Physics 11 – Dalesandro
Assignment #4 – Robert Hooke
Instructions: Work in pairs. Read the attached article Was
Robert Hooke the Greatest Jerk in the History of
Science? by Alasdair Wilkins. Then answer the
questions below. Your answers for each
question should be at least one paragraph in
length.
Due: At end of class.
Value: 12 points.
Questions:
1) Briefly summarize the article. What is it about and what
are its main ideas?
2) Who do you believe was “at fault” in Hooke’s disputes
with Isaac Newton and Christian Huygens? Why?
3) Do you think Hooke deserves the title “the English
Leonardo”? Why or why not?
4) What do you think is the main reason Robert Hooke
hasn’t been treated well by history? Explain.
5) After reading this article, have your opinions on scientific
figures such as Newton, Huygens, and Hooke changed?
Why or why not?
6) What is your opinion of Wilkins’ article? Do you think it
was informative? Was it fair? Explain your answer.
Was Robert Hooke the greatest jerk in the history of science?
Adapted from the article by Alasdair Wilkins, io9.com
Robert Hooke discovered the cell and did pioneering work in optics, gravitation, paleontology, architecture, and more. Yet history dismissed and forgot him... all because he cheesed off Isaac Newton and other contemporary scientists.
Hooke, one of the seventeenth century’s greatest geniuses (he has been called “the English Leonardo da Vinci”), almost disappeared from history entirely after his death in 1703, as even the only known painting of him was unceremoniously destroyed. It took over two centuries for his reputation to recover and his accomplishments to be properly celebrated. He's a cautionary tale for just how dangerous it can be to make too many enemies.
Hooke's Beginnings
Born in 1635 on the Isle of Wight off England's southern coast, Robert Hooke was originally destined for the priesthood. But his tremendous academic aptitude took him to an apprenticeship in London, and then onto the prestigious Westminster School, and then finally onto Oxford. This was the 1650s, and England was under the dictatorial rule of Oliver Cromwell, who took a dim view of the scientific method. At Oxford, Hooke's mechanical brilliance and noted eye for observation made him the perfect choice to perform experiments on behalf of the newly formed Royal Society. For forty years, Hooke served as Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society, which made him responsible both for designing his own empirical investigations and testing the theories being developed by others.
Hooke's Science
Hooke wasn't simply important to science in the 17th century — is some ways he was science in the 17th century. It was he who coined the term "cell" to describe the individual units making up larger organisms, a name he took from the living quarters of monks. His 1665 book Micrographia was probably the first science best-seller in history, sparking huge public interest in the new technology of the microscope. But Micrographia, like Hooke's work in general, was about far more than microscopes. He did extensive work in astronomy, both in describing celestial phenomena and calculating the distances of far distant objects. He came up with a theory that light was in fact a wave, an idea that after much evolution would eventually form part of 20th century particle physics and quantum theory. His work on elasticity led not only to his very own Law, which deals with the relationship between the force and expansion of a spring, but also to the development of a balance spring that made the first truly reliable timepieces and watches possible.
Many of his ideas were way ahead of their time. His microscopic analysis of petrified wood led him to conclude that these and other fossils were, in fact, the remains of once living things. His investigations led him to the thought that these didn't just represent ancient examples of living species — some might well be remains of species that no longer existed. Hooke thought that extinction of species might be possible if a sufficiently serious geological disaster happened. This idea had no contemporary support, and people like Isaac Newton famously scoffed at it.
Hooke's Enemies
Hooke had made his first major enemy – but not his last. His work with elasticity offered another chance to enrage. It's thought that Hooke made his big theoretical breakthroughs on elasticity around 1660, and at some point after that demonstrated how a spring could be used in the manufacture of watches that kept time with unprecedented accuracy. But at nearly the exact same time, Dutch scientist Christian Huygens (a friend of Newton’s) came up with nearly the exact same invention. Worse, both men wanted to be given credit for their new idea. The debate lasted for years, as both Hooke and Huygens were bitterly committed to proving they were right. The two men never spoke a civil word to one another again.
Hooke & Newton
It's an old cliche that history is written by the winners, and there was perhaps no greater winner in the entire history of science than Sir Isaac Newton. His work on gravitation and calculus made him a legend in his own day, and a demigod after, and in the ensuing 400 years only Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking have really rivaled him in the popular imagination. You can probably guess how he got on with Robert Hooke (that’s right – badly).
It's generally agreed that the problem began with gravity. It's tempting to think of the laws of gravity springing from Newton's head fully formed, that Newtonian mechanics were truly Newton's and Newton's alone. But scientists had already been slowly moving for years towards gravity from their old notions of "ether" as the explanation for the attraction of different celestial bodies before Newton's Principia was published in 1686.
Robert Hooke was a particularly important researcher in this area. By the 1670s, he had espoused his belief that the Sun and the planets were attracted to each other, and this attraction grew as they got nearer to each other. More than any other scientist before Newton, Hooke seems to have argued for gravity as a universal force, but he had only basic ideas, not full theories. It was Newton who came up with the latter.
The War Begins
Hooke's temper let him down here. For all his talents, Hooke wasn't really equipped to discuss disputes rationally. Hooke was convinced that Newton would not have come up with his theories without Hooke's work. He became enraged, and accused both Newton and Huygens of stealing his ideas. It was an assertion Newton bitterly disputed — and one that sealed Hooke's fate.
Newton was willing to acknowledge that Hooke was one of several forerunners in his work on gravitation, but that was about as far as he was willing to go. As far as he was concerned, Hooke was at best a minor researcher compared to his own work. As Newton explained in a letter to the astronomer Edmond Halley, Hooke’s writings on gravity contained “no helpful insights”. Instead, Hooke’s ideas made it clear to Newton “how little Hooke really knew”.
By 1676, relations between the two scientists had deteriorated to the point where the pair were arguing over proper credit for work in gravitation, momentum, optics, and more. Hooke was commonly described as very short, and Newton refered to him as “a hunchback” who had “no influence” on science.
Erased From History
To pick a fight with Isaac Newton was a bad idea. Even worse was the timing of Robert Hooke’s death: he passed away well before Newton did. In 1703, the year of Hooke's death, Newton became the President of the Royal Society.
Writing just two years after Hooke's death, Richard Waller (a historian and friend of Newton’s) declared Hooke a “despicable man, a miserable bastard who jealously guarded ideas he had probably stolen anyway”. As Newton emerged as a demigod in the history of physics, Hooke became a boogeyman, a vain villain determined to steal credit for himself.
These were obviously exaggerations, but what gave them power was the fact that there was some truth to them. While Hooke was probably right in his credit dispute with Christan Huygens, it's harder to justify his arguments against Newton, and his reputation for quarreling over scientific credit was well-deserved.
It wouldn't be until the 20th century, when Hooke's personal diary surfaced and historians of science became less committed to deifying Newton that Hooke and his accomplishments were rescued from the dustbin of history. The picture that emerges is a complicated one. While he was unquestionably a brilliant scientist, Hooke could be his own worst enemy when it came to securing his own place in history. Part of that was his proclivity for picking fights with other scientists, but another big part of it was precisely how he approached science.
The Leonardo Problem
In his excellent 2005 biography of Hooke, historian of science Allan Chapman dubbed Hooke England's Leonardo. And while Hookes influence on contemporary science far outstripped Leonardo's, it's still a fitting epitaph to bestow — more so than any other figure of the Royal Society and England's nascent scientific revolution, Hooke embodied the Renaissance man ideal we associate with Leonardo da Vinci. Robert Boyle was the father of modern chemistry, Christopher Wren revolutionized architecture, Isaac Newton was the physicist — but Hooke, he did it all. And that might actually be part of why it was so easy to erase his legacy from history.
Let's think about Leonardo for a moment. We now know him as the polymath to end all polymaths, a man who excelled in engineering, anatomy, cartography, botany, geology, music, and a dozen more subjects. And yet little of this was known in his lifetime — Leonardo kept most of his scientific work to himself — and even less of it was properly appreciated, considering his designs for things like helicopters and tanks were impossibly ahead of their time. His design for an "aerial screw" was brilliant, yes, but it was a dead end that didn't influence the later development of actual helicopters.
What won Leonardo his immortality was his paintings, which made him famous in his lifetime and secured his place as one of the Renaissance's greatest artists. It was only in subsequent centuries that the full extent of his genius became known, and his reputation expanded to that of the ultimate Renaissance man. Without those paintings as the centerpiece, it's possible that Leonardo would be less an icon than a footnote, that forgotten, eccentric genius who came up with helicopters and plate tectonics but didn't really have much impact.
Robert Hooke really was England's Leonardo — except without the painting. Hooke was a genius who did extensive work in dozens of different scientific fields, but that packed schedule arguably worked against him. He came up with lots of ideas, but he kept moving from one breakthrough from another, seldom slowing down enough to work them up into full-fledged theories. This left the door open for other scientists — often working entirely independently — to focus on a particular area and deliver a magnum opus that could secure their place in history. The breadth of Hooke's work was truly staggering, but it perhaps lacked the depth in any single area that would have made his reputation unassailable.
That's probably why, even though Hooke is no longer science's greatest jerk, he still hasn't really received the renown that all his contributions deserve. In that sense, he's not just a reminder of the dangers of making enemies of living legends. He's also an example of why history doesn't remember people simply based on merit — it also helps to provide a juicy, well, hook, a singular achievement everyone can remember. On second thought, maybe the title of "science's greatest jerk" wasn't such a bad thing after all.