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THE INVENTION of ATOMIST ICONOGRAPHY 1. Introductory THE INVENTION OF ATOMIST ICONOGRAPHY Christoph Lüthy Center for Medieval and Renaissance Natural Philosophy University of Nijmegen1 1. Introductory Puzzlement For centuries now, particles of matter have invariably been depicted as globules. These glob- ules, representing very different entities of distant orders of magnitudes, have in turn be used as pictorial building blocks for a host of more complex structures such as atomic nuclei, mole- cules, crystals, gases, material surfaces, electrical currents or the double helixes of DNA. May- be it is because of the unsurpassable simplicity of the spherical form that the ubiquity of this type of representation appears to us so deceitfully self-explanatory. But in truth, the spherical shape of these various units of matter deserves nothing if not raised eyebrows. Fig. 1a: Giordano Bruno: De triplici minimo et mensura, Frankfurt, 1591. 1 Research for this contribution was made possible by a fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschafts- geschichte (Berlin) and by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), grant 200-22-295. This article is based on a 1997 lecture. Christoph Lüthy Fig. 1b: Robert Hooke, Micrographia, London, 1665. Fig. 1c: Christian Huygens: Traité de la lumière, Leyden, 1690. Fig. 1d: William Wollaston: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1813. Fig. 1: How many theories can be illustrated by a single image? How is it to be explained that the same type of illustrations should have survived unperturbed the most profound conceptual changes in matter theory? One needn’t agree with the Kuhnian notion that revolutionary breaks dissect the conceptual evolution of science into incommensu- rable segments to feel that there is something puzzling about pictures that are capable of illus- 2 THE INVENTION OF ATOMIST ICONOGRAPHY trating diverging “world views” over a four-hundred year period.2 For the matter theories illustrated by the nearly identical images of fig. 1 have almost nothing in common. But what implications does this observation have for the relation between theory and illustration?3 It might be suggested that such globular drawings are theory-independent and ahistorical for some a priori characteristics which free them from all specific referentiality. But a quick look at twentieth-century debates over the nature of such imagery will quickly persuade us that this way out is barred and that there is nothing ahistorical, self-explanatory, or otherwise a priori about them. While Niels Bohr’s atom model of 1913 was the expression of the belief in an em- pirically and mathematically verifiable correspondence between the solar system and the atom- ic nucleus with its surrounding spherical electrons,4 the protagonists of the new quantum physics have urged, ever since 1924/5, that all Anschaulichkeit had been lost and that drawings of spatio-temporally bounded, material corpuscles were not only inadequate, but truly mislead- ing.5 And yet, again, the old globular imagery has not only managed to survive its official ref- utations, but it has found its most paradoxical demonstration in the "pictures" that have, over the past few years, been produced by tunnel, field ion, and atomic force microscopes.6 The re- lation between the depicted spherical particle, on the one hand, and the various theories it hap- pens to illustrate, on the other, is thus seen to fluctuate so wildly that we must abandon all hopes of finding a single semiotic theory to define it. In fact, over the course of history, we find that the status of the illustrated globule oscillated between what, in the language of theory, might variously be described as a “symbol,” “sign,” “model,” “abstraction,” “reproduction,” or a “map.” Faced with the globule's stubborn unwillingness to disappear from physics, one might also be tempted to view it as the product of some necessary mental operation, corresponding, for ex- ample, to the schematic operations of Kant's transzendentale Einbildungskraft.7 But this hy- pothesis is also easily refuted. For as will be shown in the following, the globular atom is an invention of the late sixteenth century. Neither did it exist before, nor did its invention seem very useful at first. Instead, the globular particle of matter is a strange outgrowth of Renaissance speculation which required decades of reinterpretion before it could seem useful here and there as a possible tool for the explanation of certain natural phenomena. 2 Cf. in particular Kuhn (1962) ch. 10: “Revolutions as Changes of World View.” 3 Emerton (1984), whose work has left strong traces in the present article, is one of the few scholars to have drawn attention the visual aspect of the corpuscularian revolution of natural philosophy. 4 On the development of Bohr’s views on the representability of physical theory, cf. Chevalley (1973); on the relation between theory and imagery in 20th-century physics, cf. Falkenburg (1995) and Galison (1997). 5 Cf. Miller (1984), ch. 4. 6 On the “manufacturing” of microscopical images, cf. Hacking (1983) ch. 11, and Hacking (1985). According to Hacking (personal communication), the paradoxical side of these new types of microscopic “pictures” of atoms has not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve. 7 For a Kantian (but nonetheless historically accurate) understanding of atomism, cf. Lasswitz (1890). 3 Christoph Lüthy The many conceptual discontinuities that separate today’s physics from the natural philosophy of the late sixteenth century render the survival of a stable atomist iconography a perplexing puzzle indeed. Although in this essay, I limit myself to the task of providing a first and prelim- inary sketch of how the globular view of matter was first developed and of how it managed to integrate itself into the emerging seventeenth-century view of nature, I hope that the results of this investigation will also be able to contribute to the larger investigation of the oscillating re- lations between theories and images of matter. 2. Aristotle’s Anti-Atomism While it is in most cases idiotic to ask why a certain phenomenon did not exist before the time when it first occurred, this question happens to be meaningful in our case. For there existed spe- cific factors inhibiting explicitly the production of atomist images, factors that are mainly to be sought in Aristotle’s natural philosophy. In his critique of the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, Aristotle had argued that a world made up only of particles and void would be a mere “heap” and that such a “heap” could not explain the cohesion of natural bodies, let alone life and organic development. Apart from its other deficiencies, the atomists’ model was also flawed, in Aristotle’s eyes, by its sense-sceptical implications. For in an atomist cosmos, mate- rial substances merely appeared to be continuous bodies, while in truth they were made up of discontinuous particles of different types and of gaps between them. To a keen-eyed fellow such as the mythological Lynceus, an alloy such as bronze would, for example, not appear as a homogeneous, continuous substance, but as a mere juxtaposition of copper and tin particles. In other words, natural bodies would only be mixed according to the standard of sense-perception, and the same thing would be a mixture to a man, who has not sharp sight, whereas to the eyes of Lynceus it would not be mixed.8 Leucippus and Democritus had in fact assumed that an invisibly small micro-world underlay the macro-world of sense experience, but such a fragmentation of reality was anathema to Aristotle. Natural bodies, he insisted, not only appeared continuous and homogeneous, but, thanks to the agency of specific substantial forms, did indeed possess these qualities.9 And al- though these Aristotelian "forms" (morf}; morphé; or eÂdow, eidos) sound very "morphologi- 8 Aristotle (1982) 328a13ff. On Lynceus as a proto-microscopist, cf. Lüthy (1996). 9 On the different visual implications of an atomist and an Aristotelian explanation of rarefaction, cf. Des Chene (1996) 107. 4 THE INVENTION OF ATOMIST ICONOGRAPHY cal," "eidetic" and hence picturable, they are not. In fact, they denote mainly (teleo-)logical principles, and they must strictly be distinguished from figura (sx êma, schema), a term of mar- ginal importance in Aristotle’s natural philosophy.10 In contrast to most of his predecessors, Aristotle was no visual thinker, although one might have expected something different from such an outspoken sense realist. The rejection of material substructures was only a minor aspect of his conceptual, anti-visual natural philosophy, which did not think of the world geometricè even where its argument proceeded more geometrico. The strikingly pictureless nature of nat- ural philosophy during Europe's scholastic centuries is the direct result of this style of reason- ing.11 At the most basic level of Aristotelian matter theory, we encounter, under the name of "prime matter," a purely logical principle denoting the substratum underlying the specific forms of el- ements and other substances. This materia prima cannot subsist by itself and is neither imagin- able nor indeed depictable. At the next higher level, we encounter the four elements which, however, possess none of the geometric qualities ascribed to them by the atomists or by Plato. Though they can be sensually experienced, they are not easily represented with ink on paper. Apart from theory-independent allegorical and semiotic means ("water" being represented by a lady pouring water out of a jar or by a wavy line indicating an ocean surface), the Aristotelian tradition has engendered only two types of theory-related graphic conventions. The first of these follows De generatione et corruptione, where the elements are defined in terms of the pri- mary qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry in such a way that elements and qualities are found to overlap as in fig.
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