A BRIEF HISTORY OF SCIENCE: As Seen through the Development of Scientific Instruments.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SCIENCE: As Seen through the Development of Scientific Instruments.

By Thomas Crump. Carroll & Graf. 425 pp. $28

This one-volume history of science begins with a preface explaining that it’s no longer feasible to write a history of science in one volume. The subject has grown too vast and varied. Scientists can barely stay abreast of their own disciplines, and academic historians prefer to dig narrow and deep.

As a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, Crump can afford to indulge his fondness for breadth and compendiousness, but by his own admission this book can’t live up to its title. He discusses only what he calls the hard, exact sciences (is the reader to infer a smidgen of disdain for the soft, squishy ones?), and restricts the subject further by putting experimental discoveries and practical inventions at center stage, with the role of theory reduced to an occasional voice from the wings.

The author’s ambition, however, is laudable. He begins with some harsh words against Aristotle, whom he calls a "reason-freak" for coupling ineluctable logic with self-evident (to him) principles, such as the notion that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. The dogmatization of such erroneous ideas made true science impossible. Only when Francis Bacon and others began to emphasize empirical facts and experimental tests could modern science begin.

Historians have conventionally identified Copernicus as a seminal early figure for his intellectual leap of putting the Sun at the center of our planetary system. But as Crump explains, ingrained philosophical prejudice led Copernicus to stick with perfectly circular orbits, which caused him no end of difficulty. It was Johannes Kepler, building on the massive compilation of observations by Tycho Brahe, who proved that the planets follow elliptical orbits. This apparently small geometrical innovation was an epochal development: It placed mathematical analysis of hard-won data above abstract reason in the forming of scientific theories.

Crump makes a worthy effort to explain the importance of devising reliable, standardized ways to measure things—distances, masses, times, electric currents, and so on. Such mundane matters are usually relegated to footnotes, but Crump provides anecdotes that illustrate how much ingenuity was required to solve these forgotten problems. Unfortunately, highlights such as these are buried in a generally rambling text in which the author is at pains to mention every experiment and invention he can think of and leave the reader to figure out their importance. As much as Crump wants to concentrate on observations and experiments, it takes theory to cohere apparently contradictory or inconsistent empirical findings into a comprehensible whole. His reluctance to provide clear summations of the bits and pieces of evidence is tantamount to writing a murder mystery and leaving out the final chapter.

—David Lindley