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“At various times in the past, technological optimists have predicted that textile workers would benefit from factory automation, that women would be emancipated by washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and that racial discrimination would vanish in the age of computers. If only.”
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“Every savage can dance,' declared Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. His antagonist's riposte now seems odd—'I doubt not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr Darcy.' 'Science' is among the most slippery words in the English language, because although it has been in use for hundreds of years, its meanings constantly shift and are impossible to pin down. That plural (meanings) was deliberate. In the early nineteenth century, when Austen casually mentioned the science of dancing, other writers were still using 'science' for the mediaeval subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Long afterwards, 'science' could still mean any scholarly discipline, because the modern distinction between the Arts and Sciences had not yet solidified. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin listed five subjects he thought worthwhile studying at university—the Sciences of Morals, History, Grammar, Music, and Painting—none of which feature on modern scientific syllabuses. All of them, Ruskin declared, were more intellectually demanding than chemistry, electricity, or geology.
However skilfully Mr Darcy performed his science of dancing, Austen could never have called him a scientist. That word, now so common, was not even invented until twenty years later, in 1833, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was holding its third annual meeting. As the conference delegates joked about needing an umbrella term to cover their diverse interests, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected 'philosopher', and William Whewell—one of Babbage's allies, a Cambridge mathematical astronomer—suggested 'scientist' instead.
The new word was very slow to catch on. Many Victorians insisted on keeping older expressions, such as 'man of science', or 'naturalist', or 'experimental philosopher'. Even men now seen as the nineteenth century's most eminent scientists—Darwin, Faraday, Lord Kelvin—refused to use the new term for describing themselves. Why, they demanded, should anyone bother to invent such an ugly word when perfectly adequate expressions already existed? Mistakenly, critics accused 'scientist' of being an American import, a trans-Atlantic neologism—one eminent geologist declared it was better to die 'than bestialize our tongue by such barbarisms'. The debate was still raging sixty years after Whewell first introduced the idea, and it was only in the early twentieth century that 'scientist' was fully accepted.”
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However skilfully Mr Darcy performed his science of dancing, Austen could never have called him a scientist. That word, now so common, was not even invented until twenty years later, in 1833, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was holding its third annual meeting. As the conference delegates joked about needing an umbrella term to cover their diverse interests, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected 'philosopher', and William Whewell—one of Babbage's allies, a Cambridge mathematical astronomer—suggested 'scientist' instead.
The new word was very slow to catch on. Many Victorians insisted on keeping older expressions, such as 'man of science', or 'naturalist', or 'experimental philosopher'. Even men now seen as the nineteenth century's most eminent scientists—Darwin, Faraday, Lord Kelvin—refused to use the new term for describing themselves. Why, they demanded, should anyone bother to invent such an ugly word when perfectly adequate expressions already existed? Mistakenly, critics accused 'scientist' of being an American import, a trans-Atlantic neologism—one eminent geologist declared it was better to die 'than bestialize our tongue by such barbarisms'. The debate was still raging sixty years after Whewell first introduced the idea, and it was only in the early twentieth century that 'scientist' was fully accepted.”
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“Quetelet had introduced a radically new way of thinking about human beings. As one of his admirers put it, 'Man is seen to be an enigma only as an individual, in mass, he is a mathematical problem.' Quetelet's successors took his ideas in many different directions. For one thing, his work was valuable politically because it could be interpreted in different ways. While conservatives insisted that little could be done to alter the current system, radicals accused governments of impeding the natural course of progress, and Utopians--such as Karl Marx--envisaged harmonious societies governed by nature's own laws guaranteeing improvement. Data collection projects proliferated, and statisticians searched for laws governing every aspect of life, ranging from the weather to the growth of civilization, from stock market fluctuations to the incidence of disease. Many scientists took their ideas from Quetelet rather than from abstract textbooks--but they added their own twist. Whereas Quetelet regarded individual deviations from the norm as errors to be eliminated, scientists set out to study how variations occur.”
― Science: A Four Thousand Year History
― Science: A Four Thousand Year History
