The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

I.

On its surface The Invention of Science defends an old-fashioned thesis: that there was a Scientific Revolution, that it was a real and transformative event, and that it happened roughly between Tycho Brahe's observation of a new star in 1572 and the publication of Newton's Opticks in 1704. You may think: great, we now have a book showing that water is wet. But apparently the Scientific Revolution has been under sustained attack for decades. Not by astrologers, alchemists, or people who miss Aristotle, but by historians of science. Wootton is writing against a now-dominant academic tradition built on decades of scholars arguing that the Scientific Revolution wasn't a single event, wasn't about science, and wasn't, in any case, much of a revolution.

The book is about three intertwined themes. The first is a history of the Scientific Revolution as it actually happened: a great deal did change between 1572 and 1704, and Wootton documents it with precision. The main protagonists are Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo, Boyle, and Newton, but Wootton’s cast is much larger: hundreds of other characters pass through these pages, and Wootton brings the intellectual world of the period back to life. This is the most enjoyable part of the book, where Wootton's erudition is on full display and the reader is taken on a tour through a lost mental universe.

The second theme makes the case that it makes sense to call any of this a revolution at all. Who introduced the term, and is it a meaningful characterization? Should we instead speak of scientific revolutions, plural — or drop the label altogether? Wootton argues that the singular noun is the right one, and the bulk of the book is dedicated to detailing why. His deeper claim is that the change was enabled by new conceptual vocabulary and that the emergence of this vocabulary can itself be documented with precision. Science had to be invented not just institutionally or technically, but also linguistically. A world capable of modern science needed to articulate new things: discovery, fact, evidence, experiment, hypothesis, theory, laws of nature, progress.

The third theme turns to a debate over how academic historiography came to drop something as intuitive as the proposition that there was a Scientific Revolution. This is at heart an argument among historians and social scientists, and one Wootton appears genuinely angry about. The postmodern and sociological critique of the Scientific Revolution, in his view, rests on confusions about what facts are, what discoveries are, and what it means for something to be socially constructed.

II.

The first two themes are deeply intertwined: Wootton's history of the Scientific Revolution serves throughout as the demonstration that there was a Scientific Revolution to have a history of. To see what is at stake, let us go back to a typical well-educated European in 1600 — in this case an Englishman, though it scarcely matters, since the educated of Europe share the same culture at this time.

“He believes in witchcraft…He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at sea…He believes Circe really did turn Odysseus’s crew into pigs. He believes mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw. He believes in contemporary magicians…He believes that a murdered body will bleed in the presence of the murderer. He believes that there is an ointment which, if rubbed on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound. He believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind…He believes the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil. He believes that dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours – he has heard mention of Copernicus, but he does not imagine that he intended his sun-centred model of the cosmos to be taken literally. He believes in astrology… He believes that Aristotle is the greatest philosopher who has ever lived, and that Pliny (first century CE), Galen and Ptolemy (both second century CE) are the best authorities on natural history, medicine and astronomy… He owns a couple of dozen books.”

And here he is again in 1733, the year Voltaire published Letters concerning the English Nation:

“[He] has looked through a telescope and a microscope; he owns a pendulum clock and a stick barometer – and he knows there is a vacuum at the end of the tube. He does not know anyone… who believes in witches, werewolves, magic, alchemy or astrology; he thinks the Odyssey is fiction, not fact. He is confident that the unicorn is a mythical beast. He does not believe that the shape or colour of a plant has any significance for an understanding of its medical use. He believes that no creature large enough to be seen by the naked eye is generated spontaneously – not even a fly. He does not believe… that murdered bodies bleed in the presence of the murderer… he believes that the Earth goes round the sun. He knows that the rainbow is produced by refracted light and that comets have no significance for our lives on earth. He believes the future cannot be predicted. He knows that the heart is a pump. He has seen a steam engine at work. He believes that science is going to transform the world and that the moderns have outstripped the ancients in every possible respect…He owns a couple of hundred – perhaps even a couple of thousand – books.”

The Invention of Science is about what happened in between. It is both dense and erudite. Luckily, Wootton is also funny. He keeps dropping in asides that have no bearing on the argument and that I am very glad he didn't cut. Some time before 1610, John Donne drew up a satirical list of imaginary scholarly books — one of which was On the Nothingness of a Fart by Girolamo Cardano (a real and very famous scholar at the time). Around 1605, Donne probably also met Galileo in Venice — and was only in Venice in the first place because the English ambassador was busy trying to spring a Scotsman from prison for the capital crime of sleeping with a nun. None of this matters. It does make a long book feel short.

III.

So, what happened during the Scientific Revolution? First, the easy part. Tycho's Nova: a new star appeared where Aristotelian cosmology said no new star could appear. Galileo's telescope: moons around Jupiter, mountains on the moon, phases of Venus — none of which known to the ancients. Hooke's microscope: a whole hidden world of structure inside structure. Boyle's air pump. Pascal's barometer. Harvey on the circulation of blood. The list goes on for chapters. Wootton's point is that these discoveries actually happened and were enormous. We can argue about how to interpret them, but we cannot argue them out of existence.

Some tried. The most famous refusenik is Cesare Cremonini, the principal philosopher at Padua, who declined to look through Galileo's telescope at all. The popular version is that Cremonini was a bigot. The more interesting version, which Wootton maintains, is that he had a coherent Aristotelian reason. If Galileo's mountains on the moon were real, the moon would be a terrestrial body, and terrestrial bodies would fall to earth: the moon was not falling, therefore the telescope must be lying. Galileo wrote to Kepler complaining that the man had shut his eyes with the obstinacy of an asp.

Now let us turn to Wootton's claim that a new language was necessary for this revolution to take place — that without certain words, the practice we call science could not have come into being. The first crucial word is discovery. It enters European languages in the late fifteenth century, with Columbus's landfall in the Caribbean in 1492. Before then, Wootton argues, Europeans had no word for discovery and no concept of discovery in our sense. You could invent something in the older sense — invenire, "come upon" — but you could not discover it, because the conceptual scaffolding wasn't there. The ancients had described the world; you read the ancients; if your experience contradicted them, the problem lay with you. What Columbus and his successors made unavoidable was the realization that Aristotle, Pliny, and Ptolemy had simply not known about an entire continent: their map was not partial, it was missing pieces. The pieces needed a name for what they were — discoveries — and got one.

The new vocabulary spread fast. By the 1550s, the same word had been borrowed by Italian anatomists, who were now having priority fights over who had "discovered" which parts of the human body. A famous case is the row between Gabriele Falloppio and his Paduan rival Realdo Colombo over which of them had discovered the clitoris — a structure that, as Wootton drily notes, was probably not in any meaningful sense missing before 1550. Galenic anatomy had held for fifteen hundred years that male and female bodies were the same plan folded differently, each part with a counterpart. The clitoris had none, and so fit no theory. To "discover" it meant naming what Galen had no way to absorb. The concept of discovery had become robust enough to make even this a coherent claim, attached to reputation and worth fighting over.

Once discovery is available as a concept, the rest of the modern epistemic vocabulary follows. Fact, in our sense — an established piece of empirical reality — dates to roughly the same period; earlier, you had the older Latin factum, meaning a deed or thing done, with no particular epistemic standing. We live in a culture so saturated with facts — real, alleged, fabricated — that it is hard to imagine its absence. But the word as we understand it did not exist before the seventeenth century. Evidence, that which supports a fact, is similarly post-medieval. Experiment gets retooled from a word meaning "experience" into one meaning the deliberate manufacture of new facts under controlled conditions. Hypothesis, theory, laws of nature, progress — all emerged or were repurposed during the long seventeenth century. Wootton tracks these emergences with philological care; one of the pleasures of the book is the parade of first attestations. Wootton's point is not that words magically create things. It is, rather, that the practice of science required certain conceptual tools, and those tools had to be made.

IV.

The third theme of the book is the one most at risk of feeling like a different book entirely. Substantial portions of The Invention of Science are devoted to disagreeing with the sociologists of science: Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, Bruno Latour, the Edinburgh school. To understand why, it helps to see what he is “fighting” against. Here is how Shapin's book opens: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” Some version of this position has been the dominant academic stance in the history of science for decades.

Take the canonical case, Wootton's principal target: Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump, the 1985 book that treats Boyle's experiments not as the discovery of the vacuum but as the manufacture of a fact: produced by laboratory ritual, witnessed by gentlemen of the right social standing, underwritten by the new conventions of the Royal Society. Knowledge becomes a kind of political settlement. The vacuum in the receiver becomes a piece of seventeenth-century English class theatre: not just what appears in the glass after the air is pumped out, but what a particular community, using particular rules of witnessing and trust, comes to recognize as a fact. Boyle, on this account, prevailed over his critics not because his arguments were better but because his social position was stronger and because he had built a better social machine.

Wootton's reply is that it is mostly confusion. The category of "fact" being historical does not mean the things facts refer to are. Boyle’s air pump did not merely produce a social performance; it produced a real alteration in the world. What is historical is the category of things-we-call-facts, not the things. This is correct, but Wootton clearly loses his patience here: he spends an exhausting number of pages on it. The methodological chapters and appendices read as almost a separate book grafted onto the historical one, with little narrative integration into the seventeenth-century material around them. A reader who came for Galileo and Boyle may have limited appetite for the late twentieth century's faculty disputes. And yet, this section exposes the real stakes of the book. It became uncool, over the second half of the twentieth century, to say any of the following: that things got better, that progress is real and has causes, that discovery is something humans actually do rather than something they perform. The Shapin sentence is the tip; the iceberg is a long erosion of the conceptual vocabulary that makes it possible to even ask why some periods produced more knowledge than others. Wootton is cranky. He is also fundamentally correct.

V.

Here is a thought the book invites without quite suggesting. Wootton's argument turns on a 1600-vs-1733 contrast: here is a man who believes in unicorns and bleeding corpses; there, a few generations later, a man who knows the heart is a pump. The reader is invited to be amused, mildly superior, glad to be born late.

However, the argument cuts both ways, especially as we stare at another possible world-historical revolution, this time around AI. If conceptual vocabulary is what made the seventeenth century possible, then it is conceivable that there are concepts we lack now that our successors will find indispensable. Whether those concepts come as words, or as something stranger that AI will turn out to think in, is a question I am not going to settle in the last paragraph of a book review. Some future Wootton will describe a typical well-educated person of the early twenty-first century and enumerate our strange beliefs. Some of our convictions, convictions that feel as solid to us as Galenic anatomy felt in 1550, will end up sitting next to the unicorns. We are not able to predict which ones. This is a humbling thought. It is also, oddly, a hopeful one. The 1733 Englishman was not smarter than the 1600 Englishman; he just lived downstream of a few key conceptual inventions. In the meantime, we have On the Nothingness of a Fart.