From Palladium Magazine, October 10:
In November of 1660, at Gresham College in London, an invisible college of learned men held their first meeting after 20 years of informal collaboration. They chose their coat of arms: the royal crown’s three lions of England set against a white backdrop. Their motto: “Nullius in verba,” or “take no one’s word for it.” Three years later, they received a charter from King Charles II and became what was and remains the world’s preeminent scientific institution: the Royal Society.
Three and a half centuries later, in July of 2021, even respected publications began to grow weary of a different, now constant refrain: “Trust the science.” It was a mantra everyone was supposed to accept, repeated again and again, ad nauseum.
This new motto was the latest culmination of a series of transformations science has undergone since the founding of the Royal Society, reflecting the changing nature of science on one hand, and its expanding social role on the other.
The present world’s preeminent system of thought now takes science as a central pillar and wields its authority to great consequence. But the story of how that came to be is, as one might expect, only barely understood.
Science Before Scientists
The investigation of the natural world stretches back to antiquity and earlier. Some philosophers inquired into number and shape, some into the heavens, some into the nature and disposition of things here on Earth. The latter practice came to be known as natural philosophy.The history of natural philosophy is complex and richer than many would imagine. It includes records of observations by historians like Plutarch and Pliny the Elder, theories of natural phenomena by philosophers like Thales, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, and descriptions of instruments and experiments by artificers like Peter Peregrinus. It also includes little-known feats like the latter’s discovery of the basic properties of magnetism in the 13th century A.D. and surprises such as the possible invention of the telescope in the writings of Roger Bacon hundreds of years before Galileo.
Importantly, the investigation of nature in the early history of natural philosophy was largely an individual endeavor. Lone investigators created theories, built instruments, conducted experiments, and wrote accounts of different aspects of nature. There could then be decades or even centuries before the next major recorded advance.
While the idea of the Scientific Revolution has been critiqued in a number of quarters, it is clear something very important happened in the 16th and 17th centuries. Natural philosophers made important discoveries in astronomy, mechanics, electricity, magnetism, optics, chemistry, anatomy, and mathematics. Following the invention of the printing press, scholars exchanged written works and their ideas at an unparalleled pace, laying the foundations for new epistemologies and their promulgation....
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