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Ideas & Inventions / Giant leaps

10 A micro-revolution in

our understanding

The discovery of the very small

Europe, 17th century
Chosen by Professor Jim Bennett, former director
of the Museum of the History of Science

It is such a fundamental, taken-for- its principal exponents was Robert
Gresham College, the original meeting
place of the experimental society in 1660 granted notion of modern science Hooke, author of Micrographia
that we explain the properties of (1665). He articulated very clearly that
things by going beneath the superfi- the micro-world is a bit like a clock
9 Launching the cial appearance to the micro-world. with lots of springs and wheels. Just
like we can open up a clock, Hooke
But like anything we take for granted,
it was made in history. said we could open up the actual
scientific age the earliest decades of the 17th world to see how it works, and the
The microscope was known from
tool for doing so was going to be
century. At first it was just a toy that increasingly powerful microscopes.
The founding of you could go and buy at a fair. It A lot more had to happen before we
didn’t tell you anything about the got to where we are now in our beliefs
natural world because although you about explaining the macro with the
could look at little things, nobody micro, but I think it all started in the
the Royal Society
who was interested in explaining the 17th century.
England, 1660
world was yet saying that everything
Chosen by Dr Patricia Fara, depended on them. Still, the micro-
scope was the technology that made
University of Cambridge people believe there was a route to
the very small. It was no longer just a Jim Bennett GETTY/WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON
When King Charles II was restored to power, matter of speculation. You could is co-author of
a group of men who had been working in engage with it empirically. London’s Leonardo: The
Oxford came back to London and decided A new mode of explanation that Life and Work of Robert
to set up a society for carrying out experi- assumed an underlying micro-reality Hooke (OUP, 2003)
mental research. It was the first national began later in the century and one of
scientific society to be created anywhere
in Europe. Although it was rather like a A very small flea looks rather large in
gentlemen’s club, it did allow people to Robert Hooke’s Micrographia
come together specifically to carry out
experiments, do research, disseminate new
theories and collect data. Within a few years
there was a similar society in Paris and soon
they started proliferating all over Europe.
Organisations dedicated to scientific
research are very important and I think
historians should write more about how
science is enabled, not just the great
achievements. Too much history of
science has been about heroes such as
Newton and Darwin, and not enough
about institutions. For me, the big
overriding question is how science has
become so integral to today’s society: I
believe the Royal Society was the
institutional foundation that made
modern science possible.

Patricia Fara is the author
of Science: A Four Thousand
Year History (OUP, 2009)

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