Capturing Digital Lives the Early 1660S, As a Celebrated Public Figure and Emblem of the Early Royal Society
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Vol 461|29 October 2009 AUTUMN BOOKS ILLUSTRATIONS BY JONATHAN BURTON JONATHAN BY ILLUSTRATIONS Reassessing the father of chemistry Robert Boyle’s character is often obscured by the shadow of Isaac Newton, but a masterful biography reveals him as larger than life, explains Peter Anstey. Boyle: Between God and Science with his contemporaries Robert Hooke and with which he has combed the vast quantity of by Michael Hunter Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton’s shadow published and unpublished materials — includ- Yale University Press: 2009. 400 pp. has obscured our view of Boyle. But previous ing portraits, printed images and medallions £25, $55 biographers must share the blame for Boyle’s — relating to Boyle’s life. Hunter masterfully faded image, not least the first, Thomas interweaves the narrative of Boyle’s intellectual Birch. Writing in the 1740s with his collabo- development and scientific achievements with In the latter half of the seventeenth century, rator Henry Miles, Birch removed letters and a measured assessment of Boyle’s diffident, Robert Boyle (1627–91) was the leading whole unpublished works from Boyle’s papers even convoluted, personality. natural philosopher in Britain. Yet although in order to perpetuate the anodyne image that The tale begins with Boyle’s domineering historians have been piecing together a more- suited the polite tastes of the day. and ambitious father, Richard, the Earl of Cork, detailed profile of him in the past three dec- Nevertheless, there is no paucity of material and moves through his infancy, childhood and ades, his popular image extends little beyond with which a biographer can work. Indeed, Eton school years. Then follows his Grand Tour the law that bears his name and his most the most impressive feature of biographer of Europe, on which Boyle had seminal experi- famous publication, The Sceptical Chymist. As Michael Hunter’s Boyle is the meticulous care ences that were to shape his earnest Christian NEW IN PAPERBACK The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science Conflict Between Faith and Reason by Richard Holmes (Harper Press, £9.99) by Russell Shorto ( Vintage Books USA) This award-winning book explores links between science Russell Shorto interweaves the fate of philosopher and Romanticism around the start of the 1800s. “To René Descartes’ bones with a narrative of guide readers through the science and culture of this Cartesian philosophy and beliefs, also exploring period, Holmes masterfully dips in and out of the life of “the history of the uncomfortable relationship Joseph Banks,” wrote David Bodanis in his review of the between Catholicism and Cartesianism”, wrote hardback edition (Nature 457, 31–32; 2009). Lisa Jardine (Nature 455, 863–864; 2008). 1205 © 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved OPINION AUTUMN BOOKS NATURE|Vol 461|29 October 2009 faith and his early intellectual trajectory, overt religiosity, his reputation for professional by leaving the reader latitude to make up their and from which he emerged as a precocious integrity and his understated philanthropy. But own mind about what made Boyle tick. adolescent. it is the inner Boyle whom Hunter is most con- This first comprehensive work on the life of Perhaps surprisingly, Boyle’s first exploits as cerned to explore: Boyle the doubter, the vac- Boyle is a piece of stunning scholarship, a com- a writer were directed to moral and devotional illator, the stuttering and conscience-stricken mand performance by a gifted historian. It is topics. But at the age of 22 he was “transported man revealed in private notes written near the also a great read. ■ and bewitch’d” by experimental chemistry and end of his life. Hunter displays fascination and Peter Anstey teaches early modern philosophy at never looked back. So began a life dedicated to impartiality, even wavering respect, but in the the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. the study of nature: a life that was funded by the final analysis it is not clear that he really likes He is the author of The Philosophy of Robert Boyle. substantial means he inherited from his father, Boyle. However, the biographer shows maturity e-mail: [email protected] and that is epitomized in the title of his popular later work The Christian Virtuoso. The most compelling chapters in Hunter’s narrative cover Boyle’s time in Oxford from the winter of 1655–56 and his emergence, in Capturing digital lives the early 1660s, as a celebrated public figure and emblem of the early Royal Society. These Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution agree. Where they differ is in what they think years were his most productive, both in terms Will Change Everything will happen next. Pioneering computer scien- of experimental results and written output: by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell tist Gordon Bell and his Microsoft colleague from 1660 to 1666, he published a dozen Dutton: 2009. 304 pp. $26.95 Jim Gemmell take a libertarian view in Total books at an average of 140,000 words per Recall. Digital media will free us to dip back year. Other works took shape in this period, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the into the past at will, they argue. Equipped with emerging in later decades; and still others have Digital Age information that our brains may have lost, only recently been unearthed and published in by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger we will act more effectively as individuals in the definitive 14-volume The Works of Robert Princeton University Press: 2009. every part of our lives. In Delete, by contrast, Boyle (Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2000), of 256 pp. $24.95 information-policy expert Viktor Mayer- which Hunter is an editor. Schönberger believes people and technologies In his publications, Boyle introduced a are inextricably woven into the fabric of insti- new and distinctive natural philosophy called We are entering an era of unprecedented tutions. Records of our personal data could corpuscularianism. He also stressed the inter- digital power. Thanks to the diminishing cost easily make us vulnerable to the predations of play of theory and experiment in the construc- of digital storage and the increasing ubiquity governments and corporations, he warns. tion of natural histories, an approach that was of digital devices, the Bell, the first-person narrator to dominate British science for four decades. day is coming when we of Total Recall, acknowledges the However, most significant was the series of will be able to record possibility that malefactors might innovative experiments Boyle performed with almost every interaction abuse our information, but this is a his air-pump, J-tube and long pipette. Through we have. Digital micro- long way from his primary concern. the clever manipulation of air and mercury and phones will capture our His book is largely a chronicle of with careful measurement, he established that brief encounters with the delight he has experienced in the pressure of the air is inversely proportional strangers; cameras spending the past decade gathering to its volume. Furthermore, he solved the long- will snap automatically data about himself, a process he calls standing problem in animal physiology as to as we enter new rooms “lifelogging”. At the beginning, this the cause of air entering the lungs in respiration: or browse the web. And involved simply scanning documents there is a differential in air pressure between the somewhere on a remote and photographs onto a hard drive. expanded lungs and the atmosphere. server farm, the images and Then he began to look for ways Yet there is more to Boyle than the careful sounds of our lives will pile to capture his experiences as experimenter. Hunter shows how in the eyes up in a massive database. they happened. In 2001, this of his contemporaries, from the royal court On this at least, the authors of two resulted in the birth of the to savants abroad, Boyle was a larger-than- books about the social effects of digital MyLifeBits project at Micro- life character. This stemmed in part from his data storage, Total Recall and Delete, soft Research. Bell’s team, Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen History of the Atom Bomb, 1939–49 Hawking to Make the World Safe for by Jim Baggot (Icon Books, £9.99) Quantum Mechanics Vividly written and impressively researched, Atomic by Leonard Susskind (Little, Brown, £12.99) covers the efforts of scientists and spies in the United Leonard Susskind charts his long conflict with States, Britain, the USSR and Nazi Germany to develop Stephen Hawking over the fate of information in a their own atomic weapon. Drawing on material including black hole. Paul Davies’s review noted it “skilfully declassified British secret-service transcripts and explains the subtleties of the physics that underlie documents from Soviet archives, this is a thorough but the issue, and includes anecdotes to enliven the engaging account of the race to build the atomic bomb. technical details.” (Nature 454, 579–580; 2008.) 1206 © 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved NATURE|Vol 461|29 October 2009 AUTUMN BOOKS OPINION which includes software designer is a construction, built from both and co-author Jim Gemmell, personal and social resources. has developed a suite of dig- From this perspective, Mayer- ital tools for recording, storing Schönberger raises questions about and searching everything from the power of technology and how old family photographs to kerbside it affects our interpretation of time chats. — a topic that Bell largely ignores. He Today, Bell wears a ‘SenseCam’ dramatically undermines Bell’s case that automatically takes pictures for the value of being able to behold every time a sensor on the device all the times of our lives at once.