagreement is normal, the smaller the risk of a civil war.

Boyle also questioned Hobbes’s religious beliefs: Where in a universe full of matter is there room for God? This was in a separate book on Boyle’s views on religion and not directly connected to the Royal Society or Boyle’s experimental work.

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Two Dialogues

Boyle and Hobbes both wrote dialogues. These did not try to exemplify the ideal form of empirical or rationalist writing. Instead, they presented how philosophers ought to debate. Boyle wrote The Skeptical Chymist (1661), while Hobbes wrote Dialogus physicus (1661), Problemata physica (1662), and Decameron physiologicum (1678).

Hobbes’s dialogues always had two participants: a teacher who represented Hobbes’s position and a student who begins with a mistaken view of the world. Both sides state their positions and ask clarifying questions of each other, but persuasion only works in one direction. The teacher does not use arguments from authority and is not dogmatic himself, but the teacher’s system is dogmatic. By the end, the student has learned the correct system well enough to anticipate and even correct the teacher, who graciously accepts the correction.

The Skeptical Chymist has four participants: a scholastic, two alchemists, and an empiricist. The discussion is open and no one has any particular roles. Consensus emerges as a result of the conversation. Everyone, including the empiricist, changes their views on the way to the consensus.

The different structures of the dialogues reflect the different views of how knowledge works and how philosophers reach agreement. For Hobbes, knowledge comes from an authoritative source. Students must be taught the correct axioms and how to use them, and then everyone will be able to derive the same correct conclusions. For Boyle, agreement comes as the result of open debate. When everyone gets to see the experiments, disagreements can be settled by Nature itself. Metaphysical questions will remain unanswered, but we can bracket them off from the rest of the empirical enterprise.

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Other People

Hobbes and Boyle were not the only people thinking about these questions during the 1660s. Many of them reached out to Boyle with hope of showing how polite public debate could safely take place. Hobbes was less well known for being polite and didn’t think that public debate should be taking place.

Alchemists

There was another empirical tradition in England which had existed long before the Royal Society: alchemy. Alchemists also believed in the importance of doing complex experiments to learn the secrets of nature. They did not believe in doing them publicly to make them matters of fact.

Boyle and Hobbes both associated the alchemists with the small religious sects that worshiped privately and insisted on personal interpretations of the Bible. Both these sectarians and the alchemists believed that knowledge was an inherently private thing, which made them potentially seditious.

Boyle extended an open hand to the alchemists. If they were willing to perform their experiments in public, they would be accepted as members of the empirical community. The Royal Society would accept these results, even if they disagreed with the alchemists’ metaphysical interpretations.

Franciscus Linus

One of the first people to respond to Boyle from outside the Royal Society was Franciscus Linus. His Tractatus de corporum inseparabilitate (1661) showed that he accepted the empirical project, but disagreed about how air works. Linus was also a Jesuit (a Catholic monk).

Even though they had fundamental disagreements about religion, Boyle accepted Linus as a fellow experimenter. Boyle responded scientifically, debating how the experiments were analyzed and some of Linus’s results that were not well witnessed, but did not attack his character.

Henry More

Henry More was a ‘divine and philosopher’ at Cambridge. He saw Boyle’s facts as part of an Antidote Against Atheism (1662). More hoped that every priest trained at Cambridge could be a philosopher too.

More followed Aristotle in believing that objects have simple intentions that drive their motion. The spring of the air described by Boyle shows that air wants to expand. This proves that mere mechanism cannot explain all natural phenomena. Instead, God directs the activity of matter in the world.

The truest and best use of experimental results is to prove true religion.

Boyle did not believe that inanimate matter did any purposeful action. He could quantify the air pressure.^[8]Shapen & Schaffer mention this as a counterargument, but I’m not sure why purpose and quantifiability can’t coexist.

More importantly, this is a metaphysical question. Whether or not the air expands on purpose or on accident cannot be determined through experiment. We shouldn’t use the experimental results to support a metaphysical claim and so we should agree to disagree on this question.

More wanted to merge the goals and communities of experiment and theology. Boyle maintained that they ought to be separate. Experiment should try to learn about nature for its own sake, not for the sake of true religion.

Longvil:	But to what end do you weigh this Air, Sir?
Sir Nicholas Gimcrack:	To what end shou’d I? To know what it weighs. O knowledge is a fine thing.

Other Churchmen

Once they accepted the distinction between the experimental and theological communities, Boyle was fine with the clergy using his work in other ways.

Some churchmen, such as Joseph Glanvill, decided to use experimental techniques to answer some questions about religion. They wanted to show that immaterial spirits existed by establishing demonic possession and witchcraft as matters of fact.

Experiment ought to sway “the mighty confidence grounded upon nothing, that swaggers, and Huffs, and swears, there are no Witches.”

p. 315, quoting PHILOSOPHIA PIA by Joseph Glanvill (1671).

Do you think they were successful?^[9]Boyle accepted some of these experiments and thought that they would be helpful in reclaiming atheists.

Since most of the Royal Society were good Anglicans, the clergy could use them as an independent witness for their religion. While respecting the boundaries between and within the communities, the empiricists and clergy cooperated externally to counter to influence of secular rationalists on society.^[10]New Atheists like to promote the thesis that Science and Religion are inherently in conflict. This does not hold up to historical scrutiny. For example, here we see Science and Religion ally against … Continue reading

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Replication

Replication is important for establishing matters of fact. The more people who see an experiment and the more times they get the same result, the more reliable the fact is.

You might find it surprising that it was difficult to replicate the air pump for the first decade after Boyle’s first publication about it.

The air pump at the Royal Society was used many times and was reliable enough to show off to visiting dignitaries. At one point, the Society worried that the king might not be entertained if they kept showing him air pump experiments every time he visited.

However, the air pump was continually being modified and rebuilt. Some of these design changes were quite substantial. This should only count as replication if you think that the new mechanisms are still doing the same thing: evacuating the receiver.

Other than the air pump at the Royal Society, less than 10 other air pumps were built during the 1660s.

All of them were built by people who had seen the London air pump firsthand. No one was able to replicate it entirely from the written description. Shapin & Schaffer use this to argue against Boyle’s technique of virtual witnessing and independent verification. I was not surprised: most human activities cannot be fully captured in a written description unless there is shared foundational knowledge to draw on. The air pump was a new thing and close to the limits of contemporary manufacturing capabilities, so of course it was helpful to see it in person.

Boyle split his time between Oxford and London. He had an air pump at each location. When Boyle was in Oxford, Robert Hooke maintained the air pump of the Royal Society. Henry Power, another member of the Royal Society, might have made one in Halifax as well.

Outside of England, all of the air pumps were built by Christiaan Huygens. Huygens built an air pump in The Hague after visiting London in 1661. He discovered some anomalous behavior using it, which the Royal Society refused to accept as a matter of fact until Huygens returned to London in 1663 and showed his experiments on the Royal Society’s air pump. Afterwards, Huygens went to Paris and built air pumps for two groups there.

Denis Papin, a member of one of the groups in Paris, worked to make the air pump simpler and easier to produce. By 1673, Papin’s design could be bought ready-made from the clockmaker Gandrou. Air pumps then transitioned from being an expensive specialized device to a common piece of equipment.

Two other groups were also working on similar experiments. Guericke and Schott in Germany^[11]Würzburg, Magdeburg, and Regensburg. designed a different air pump before Boyle did. The Accademia del Cimento in Florence was working on making larger versions of the Torricellian phenomenon and on doing experiments in the space above the mercury. The groups working on the three different designs for a vacuum chamber communicated extensively about the strengths and weaknesses of each others’ methods and the phenomena they observed. None of them saw the need to replicate the others’ designs.

During the 1660s, only 5-6 air pumps were built, along with two other similar experiments.

Shapin & Schaffer are not impressed with this replication record. I don’t think it’s that bad. First, Shapin & Schaffer conflate replicating the experiment with replicating the machine used for the experiment. The void-in-a-void experiment was performed dozens, if not hundreds, of times, using 5-6 different machines, during the 1660s. Second, this isn’t a bad record for big modern physics experiments. Gravitational waves were first observed in 2015. Since then, gravitational waves have been observed 22 times on 3 machines. The Higgs boson was first observed in 2012. There is still only one machine capable of performing that experiment: the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Compared to these, the record of the first air pump doesn’t look too bad. Third, by the mid 1670s, the air pump itself also came to be widely replicated.

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Missing Voices

There are several other groups whose perspectives could have been investigated closely. I’m going to try to fill in these gaps, but I am less confident here because I don’t have a professional historian as a guide.

Universities

Shapin & Schaffer look at the relationship between Boyle and particular individuals at the universities, but they do not look at the institutional relationship between the Royal Society and the universities. Today, universities play a major role as scientific institutions, so it would be interesting to see if this relationship began in the earliest days of institutionalized science.

Oxford and Cambridge were both already hundreds of years old by the 1660s. They had been founded during the High Middle Ages to educate the clergy, lawyers, and doctors.^[12]In that order of importance. Boyle spent a significant amount of time at Oxford and it would be interesting about his role there.

The Royal Society was closely tied to Gresham College, but that was not a university. Gresham College had been founded in 1597 as a public lecture hall. It had several curators who organized the lectures, but it did not have its own students or award degrees. The Royal Society met at Gresham College because its goal of public discussion aligned with their own.

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was still a teenager at grammar school when the debates between Hobbes & Boyle began in 1660. He soon transferred to Cambridge. Newton became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672. Newton had to have been involved in the debates over what natural philosophy should be. He would become much more influential in science than either Boyle or Hobbes.

Newton took a different strategy in the rationalism-empiricism debate. His Principia Mathematica (1687) is structured like a rationalist text: it begins with three laws and derives the rest of mechanics from these axioms. But the justification for these laws is empirical. The laws are not taken to be self evident. You should trust the laws because the conclusions that you derive from them agree with a large range of experiments.

Newton also compartmentalized his intellectual endeavors more than Boyle. When doing natural philosophy, Newton followed the norms of the natural philosophers. When doing alchemy, Newton followed the norms of the alchemists. In contrast, Boyle tried to make alchemy part of his experimental program by bringing their methods and results into the public.

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Conclusion

I read this book so you don’t have to.

At this point, you might be expecting me to recommend reading the rest of the book. I’m not. While I found the subject matter extremely interesting, it wasn’t particularly entertaining to read.

Leviathan and the Air-Pump is written for an academic audience. It doesn’t provide as much background as it could. The political context isn’t even discussed until the second to last chapter, even though the English Civil War was very influential on Hobbes’s views. This book is also repetitive. Every chapter begins and ends by resummarizing the disagreements between Hobbes & Boyle.

What I found most annoying is that Shapin & Schaffer are consistently biased in favor of Hobbes. They come from a postmoderist perspective where you should question the foundations of all forms of Truth.

Neither our scientific knowledge, nor the constitution of our society, nor traditional statements about the connections between our society and our knowledge are taken for granted any longer. As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions. Hobbes was right.

– p. 344, the last paragraph of the book.

Shapin & Schaffer listen to Hobbes as part of a postmodern critique of science, but they don’t point the postmodern critique at Hobbes too. This is jarring because Hobbes is one of the least postmodern philosophers. He believed that all Truth should exist within formal systems. You should never question the king or his axioms. If Hobbes’s position had won, this sort of book would be illegal.

I read Leviathan and the Air-Pump with very different goals: How should science be constituted? How should science respond to its critics?

It was somewhat surprising to see how modern the debate sounded. Many questions about science today, including public access, replication, and publication bias, were addressed by Boyle in the 1660s. These are not new issues: they are old issues that we forgot about.^[13]Or maybe these norms were not imported when other fields tried to turned themselves into sciences.

When we are faced with non-scientists who want to undermine the scientific enterprise, we can exclude them from our scientific organizations. But we should respond to them, in public, using the norms of polite scientific discourse. Even though they are not being scientific, we should promote good discussion through our example.

Despite this book’s bias in favor of Hobbes, I couldn’t help but favor Boyle. His words and actions lead us to a better understanding of nature and a better society. History was right to rule in Boyle’s favor.

What a blessing to mankind, in himself and in his writings, was the ingenious, humble, and pious Mr. Boyle; what a common pest to society was the fallacious, proud, and impious Hobbes!

– inside front cover,^[14]I’m not entirely sure why Shapin & Schaffer included this quote here. Probably to show later historical bias against Hobbes. I think it should be read unironically. quoting THE BEAUTIES OF HISTORY^[15]The subtitle is: PICTURES OF VIRTUE AND VICE DRAWN FROM EXAMPLES OF MEN, EMINENT FOR THEIR VIRTUES OF INFAMOUS FOR THEIR VICES. The quotes continues: “Accordingly, we find the former bid adieu … Continue reading by W. Dodd (1796).